Day 3 of the Monkey Mind

I increased my meditation time from 5 minutes on Monday to 7 on Tuesday and 10 last night, and so far I still haven't gotten bored. On Tuesday I picked up a meditation candle (just a normal candle, really) and have been staring at it to help focus my meditation. Last night an interesting thing started happening after about 5 minutes or so. If I held my head still and didn't blink, after a little bit of time the periphery of my vision would start to darken, and it was like being in a tunnel looking only at the candle. I could only hold onto it for a second or two. My guess is that this effect has more to do with suppressing my saccadic eye movement than anything mystical, but it's fun to see how long I can hold onto it. Excepting of course that merely noticing when I go into tunnel-vision is an interruption of my clear mind and the goal here is to let go of things, not hold onto them. Inspired by the article on distraction that I linked to yesterday, I've also picked up Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age, which was cited in it.