One Thought At A Time

 

In his book, “Zen Meditation In Plain English”, John Daishin Buksbazen outlines a basic meditative technique; that of counting from one to ten with each in-breath and out-breath.

This might seem easy at first, but your mind must be absolutely still as you do it. If your thoughts wander at any time, you must start again from ‘one’ with more determination to do it properly. The goal of this practice is to train your mind to stay focused, to not go off on flights of fancy.

It is based on the intriguing fact that the mind can only ever focus on one thing at a time. As Buksbazen says, “Nobody can really concentrate on two things at once.” Basically, this means that whatever thought we have automatically expands to fill our entire consciousness for time we allow it to stay there.

This could be wondering where you put your car keys, or working on the big project you have to have prepared for Friday. Not only that, but it is of course reflected in how we interact with the world: the car keys will bother you while you should be enjoying your dinner or that movie, and even though you’ve have a month to work on that project, you are still making last minute changes on Thursday night. Just as the thought of the project expands to fill the mind entirely, the project itself expands to fill entirely the time allotted to it (another truism, this time of design / multimedia production).

We can see the results of this on a practical level, every day. It could be argued that it is why textual information (books, magazines etc) are separated into sections, chapters and even paragraphs. We recognise that this is a reflection of how we think, and it seems more attracive to us than uncut reams of text. Pictures, in particular, are attractive to us because, to paraphrase the old saw, we can take in a thousand words at once.  

It is a well-known fact in the publishing world that if you want your audience to feel smarter and more involved, make your chapters shorter. Dan Brown’s bestseller the Da Vinci Code used this technique brilliantly to help weave together historical information and fiction without losing the reader’s interest.

In fact, it feeds directly into the standards of memory theory. For example, languages are always best taught not when the student is presented with pews of black and white text, but when the language is a part of a narrative, a small adventure, something interesting. In that case, the primary thought is to complete the adventure or task at hand, and the language becomes secondary. It becomes a means to an end, not the end itself. The mind absorbs the information so much faster because it is feeding into a larger, more entertaining thought.

If we can take this basic Zen axiom and use it to convey information more effectively, we could not only improve obvious things like the educational system, but change how we think about our own mental processes, and the erronious belief that our thoughts are in control of us, rather than the other way around.