Question: How do you apply that way of concentrating to a chapter of a book that you have to study?

Sri Chinmoy: Do not take it line by line. When you concentrate on a chapter it will be several pages, but you can only see two pages at a time. But this is what you do. Suppose there are ten pages that you have to commit to memory. Just hold these pages; do not read them. Just enter into them and then go beyond them. Before you start reading anything in an ordinary way, word by word or line by line, just concentrate and take it as a whole object, not scattered lines or a series of lines. Then concentration is very successful. Then it becomes very easy to learn anything by heart. Here the witness is the person who does the concentration. When I was a student, at the age of fourteen or fifteen, in my history class I used to commit thirty or forty pages at a time to memory by the power of concentration. The teacher used to ask me, "How do you do it?" Of course, I could do it in various ways. There are a few Sanskrit mantras for this. If you just repeat these mantras four or five times, then just read any poem twice, a fourteen or sixteen or twenty-line poem, and you can easily prove that you have learned it by heart.