In the third week of the first month every Apprentice is told to count the lapses: each time the attention leaves the flame and has to be brought back, a mark is made. Most of us stop counting when the month is over. I did not, partly from a schoolteacher's habit and partly from stubbornness, and I now have a little over two years of figures. I offer some of them here, with an experiment I made last winter, because they bear on a question that petitioners ask more often than they used to.
The question
At an open evening in Bergen last autumn a visitor asked, politely but firmly, why a Western school of magic should begin with meditation, which he had been told was an Eastern practice with no history in the West. The Warden who was answering gave him the short history that now appears on this website under Contemplation: that the word comes from the Latin for rehearsing in the mind, that the philosophers, the theurgists, the Qabalists and the monks all trained attention in their own ways, and that the old handbooks of magic take such training for granted. He was satisfied with the history. Then he asked a better question. "If the old magicians did without a daily sitting practice," he said, "why can't I?"
The honest answer is that some of them probably did not do without it, and that those who did lived in a different world of attention from ours. I thought I might be able to say something about the second half of that answer from my own Record.
The ordinary count
I keep the Lamp for fifteen minutes each morning, before work. I make a pencil mark for each lapse and divide the total by one and a half to give a figure per ten minutes, which is the figure I give below. Over my first eighteen months the figure fell from about fourteen to about eleven, and then stopped falling. It stayed at eleven, give or take one, for six months. I had reached what I took to be my level, and I said so in my monthly letter to my mentor.
My mentor asked what I did in the hour before the Lamp. I told her: I woke to an alarm on my telephone, read the news and my messages in bed, and then got up and lit the lamp. She suggested that I change one thing and count again.
The experiment
For six weeks, from the middle of January to the end of February, I left my telephone in the kitchen overnight, switched off, and did not turn it on until after the Lamp and the Gates. I bought a clock. Nothing else in my practice changed. I then went back to my old habits for four weeks, and counted throughout.
| Period | Mornings | Lapses |
|---|---|---|
| Six months before | 171 | 11.2 |
| Weeks 1 and 2 without the telephone | 14 | 10.4 |
| Weeks 3 and 4 | 14 | 7.9 |
| Weeks 5 and 6 | 13 | 6.1 |
| Four weeks after, telephone restored | 27 | 9.8 |
Two things surprised me. The first was that the improvement took two weeks to appear at all. The second was that it did not vanish at once when I went back. I have since kept the telephone in the kitchen, and the figure is now a little under seven.
What the figures cannot show
I am one person, and I knew what I was hoping for. I cannot rule out that the long nights of a Bergen winter, or the end of a difficult term, or the mere fact of trying something new, did the work I am crediting to the kitchen. A lapse is not a precise unit: some are a flicker, some are two minutes of planning a lesson. Had I written the purpose and term of this experiment in the Record beforehand, as the Common Book rightly insists we should for any working, I would have more right to my conclusion than I do. I did write it, but only the day before I began, and only after my mentor had put the idea in my head.
So I will not say that the telephone halves one's attention. I will say that in my Record, the hour before the Lamp mattered more than anything I did at the Lamp, and that I would not have known it without counting.
An answer for the visitor
The old magicians had many difficulties that we do not. Most of them were cold, many were hungry, and all of them worked in fear of the law. But few of them woke each morning to a small bright object designed by very able people to take their attention and keep it. The texture of our distraction is new, and it seems to me that it calls for a deliberate practice to answer it, as the old handbooks never needed to say.
That is not an Eastern idea or a Western one. It is the plain sense of the first Paper: light the lamp first. I would only add, from my own figures, that it helps to put the telephone in the kitchen before you do.