According to this Psychology Today article, the earliest images of meditation from the Indus Valley date to 3500 BC to 5000 BC.
That means 7,000 years ago individuals felt the need to remove themselves from the distractions of daily life.
What distractions?
Nagging wives? Demanding bosses? Crying children? Ten text messages?
Seven thousand years ago there were no telephones, radios, televisions, Internet, magazines, books, daily mail or newspaper waiting on the front door.
What was so distracting?
Distracted living
There’s a lot of complaining in my part of the world about distracted driving. While distracted driving is certainly a menace, I think the bigger issue is distracted living.
Distractions have been around since men created wall art, so isn’t really about hand-held devices. Maybe at dinner your friends have always been distracted and now it is simply more evident as they move their eyes from yours to the phone as you narrate the thousand reasons you left your ex.
Attraction to distractions
When I mention to people that I don’t have cable channels, they respond quickly with the different options. It’s always assumed that I want options.
Back in the 1980s when there was much complaining about violence on television (do we not care anymore?), I wondered why people didn’t simply turn off the television. Watching violent TV or any TV was a choice.
That was the seed of what was to come. We not only can’t or won’t turn off our televisions, regardless of content, but willingly pay for the content, even content we don’t want.
We want distractions.
Here’s an interesting blog article called The Plague of Distraction which comments on the increasing distractions of today.
Mercury
My own Mercury has been processing a lot about the astrological Mercury lately. This wing-footed messenger between the gods is much more than communication and papyrus scrolls. He is perception and stands between you and what you consider empirical reality.
Mercury becomes a menace when he moves from his sentry post of interpreting “out there” and starts running loose “in here.” In meditation some question whether the distraction is what we’re sensing or our thoughts regarding what we’re sensing.
If a bad event occurred in the past, is it still hurting you or are your thoughts regarding it hurting you?
Mercury seems prone to distraction in lesser or greater degree dependent on the personality represented by the horoscope. Those handing us cell phones and constant streams of tailor-made entertainment are simply feeding Mercury.
The tailor-made portion of the entertainment may also be feeding the moon which gets hungry and pecks at any available food like a bird.
A bird – we’re back to the wing image. Winged beings fly quickly, peck often and rarely sit in one place for long periods of time.
Ohio Astrology 
That damn Mercury! Interesting perspective as always. 🙂
Heather
Sent from my iPhone
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Yes — in response to a couple of friends who have anxiety disorders, I use an image of Mercury and a tip that I picked up from a “how to meditate” book: not to fight thinking, but to recognize it and let it float away like a balloon. So, Mercury can fly all around the place, as it will; it can alight or not alight upon a leaf or a twig, as it will. In the meantime, I’m using distraction. I ask a question on some part of the content uttered by the panicky friend. “You said ‘she’ — do you mean your sister,or her mother-in-law?” They answer respectfully to me, but irritated by the denseness of my questions. “The third stop light jinxed you — is that the one at Main Street?” They sound irritated and sometimes exasperated, but tolerant, I guess because we’re friends. Anyhow, I just keep being dense until I hear the sound from them of a deep, deep breath. The panic has passed. Once it has passed, I have to laugh because they’re kind of fed up with my dense questions and they need to get on with their day.
I’m not exactly understanding how that works. Do you mean focusing on the details allows the thoughts an escape hatch? I work as an analyst and we are all anxious. It’s sort of amusing in an anxiety-provoking way 🙂 What do you do?
I like your humor. Wow, an analyst! Not me — hopefully I’m harmless with the shiny bits of information that I pick up and try. When these friends have an attack, they are mentally and verbally flying around like Mercury on speed. I can’t catch Mercury or swat him down so I just accept him like a bird in the air, and focus on whatever the person is saying, no matter how frenzied or crazy. Then I ask a simple question on the content, for my own clarification, like, “Were you in the store when she turned on you, or outside?” Whatever it may be, I’ll just ask for a point of clarification real quick. Mercury is still functional — they take a moment out of the frenzy to answer me. Then I’ll wait and ask another question at another point. I picture it as simply distracting the person until Mercury, on its own, settles. The person takes a deep breath and I know the attack has passed. Even if it doesn’t actually help the other person, at least I feel in the process that I’m not helpless.
By the way, I wondered if you might have looked at Elliot Rodger’s “manifesto” online, and his chart. I met a young man very much like him, and I didn’t know what else to do but to accept the content of his expressions as-is, and to ask simple questions — the idea being to have him respond “out here” and acknowledge that he was recognized and respected. That was my aim, anyhow.
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