Occult Gathering's Blog

Focal (and void) Non-Meditation:

1) does not eliminate the the necessity to do focal or void meditation(s).

2) may speed up progress in the above two fields.

3) may lead to general clarity, speed of thought and restfulness in every day life.

4) and other stuff

We sit down for 15 minutes to an hour every day and try to still our mind. Try and fail. We spend months and seem to get not better at it but worse. What is wrong?

Can 15min or an hour compensate for the other 16 some hours of our waking day we spend w/ our heads filled with repetitive and inceassent chatter and stress? In my case (and maybe in your case too), obviously not. Why? It has become a habit and a bad one. Worse, 98% of people do not realize that this is a habit and thus are not able to even consider correcting it. Can't concentrate, can't relax because always thinking of stuff. Doesn't matter what stuff is, but 70% of the time, we don't need to think about it. It makes us mentally tired and unable to concentrate on the thing we are doing at this moment (studying, listening to someone, etc). True, thinking about stuff that does not relate to the current problem at hand can sometimes be useful, but we need to control it. When its useful, we do it, when it's not useful, we stop.

Anyway, enough w/ the stupid intro. Here's how:

Gently empty the mind of all thought. If you are doing something at the moment (ex: listening to someone, writing something, etc) give that 100% of your attention. If you are not actively doing something, keep the mind empty.

This is not an "excersise" you do for a certain period of time. This is to be done all the time you are awake, every day, untill you are able to keep your mind focused only on the thing(s) you are actively participating in and clear it completely when you are not doing anything, ALL DAY LONG, w/o your mind going off on a daydreaming tangent even a single time. When you reach that level of control you may start to allow yourself to daydream WHEN YOU DEEM APPROPRIATE.

I've been thinking latey about my poor abuilities when it comes to drawing w/ a pencing (or pen)... I got tons of how to draw books, I understand what their telling me, I can think in 3d, but whenever I try to draw, it comes out looking like crap. The proportions are wrong, lines go where they aren't supposed to go, etc. Then I remember what a friend of mine who could draw very well told me once. "You have to image what you're drawing."
I have never considered lack of imagination my problem. But now when I thought about the phrase again, I reolized something.. Imagining the picture you're about to draw isn't enough, apparently. What I think she ment by the word "imagine" was "visualize". And not just visualize for a split second, but keep the visualization constant while you draw. In this sence, perhaps true drawing is tracing. Like putting a piece of wax-paper on a ready-made drawing and tracing it w/ a pen. Except you don't trace another physical drawing, you trace the contuers of your visualization, what you see in your mind's eye.
So! Perhaps I can combine my visualization excersises and my art excersises, by visualizing simple shapes (and then progressively more complex shapes as I learn) and tracing the visualization on a piece of blank paper.
Visualizing a perfect circle is pretty easy. Drawing a perfect circle is not quite as easy. Tracing the cirlce is super-easy. Why not visualize train to visualize the circle so clearly and constantly, that instead of drawing it from memory, you can actually trace your visualization?
I'll try this excersise out later on tonight and continue to practice it every day. Will see if my art skills improve any.

Added my research paper on Shamanism to the forum.

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