What Happens When You Close Your Eyes
- By Bilal Hafeez
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- 1 min read
Try it. Close your eyes for 5, 10, 20 minutes or whatever length of time you want. I tried it for 30 minutes just now. My aim was to focus on my breath and just observe but not engage in any thoughts.
It started well. Everything was calm and peaceful. I even observed a thought that I could keep this up for 30 minutes.
Suddenly without warning, I entered a storm of thoughts. What graph structure should I use for retrieval in an LLM model? Who in the team should investigate this? Should I contact the authors of a paper on this topic? Do I need to start mapping a knowledge graph this weekend to give to the team on Monday? Phew that was exhausting. I returned to my breath, and it was calm again.
I then started to think about whether I was breathing correctly or not. Was it too shallow? Should I breathe through my stomach and have longer breaths? Oh, those darn thoughts again, I remind myself to observe and not engage. Calm again.
During this calm, I suddenly realised that I was enjoying the calm. This in itself was a thought I was engaging in. All this time, my ‘will’ was always trying to get to a notion of calm. Now this thing I call my ‘will’ was still some bundle of engaged thoughts. My thinking mind was clever. It had fooled me into thinking it was ‘off’ and my observer mode was ‘on’ when in fact it was always ‘on’. This was getting way too meta for me, so I just focused on my breathing again.
My alarm goes off. 30 minutes have passed. I felt exhausted. I felt I had gone on an epic journey. But all I had done was sit with my eyes closed for half an hour.
Why don’t you give it a go!