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Sit down quietly and comfortably, and very slowly and gently bring your attention to a particular thing and watch what happens. I will give an example. While I write this I am lying - as it happens - on my back on the grassy slopes of a Hollywood hillside garden, holding a stiff little book aloft in my left hand, and a pencil in my right. My left wrist gets tired, so I have to lower the book now and then, which is beneficial, being conducive to frequent reflective thought. On my right is a lemon-tree, which gives me pleasant dappled shade from the rays of the slanting afternoon sun. On my left are two large bushes and an orange tree, backed by over-towering pines. In front at a distance I see portions of a handsome house and, in the near foreground, a fine palm tree, some thirty feet tall. Let me shut my eyes and think only of the palm.
A procession of mind-pictures begins. Here comes a palm grove in South India in a garden where I lived for many years. In the midst of that palm grove was a pond; I find myself now in thought standing on the edge of it and looking at the water-lilies there - blue lotuses. And then (of all unexpected things - I have not directed my thoughts) a blue crayon and myself sitting at a desk at school fifty-five years ago. I still watch disinterestedly, and now comes some map drawing at school - a map of India with coloured coast lines. Now a part of the map - I am writing the word Hyderabad near the northwest corner (a true memory), and now the river Indus is drawn in. My thought jumps again twenty-five years: I become Principal of the College at Hyderabad - talking to the students at Assembly - a lecture in Physics - a glass tube - glass - Venetian glass - a curio shop - an old rocking chair - a cradle - a baby - and so on.
Such is the mental process when the driver is not there. The car goes along a road, but not of my conscious present choice. I notice incidentally that I do not produce the welling-up of the images, and I do not even produce the drifting flow of thoughts but I am the director, if and when I direct them. At other times I am merely the looker-on, just as I may be the looker-on at my own blood-stream or digestive process.
Now stop thinking about me. Select your own ``palm tree'' - any object. Look at it, then close your eyes, and watch for yourself within your own mind the drift of mental pictures and ideas. Do this several times with different objects, then observe that you can stop the drift by stepping into the stream and directing it. To do this you have to pounce upon one of the objects in the drift. You hold it and see what you can do with it. You watch its up-wellings or coruscations and you next deliberately select one of these and watch its up-wellings, and thus go on directing the flow of thought.
As an illustration of this process, let me suppose that your ``palm tree'' of the moment is a cow. That is what has caught your mental eye, and now you hold it and watch its up-welling. Here, standing around it, together with it, are the ideas milk, calf, horns, bull, shed, field, grass, your Uncle's favorite black cow, patience, gentleness, and many, many others. Among these you deliberately select, let us say, grass, and now you allow grass to upwell, and again deliberately select. It is the power of selection that is now to be observed and learnt; we will make use of the other processes further on.
From this mental experiment you will get a new sense of power, which is the power of concentration, operated by the will. You will also get a new knowledge and experience of ``I''. A third gain is that you will have learned how to think, as I will explain more fully later on.
Terrence Brannon 2005-09-09