12.3 Practical Exercises

Exercise 16. Consider again the diagram and arrow-words on page 17. Recall how you made a larger diagram or chart for yourself, with perhaps fifty or more arrow-words about the cat or other chosen object. In that practice of concentration, every time that you thought of something directly (not meditatively) concerned with the cat you wrote it down as an arrow-word. You did not then allow yourself to think about this arrow-word, but dropped it from mind and slid back along the arrow to the central thought, the cat.

Now get out your old sheet of paper containing your diagram with all its arrow-words, or make a new one. Do not be in a hurry; it will not be a waste of time to make a new one, if necessary. Using this diagram or chart, look at arrow-word number I, which may be ``milk'' (for example), and return (sliding, not jumping) to the cat, bringing the milk with you. Now you will spend a little time looking at the cat and the milk together as a unitary mental picture, thinking all you can about their relationship, when this flow of thought (in which you do not allow yourself to think about milk except with the intention of its relation to the cat - for that would be starting a new chart with milk in the center) is finished, and you feel that nothing more is coming up in mind on the subject of this relationship, you turn to your arrow-word number 2 and treat in it the same way, and so on with all your arrow-words.

This is meditation on the cat, and as a result of it you will have enormously enriched your idea (and future experience) of cats, and will have co-ordinated many disorderly and disconnected pieces of knowledge lying scattered about in your mind, and you will have increased your power and ease of thinking, so that in future your fountain of thought on any subject will play more readily and fully than before. You will probably also have received some new thoughts coming intuitively, as it were, for in all thinking there is a little touch (or more) of your original power, of which every consciousness has a share. But it must be said that this intuition belongs to the contemplation (into which one may slip involuntarily now and then during the practice) rather than to the thinking or meditation.

Practice this method with several material objects, .and with living objects - such as animals. Practice first with paper and diagram, and afterwards in the mind only without a chart, according to desire.