Oh, the lengths 'I' will go...
yagr
Veteran
I was five years old and my Uncle Mike was visiting us from Florida. He was the intellectual in the family and I would listen to him endlessly, finding the tidbits I did understand fascinating. One afternoon he handed me an index card that he had prepared for me. There were three dots in a line along the top of the index card a centimeter or two apart; and three dots on the bottom of the card identically spaced. He leant me his pen and told me that there was a way to connect each dot on the top with each dot on the bottom without crossing lines. I immediately set to work.
I had to be ordered to bed eight hours later because I only stopped for dinner - and brought the index card with me to the table. I lay in bed thinking about half the night and began working on it again in the morning. All day, every day until long after he left. Whenever we would call Florida, I would ask him again if he was certain it was possible. The puzzle lost its priority but I worked on it intermittently for years. I pulled it back out in college and asked my math professor to help. Nothing.
I'm fifty years old now...or will be in April. I haven't thought about the puzzle for twenty years. Here I was minding my own business. Just sitting on the ol' cushion and meditating. I figure I must have been making some great progress for my mind to pull that one out of the archives with a solution and everything. Yep - forty-five years later the answer shows up unannounced during meditation. The lengths my mind will go to distract me are indeed legendary!
Comments
Good post.
In the dervish tradition, we use a scatter, non linear methodology of small impacts. So for example a puzzle might be used to teach focus. An extreme view expressed to bring out a polarity or centering . . .
However that is a puzzle for another time . . .
You have to think outside the box.....
On the subject of "I", grateful to have been party to another's navel gazing, trying to work out what was the "authentic" them, their own values rather than those they had been taught by the culture in which they had lived. Finally clicked with me what neither I nor not I meant. Happy to be able to stop navel gazing and just be
Yes, it's strange what "bubbles up" during meditation sometimes. I tend to think of it like when people say you should always sleep on a major decision, it allows the unconscious mind time to work it through. Not that meditation is like being asleep of course!
Yes indeed.
I would class my meditation as barely past monkey mind. However I am at ease with my monkey. At ease with my body sitting.
It is interesting @yagr calls them distractions . . . m m m . . . To me the distraction is the attention. I try not to fight with monkeys, just gently let them settle, or the bubbles pop . . .
I figured out a thermodynamics problem in my sleep one time.
Oh yeah, me too, @Jeffrey.... (not really)....
But I DID dream the preliminary plot of a children's book I have written.
(Now, all I need to do, is to find a publisher.....)
There is no solution if you are working only on a single plane.
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