This is a straightforward, simple-to-learn meditative technique I’ve found people really seem to like, and so do i.  I thought it up for myself a couple years ago (I was probably a sophomore or junior in High School, ’94 or ‘95), and I recently rediscovered it in my mind when going over all this Zen stuff.  It’s so easy and nice to do because it gives to instant solid feedback, not a sloppy opinionated reality (am I meditating now? How about now?) like I’ve experienced from other peoples’ techniques. What you do is this:
 
 
 

Take a mirror. It can be a wall mirror or a hand mirror, but it has to be something you can relax and look at pretty close, like an inch or two from your eyes (or whatever close distance your eyes feel comfortable with).  Sit or stand in a well lit room.

You’ll only need one eye for this. If you know which eye your ‘dominant’ eye is, use it. If not, use whatever eye your handedness is (if you’re right handed, use your right eye).  With that eye, put the mirror up close to it and focus on that eye’s pupil (the black dot in the center).

You’ll start to see your pupil dilate (get bigger) in a few seconds after you’ve relaxed. Relaxation is the key but your main focus should be on your pupil.  As a matter of fact, don’t focus on relaxation at all – your mind will tell you what works best pretty quickly through trial and error. For me, I find it’s best to feel relaxed, but you might require a completely different feeling to succeed at this.  Focus only on the objective; everything else will serve as a means to an end.

The objective is to get your pupil to dilate as much as you can. That’s all. The more you stare at the blackness of your pupil and fade everything else out of your mental image processor, the more your eye will interpret this blackness of your eye as ‘dark’ and therefore dilate your eye more and more to let more light in.  This cycle goes around and around in a loop until your eye is fully dilated – you focusing deeper on your eye, and your mind compensating by dilating your pupil, trying to let more and more light in (in a sense, fighting against you to let more light in and break your meditation by realizing your environment).  The meditation comes when you break through all that fighting and come to a balance with your body, seeing your eye at full dilation and existing with it at the same time. This balance is the apex of this technique.  I haven’t gotten this far yet.. I think the farthest I’ve ever gotten was halfway dilated.   The apex I talked about is what minimalist religions like Zen Buddhism call ‘enlightenment’ – when a person crosses over, where the ends of his autonomic self tough the tips of his explorative consciousness. It’s regarded as a pretty sacred thing and has been said to change people for the rest of their lives.

The challenge of this experiment comes at the point when you realize the fact that you have made progress, seeing your eye dilate, and you must treat it with a calm control in order to succeed.  When you notice your pupil start to dilate, the first few times you’ll naturally be excited by the accomplishment and break your focus to say to yourself ‘wow!’,  which will unfortunately shrink your pupil down to normal level, and you’ll have to start all over. This break of focus is what universally ruins meditation - the calm flow of acceptance of situations is the first thing to be learned when meditating (and many other things in life). Trying to block the excitement is just as bad as experiencing the excitement itself - they both mean the same thing, failure.  Knowing when and where your weaknesses are will help you to appease them and work through your inhibitors.

The more you can stay in this lull of mental silence and watch your eye get more and more dilated without actually jumping outside of the situation to ‘see’ how well you’re doing, the more focused your mind will become and the more apt you’ll be to things like focused thought and the simplistic ecstasy of meditation.
 
 
 

Like I said before, the response is instantaneous because you can see right before you in the mirror exactly how much progress (or not) you’re making, and through that the road to failure or success will be clearly laid out for you in plain terms: your pupil is either getting dilated or getting smaller. I’ve found physical cues such as this are much more accurate at pointing out what you’ve accomplished and what you need to work on in order to attain focused thought rather than other forms of meditation like sitting in a darkened room humming to yourself or something.

Good luck, it’s pretty cool.
© me