It's easier with your eyes open to get stronger concentration. Okay, interesting. It's easier with your eyes open to get stronger concentration because when you keep your eyes open, focused at a wall or something, and after a while the eyes kind of blank out. But we're forcing them to be open, we're forcing them to blank out. There's a lot of force going on. There's a lot of control going on. In that control, we're suppressing what we're actually seeing. We're not looking at reality. We're not seeing anything. Even though the eyes are open, we're blocking off and suppressing what we're actually seeing. In that way, there's suppression going on to force the concentration to get stronger.
With the eyes closed, we can't do that. This is very interesting because we tend to think if the eyes are open, we will have more distraction, but, no, we won't if the eyes are open staring at a fixed point. You can try that and see for yourself if what I am saying is true. The concentration gets stronger, and what happens when concentration is stronger? The mindfulness gets weaker; we're not aware of reality; we're disappearing from reality. That's not what we want in this practice. The word Vipassana means to develop wisdom; it's a wisdom outcome of a practice using a lot of different techniques. Some teachers will teach this way, some will teach that way. Any teacher who wants a person to develop stronger concentration still has to bend that back into the mindfulness practice and the wisdom practice.
But, and very important, getting too much concentration can hurt the Vipassana practice, because if you're super-concentrated like I mentioned a few minutes ago, and after sitting there in the hall for forty minutes, very peaceful, blissed out, somebody coughs, you think "Phh! Get out! You're bothering me." Too much concentration loses the reality of Compassion, in particular. In the walking meditation, why do we want your eyes down? So you can watch out for the ants and whatever else is crawling on the ground, out of Compassion for those creatures. It's easier to get concentrated in the walking if you stare straight ahead at nothing. It's the same principle. If you stare straight ahead at nothing, you'll step on all the ants, millipedes, snails and other creatures without knowing it. That's not our practice. So this is why, in the sitting, the eyes are closed. In the walking, the eyes are down, looking down. We do not want super concentration at the expense of throwing away our mindfulness and Compassion practice. We want them in balance.