Going Blind In The Eyeball Area

Morning meditation:

Today was a big day. Today was the first time I didn't open my eyes sometime during the hour, thinking "surely I set the timer for 3 hours by accident," look at the clock and exclaim inwardly "another half an hour! Holy crap!...I mean...surrendering my impatience, surrendering surrendering surrendering...Okay, all patient now...now how much longer do I have to sit here for Chrissake? Oh yea, half an hour...crap...I mean..."

Well not today. Today I kept my eyes closed the whole time, all thanks to my formidable powers of patience...or was it the duct tape blindfold...holy crap that hurts to take off!

Evening meditation:

For the last three days, sometime between 9:30PM and 12:30AM, I cry like a baby for roughly 30 minutes. No, I'm not mourning the loss of my innocence or making a statement against manly men who don't cry. It's all much more simple: this is Gene's latest instrument of torture, designed to get us to enlightenment ASAP.

The idea is to practice mindfulness (yes, again), and to do it with the view of helping out the lucid dreaming experiment. Apparently mindfulness and lucid dreaming go hand in hand. The latest book in Gene's endless queue suggests picking a simple object (mine is hand-drawn letter A), and staring at it for long periods of time, displacing all thoughts from one's mind - doing nothing but observing that object. The book gives a number of helpful suggestions including: "don't blink." This one, this family has taken seriously. Evening meditation is now a sobfest. Oof, now let me go dump my prune-like eyeballs in some warm water.