Jānnā · Do ghaṇṭe bād · two hours later

Something seen, and recalled two hours later

in two parts, two hours apart

Eyes closed if you like. Nothing is recorded or sent. The screen stays on while it runs.

How it goes
  1. Choose one thing near you: a cup, a door, a tree outside.
  2. Its shape, its colour, its size, what is near it, the light on it. Touch for each.
  3. Close your eyes and hold it in the mind. Hold, and stay. Hold again, and look once more.
  4. Then go about your day. Do not try to remember it.
  5. About two hours later, open this page again and begin the second part.
  6. From memory, one by one: what it was, its shape, its colour, its size, what was near it, the light.
  7. Then look at it again, if it is near. What you missed is only noticed. That is the exercise.

The page keeps only one thing on this phone: that the first part was done, so it can offer you the second. Nothing of what you saw is kept or sent.

Care
  • There is no score and nothing is right or wrong. Whatever you missed is only noticed.
  • Eyes may stay open the whole time.
  • Any flower, any leaf, any thing near you will do.

Sri Aurobindo, to someone afraid of the emptiness that came in concentration:

Consciousness is not dissolved; it is the limits of the consciousness that are dissolved.

Letters on Yoga III, CWSA 30, p. 276

Where this comes from

These are Sri Aurobindo's exercises, from A System of National Education, written in 1910 about the teacher and the child. Here they are given to a grown man, because the Mother says the education of the senses “should never cease”.

The order on the screen, and the way back through what was seen, are ours. They have not been tested. We claim no result from them.

Sri Aurobindo, in the same book, on how little we keep of what we see. The want, he says, is only of care in the use of the senses and the memory:

Give twelve men the task of recording from memory something they all saw two hours ago and the accounts will all vary from each other and from the actual occurrence.

Early Cultural Writings, CWSA 1, p. 402

Sri Aurobindo, in A System of National Education (1910), on why the senses err. The fault, he says, is never in the organ:

In themselves the organs do their work perfectly. The eye gives the right form, the ear the correct sound, the palate the right taste, the skin the right touch, the nose the right smell.

Early Cultural Writings, CWSA 1, p. 397

← Jānnā

the third ringthe mind