Whom Scroll

Meditation XIII · 10 minutes

The Single Star

Scrying Focused attention

Of all the stars in the sky, the navigator needs only one.

Every other working in this school is a version of this one. You choose a single thing, a smooth stone, a bowl, a coloured disc, the sound of a fan, and give it all of your attention. When the mind wanders, you bring it back. That’s the whole art.

The working

  1. Choose one object and one sense to meet it with. Something you can see is easiest to begin with: a small, plain object about an arm’s length away.
  2. Sit comfortably and rest your gaze on it. Keep your eyes soft and blink as you need to.
  3. Take in its colour, its edges, the way the light sits on it. Don’t describe it in words. Just look.
  4. When you notice your mind has gone elsewhere, come back to the object. Each return is the practice, not a failure of it.
  5. After a few minutes, close your eyes and see whether you can hold a picture of it in your mind. When the picture fades, open your eyes and look again.
  6. Go back and forth like this, looking and remembering, for the rest of the sitting.

Closing

Look around the room slowly before you get up, and notice how many other single stars there are.