Oxford: meditation II

I kept trying to meditate, but my attention would wander rapidly, and be hard to decisively reassemble. So not much surprising had happened since that one early time, except perhaps the persistence of my interest in meditating. So eventually I tried meditating for only one minute at a time, but about fifty times consecutively. And I actually kind got the hang of it.

And not only did I master paying attention for a minute at a time with non-negligible probability, but I noticed that when I did this, the thing I was paying attention to was not so much my breath as myself paying attention to my breath. Or something like that — more importantly, there was some particular mental stance I was in, that I am not usually in. It was somehow like making eye contact with myself. And it reminded me of several other mental stances I have cherished and valued the ability to occasionally muster over the years, which I somehow hadn’t connected to one other. The feeling of stepping back mentally from say a family holiday and regrouping my mind; a mental state I call ‘my reasonable self’; the feeling at the end of saying the poem Invictus; the feeling of eating honey and it ending a panic attack. They are all different, but have something in common. So I was pleased by this addition, which also seemed like a particularly pure and clear member of the set.

But what was better was that the next day, when I was doing other things — being bogged down in semi-mindless reading, fretting, staring into space — I would reflexively come back to that stance, and find myself again there with myself, ready to decide what to do.

Which seemed especially exciting because in terms of mountains and valleys in a landscape of energy to change between activities — which I still tentatively think in terms of — this stance seemed a bit like being suddenly at the top of a hill. And having a reflex that takes you effortlessly from assorted hard-to-escape and crappy valleys to the tops of hills seems like magic. And perhaps as revolutionary to the course of activities as the existence of teleportation would be to mountain climbing. Probably not, because when is anything ever revolutionary? But still.