Interesting thought this morning:
Given my spiritual trajectory this year, it’s not impossible to see me off doing some extreme meditative / spiritual practice at some point in my life. The specific example was that of a mystic: Slowly praying and chanting my way up a mountain over the course of an entire day. Whether that’s the Christian, Hindu, or Buddhist variant … or some meditative ritual of my own imagining … might there be any value there?
One popped out immediately: With practice, I have developed the ability to maintain mental focus for perhaps 5 minutes of martial arts practice. That’s sufficient for one extended form (kata), a set of self defense techniques, or similar. When I manage to work out in that mental zone, the physical seems to take care of itself … and my technique is obviously, visibly superior to that when I’m thinking about it consciously. Over the course of my career, I’ve built, lost, and rebuilt the ability to commune with computers for maybe an hour at a time … but that’s taken more than a decade. In yoga, I have trouble even maintaining a 5 minute window before my mind wanders to lunch, work tomorrow, or yesterday’s screening of Transformers. I used to have focus for a whole song, played on the cello … but that’s just totally gone now.
It would be very useful, I think, to have the mental discipline to be able to focus on a behavior … any behavior … even one as seemingly trivial as taking very slow steps up a mountain, for a full day. As justkidding_nr says “if you’re cutting up tomatoes, be there cutting up the tomatoes.” Given how much my performance is improved by achieving a focused or “flow” state of mind in any of the disciplines that I’ve practiced for years … I can only imagine that it would be quite remarkable to be able to call on that state of mind, at will, for any activity.
Of course, once one could be in such a state for a full day, why not do it every day? This might relate to the waking meditation described by sacredangle, or to the lives of the Zen masters.
Leave a Reply