Wednesday, November 7, 2007
listen up
i tried to listen and do nothing but listen and to my suprise i couldn't do it as long as i thought i'd be able to. A few classes ago you told us to try and do this in our free time and at the time i didn't think it would be that hard. Trying to just sit and listen to the surrounding sounds can be more difficult than is seems. For the first few seconds i was listening to the clock ticking and the sounds of the highway out side but after that my head started thinking and having conversations with out me telling it to. I was thinking about how i'm going to get to new bloomfield to get this car i'm trying to buy, how i'm going to get my community service done in the next three weeks. My mind also started thinking of things i haven't been worried about today, i remembered that my friend called me four days ago and i still haven't returned her call. So i tried again to clear my thoughts and just listen but in the end i got the same results. It's just wierd that i can't keep my mind distracted on just listening for more than a few seconds without my thoughts taking over.
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It may seem "weird" that you cannot keep your mind focused on one point for long, but it would be, in fact, more WEIRD if you could, in two senses: first, it would be "weird" in the sense of unusual, atypical. Most humans, as I noted, have not sufficiently developed the capacity to focus to be able to do so for even as little as two minutes. I wonder sometimes whether a second is just about the limit of conscious direction. If this were so, it is not difficult to imagine why concentrated efforts can be so exhausting: we are fighting against our natures! Not that this is a bad thing to do, to strive to extend one's conscious activity in time. But just as physical exercise places special demands on the person, so does "spiritual" effort. Most people in my experience do not have a developed spiritual practice, even if they have a developed physical practice, so again, a person engaged in, say meditation, is definitely a "weirdo".
The second sense in which it would be "weird" to be able to concentrate up towards the two-minute mark is that of "weird" as "fate, destiny, fortune" , also in the adjectival sense of relating to witchcraft, magic, faerie, the supernatural. REAL magic involves the "spiritual powers" developed through concentrated mental effort. Until one gains the ability to focus one's mind, real magic happens only by accident. With the ability to focus, one is able to perform acts which seem miraculous, supernatural, contradictory to "normal" reality.
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