by sunray_2 » January 26th, 2008, 2:31 am
I think the guys and girls with the meditation-fetish consider this a normal human condition. They usually tell stories about the mind being like a monkey jumping from tree to tree distracted by every banana along the way.
For a monkey focusing on bananas is a pretty good strategy though.
A metaphor i get along better with is the one of the mind as an untrained puppy, which tends to be playful and fascinated by everything around too. This is much fun for the puppy, and since puppies are cute you wouldn't want to traumatize it or do something equally cruel, but in your capacity as it's master you would likely prefer if the dog would stop to piss on the carpet and gnaw on the furniture.
On the other hand i am no furry, so identifying parts of me with a dog rubs me a little wrong. Let me try a third metaphor: Assume your mind is an incredibly cute and lovely child ( your decision whether boy or girl ) with no discipline whatsoever. Now if you yell 'Dammit focus!!!', it probably becomes scared and if it is the creative sort, it develops strategies to camouflage it's preference for playing as something actually useful, at which you won't yell.
What works better in my experience is to keep yourself aware of what you are doing, smile if you catch yourself jumping from what you set out to do, acknowledge that for example the inner workings of water fountains are a fascinating topic that you will have a lot of fun researching some time in the future, but that you are right now at another task, and go back to it, in the empirical knowledge that you will forget about the stupid fountains in the next 5 minutes anyway.