Eyes closed if you like. Nothing is recorded or sent. The screen stays on while it runs.
How it goes
- Wherever you are. Eyes open.
- What you see, in front of you. Touch.
- Keep it, and add what you hear. Touch.
- Keep both, and add what touches you: the ground, your clothes, the air. Touch.
- All three at once. The mind will fasten on one: bring the others back, gently. Stay. Hold.
- When you are ready, hold again, and let them go one by one.
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 attention held on several things at once:
it is quite possible to develop the power of double concentration, triple concentration, multiple concentration.Early Cultural Writings, CWSA 1, p. 403
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