Practice · chapter 0.5, Before You Can Read Anything
Count how many times your attention leaves
Books of this kind can easily skip this step. They give you frameworks and assume the faculty. And because reading about attention is itself an absorbing activity, you can spend a year on it and never once notice that the thing being described was never available to you while you were describing it.
Nothing in the room has to happen for attention to leave; most departures start on the inside. Few people have ever counted theirs.
The Poimandres offers an image for this order. It does not open with a doctrine. It opens with a man whose bodily senses are restrained, like someone heavy with sleep, before the vision comes (CH I.1). We read that as putting the state before the content. It is a reading of a religious vision, not a description of how concentration works.
Try this for one week
Put this down. Sit still, look at one object in the room (a door frame, a cup, the edge of a table) and keep your attention on it without doing anything else. Do not meditate. Do not relax. Just hold the object for ninety seconds and count how many times your attention leaves. Count honestly, whatever the number turns out to be. Write down what you noticed.
What this does not promise
This is a rough personal observation, not a test with a normal score. It cannot tell you on its own whether your attention has improved.
From Modern Hermet, chapter 0.5: Before You Can Read Anything. The book reads the real Hermetic texts with their dates, and offers twelve practices for an ordinary week.
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