A Mindful Experiment

Upon awakening and after the first blink or two, I reminded myself of the mission for the day, to will myself to be mindful with every breath I take. Suddenly I find myself staring at the unlit candle, the candle that just hours before reminded me to abandon my mindfulness. Now as I light the candle and wait for the sun to break the horizon and announce the new day, then I and we will take that cue and celebrate with break fast. But now I'm getting ahead of the here and now. Recently I've been considering vision and sight and the world outside my skull and the world inside my skull and trying to think how they are different, yet the same. I've talked about vision and here I may repeat myself, but as I found yesterday, repetition can be fun! So I repeat what I think transpires when one looks at a candle flame. A kind of miracle that occurs everytime you open your eyes. It amazes me to consider it. Yet again and again I do. Right now in the predawn darkness I am viewing a candle at arms length, burning, and yes the photons from the flame strike my retina and all the rest of the optical mechanics that take place until the electro-chemical coded message is translated in my brain as a dancing flame, but then the miracle continues, my mind takes that interior dancing flame from the mush of gray matter and projects it at arm's length in front of my nose, and the flame I think I see before my nose is actually the 'projected flames' dancing perhaps a nanosecond in time behind the actual dancing flame before my nose. And to complete the trick, my mind makes me think the projected flame and the actual flame are one and the same! Yet the real flame, or I should say, the flame I 'see' is the imaginary flame hidden in the darkness in the center of my skull, a flame sans photons. A black flame? Hmmm, now I'm hungry and must break my fast.