The first of Steiner's Six Subsidiary Exercises: holding directed thought on a single chosen object for five minutes a day.
Concentration in Anthroposophy is the first of Rudolf Steiner's Six Subsidiary Exercises, a directed thought-control practice in which the practitioner holds attention on a simple chosen object (a needle, a pencil, a paperclip) for at least five minutes a day, returning the thinking to that object whenever it drifts. Compiled in Guidance for Esoteric Training (GA 245) and rooted in the eight-membered preparation set out in How to Know Higher Worlds (GA 10, 1904-05), the exercise is followed by five companions: initiative in action, equanimity, positivity, open-mindedness, and the inner harmony that grows out of practising the other five. The first exercise is the bedrock. Without steady thought-control, the higher cognitions Steiner names Imagination, Inspiration, and Intuition cannot stabilise. The German is Gedankenkontrolle, literally thought-control: a will-act, not a receptive awareness.
Concentration, in Steiner's specific technical sense, names a five-minutes-a-day cognitive training in which thinking is held to a self-chosen object by the I. This is distinct from concentration as ordinary mental focus, and distinct from non-directed mindfulness. Here the will, not awareness, is the steady actor.
In Steiner's Own Words
Thought control. This consists of not allowing all kinds of things to flit through the soul, at least for short periods of the day, but instead allowing calm to enter the flow of thoughts. One thinks of a specific concept, places this concept at the centre of one's thought life, and then logically arranges all thoughts in such a way that they are based on this concept. Even if this only happens for a minute, it is already of great importance for the rhythm of the physical and etheric bodies.
What it Means Today
The practice still runs, more or less unchanged, inside the Anthroposophical Society's working groups and inside the School of Spiritual Science at the Goetheanum in Dornach, where the First Class lessons given by Steiner in 1924 are still read in branches that hold the recognition. The Six Subsidiary Exercises sit underneath that whole architecture. Inner-work groups in Stuttgart, Forest Row, Spring Valley, and Toronto open most meetings with a short period of silent concentration on a chosen object before any further meditative work, on the rule Steiner gave in GA 245: that meditation without this foundation can destabilise the soul rather than open it.
The contemporary anthroposophical teacher Arthur Zajonc, in Meditation as Contemplative Inquiry (Lindisfarne, 2009), called the first exercise the moral hygiene of the meditant. He noted that practitioners who skip it tend to flood their meditations with the day's stray feeling-tone, while practitioners who keep it for months find that the chosen object begins to give back something inwardly active. This is the Thalira reading too. Concentration is not generic mental focus and not Buddhist samādhi, though both are real parallel disciplines. It is a will-borne return: the I taking responsibility for what stays present in thinking. The throat-chakra correspondence is precise. The exercise is the focusing of the articulate inner Word on a single resting point.
Where to Read More
- Guidance for Esoteric Training, GA 245, the canonical compilation
- How to Know Higher Worlds, GA 10 (1904-05), the eight-membered preparation
- Theosophy of the Rosicrucian, GA 95 (1907), the source of the quote above
- Find Guidance for Esoteric Training at SteinerBooks
- The Individual Path: Six Exercises in the Philosophy of Freedom
- Steiner's Six Exercises: The 2,400-Day Path to Spiritual ...
- Samatha vs Vipassana: Concentration and Insight in Buddhist Meditation