DM*Cubic
22nd August 2007, 11:01 AM
Let's face it - clearing the mind is hard, hard, hard! It's like swimming upstream in a river of pudding with lead-lined clothes on. And from personal experience, I know that breath and spot focus are sometimes not enough to occupy our surface minds in order to set up a clear space. But I've found a few new tricks for lessening mental chatter on my own that I haven't heard discussed, so I hope that by being brought into public view they might help others achieve a greater degree of quiescence.
The first technique I call "body twitching," for lack of something more elegant. It's safe to say that anyone who has tried sitting down and forcibly taming their thought-chatter has experienced what Robert Bruce calls "thought pressure," which is that sensation one feels in the mind when a symbolic thought that hasn't yet been translated into language is about to tromp across the mental stage and ruin your peace and quiet. This pressure is not just something one mentally perceives; the sensation is also physical. With training in NEW, we become very closely attuned to the state of our body energy and can quickly, without thinking, ascertain where the physical sensation of thought pressure is manifesting. At this point, I find that allowing that physical tension to play itself out in terms of a *very slight* muscular twitch takes the pressure off the mind by allowing the neuromuscular system to vent the thought pressure physically, before it manifests itself as chatter. Also, I think that thought pressure can arise because of physical tension in the body; therefore, if you remain passively aware of your body while meditating and can lock on to tension as it begins to form, releasing it quickly, this body-to-mind feedback is interrupted. Over time, you will probably feel that, instead of twitching, your body experiences the feeling of regaining energetic equilibrium by simply redistributing its energy "below the surface." Presumably, this would become a conditioned pattern within the body with the potential to passively wear down energy blocks, promote a greater state of relaxation, and improve musculoskeletal alignment through a redistribution of tension.
The second technique that I've used I call "multisensory listening." To tell the truth, this is old news, but I think it's underused for some reason, so I'll reiterate it here. I begin by allowing my awareness to expand to encompass what I touch. When I have allowed my perception to wrap itself around that part of my sensory field, I then add hearing, and when that is integrated into my perception, I finish by adding sight. Taste and smell are optional, but they can enter the equation too. If I can hold all this in awareness at once, I begin to experience a lessening of thought pressure. It's like spot focus in principle, but with a really, really big spot. My theory on why this works is that we typically don't allow ourselves to experience the full richness of our sensory field. We screen out background noise, we ignore the contents of our peripheral vision, and we forget that we are feeling the sensation of our body's orientation in space, not to mention the sensation of contact with other solid objects. Smell and taste are also, in whole, habitually underused senses. All this slack in our awareness of our senses allows room for the mind to creep in and establish itself, chattering away without purpose. Our conscious space of awareness is like a computer's RAM; there's only so much of it to go around, at least as a human being typically experiences things. If we occupy all of our processing power with raw sensory awareness, there is no room for any thought programs to enter. Take the time to get familiar with the parts of your sensory field that you have learned to habitually ignore, and you will have an entirely new set of sensory impressions to focus on, and thus more content devoid of thought with which to occupy your brain's processing power.
The last trick I have come up with is very powerful and can work in two variations, but it requires quite a lot of familiarity with NEW, enough that one can move their point of awareness outside of their body at will (but don't let this dissuade you from trying; it's good practice nonetheless). I call the basic variation body shifting and the advanced one mind dumping. This technique relies upon the premise that, while we feel that our sensory experience is confined to our body, this is only due to conditioning. Try this experiment: begin by grounding yourself in your body. This is where your awareness resides during your entire waking life. Feel what it's like to experience life in a body - you feel your arms, your legs, your face, and everything else. You also experience your visual field as being attached to your physical eyes, and the edges of your tactile field as being within the bounds of the body as represented visually and spatially through proprioception. Even acrid scents like onions cause a burning sensation in the physical nose only. But now unground yourself: pick an object near you to focus on. It should preferably be something of small to medium size, at least at first, that you can easily grasp with your senses (something like, say, Mount Rushmore would be hard to keep in perspective all at once unless you are pretty advanced). Gaze upon it; let your sense of sight wash over it without straining in the slightest. Now infuse your mind with the idea, far-fetched though it is, that your senses are not located within what you call "your" body. Convince yourself utterly that "you" are actually that speaker/stack of CDs/alarm clock/whatever else that you're gazing upon. This can be hard on a conceptual level, but is it really an impossible leap to make? Sure, your senses *appear* to follow your body from place to place, but what if the center of your being was actually some other object? Our body fades from view when we close our eyes or look at the sky, just as the object of our focus fades from view when we turn away from it for whatever reason. It could be that you are the projected double of the object you're gazing upon! This paradigm shift is so foreign that the mind temporarily drops its habitual thought patterns when faced with this alien situation. It's a very powerful effect that has given me some of my deepest moments of clarity. The trick is to feel this paradigm shift on an existential level rather than merely on the level of abstract intellect. This may be easier or more difficult for you depending on how your brain works, but in any case it's a good exercise to try, and it yields positive fruits in terms of its effect on "your" mental focus.
The more advanced variation of this combines focus upon an object with the intent to upload our mind into it, in a manner of speaking. Gaze upon an object as above, feeling it become such a part of yourself that you aren't even sure what "yourself" is anymore. Then feel a stream of awareness connecting your third eye to the target. Presumably this stream could come through your awareness hands, or your solar plexus, or wherever else on your body you want it to come from. I find this connection is the easiest to emplace when the object is in my peripheral vision rather than in central focus. Once this connection is established, *feel* your mind, with all of its physical pressure, drifting into the target as if it were being carried on a light breeze or a lazy river current and taking up residence there. You aren't pushing it into the object, you instead wait for it to move as if by its own accord. This practice is a bit like transferring data to an external hard drive, to remain on tack with the computer analogies. Keep the connection lightly established thereafter, present in the background of your now-disembodied awareness. When I do this, I feel as if thoughts are arising from far away and are only capable of entering me along one vector, namely the connection to the target object. This allows me to fend off thought pressure with light, easy strokes which don't stir up further mental ripples that turn into an avalanche of thought.
Well, hopefully you guys and gals all find some inspiration here and try some of these practices. May we all profit from our sharing of information on this site!
Regards,
Chuck
The first technique I call "body twitching," for lack of something more elegant. It's safe to say that anyone who has tried sitting down and forcibly taming their thought-chatter has experienced what Robert Bruce calls "thought pressure," which is that sensation one feels in the mind when a symbolic thought that hasn't yet been translated into language is about to tromp across the mental stage and ruin your peace and quiet. This pressure is not just something one mentally perceives; the sensation is also physical. With training in NEW, we become very closely attuned to the state of our body energy and can quickly, without thinking, ascertain where the physical sensation of thought pressure is manifesting. At this point, I find that allowing that physical tension to play itself out in terms of a *very slight* muscular twitch takes the pressure off the mind by allowing the neuromuscular system to vent the thought pressure physically, before it manifests itself as chatter. Also, I think that thought pressure can arise because of physical tension in the body; therefore, if you remain passively aware of your body while meditating and can lock on to tension as it begins to form, releasing it quickly, this body-to-mind feedback is interrupted. Over time, you will probably feel that, instead of twitching, your body experiences the feeling of regaining energetic equilibrium by simply redistributing its energy "below the surface." Presumably, this would become a conditioned pattern within the body with the potential to passively wear down energy blocks, promote a greater state of relaxation, and improve musculoskeletal alignment through a redistribution of tension.
The second technique that I've used I call "multisensory listening." To tell the truth, this is old news, but I think it's underused for some reason, so I'll reiterate it here. I begin by allowing my awareness to expand to encompass what I touch. When I have allowed my perception to wrap itself around that part of my sensory field, I then add hearing, and when that is integrated into my perception, I finish by adding sight. Taste and smell are optional, but they can enter the equation too. If I can hold all this in awareness at once, I begin to experience a lessening of thought pressure. It's like spot focus in principle, but with a really, really big spot. My theory on why this works is that we typically don't allow ourselves to experience the full richness of our sensory field. We screen out background noise, we ignore the contents of our peripheral vision, and we forget that we are feeling the sensation of our body's orientation in space, not to mention the sensation of contact with other solid objects. Smell and taste are also, in whole, habitually underused senses. All this slack in our awareness of our senses allows room for the mind to creep in and establish itself, chattering away without purpose. Our conscious space of awareness is like a computer's RAM; there's only so much of it to go around, at least as a human being typically experiences things. If we occupy all of our processing power with raw sensory awareness, there is no room for any thought programs to enter. Take the time to get familiar with the parts of your sensory field that you have learned to habitually ignore, and you will have an entirely new set of sensory impressions to focus on, and thus more content devoid of thought with which to occupy your brain's processing power.
The last trick I have come up with is very powerful and can work in two variations, but it requires quite a lot of familiarity with NEW, enough that one can move their point of awareness outside of their body at will (but don't let this dissuade you from trying; it's good practice nonetheless). I call the basic variation body shifting and the advanced one mind dumping. This technique relies upon the premise that, while we feel that our sensory experience is confined to our body, this is only due to conditioning. Try this experiment: begin by grounding yourself in your body. This is where your awareness resides during your entire waking life. Feel what it's like to experience life in a body - you feel your arms, your legs, your face, and everything else. You also experience your visual field as being attached to your physical eyes, and the edges of your tactile field as being within the bounds of the body as represented visually and spatially through proprioception. Even acrid scents like onions cause a burning sensation in the physical nose only. But now unground yourself: pick an object near you to focus on. It should preferably be something of small to medium size, at least at first, that you can easily grasp with your senses (something like, say, Mount Rushmore would be hard to keep in perspective all at once unless you are pretty advanced). Gaze upon it; let your sense of sight wash over it without straining in the slightest. Now infuse your mind with the idea, far-fetched though it is, that your senses are not located within what you call "your" body. Convince yourself utterly that "you" are actually that speaker/stack of CDs/alarm clock/whatever else that you're gazing upon. This can be hard on a conceptual level, but is it really an impossible leap to make? Sure, your senses *appear* to follow your body from place to place, but what if the center of your being was actually some other object? Our body fades from view when we close our eyes or look at the sky, just as the object of our focus fades from view when we turn away from it for whatever reason. It could be that you are the projected double of the object you're gazing upon! This paradigm shift is so foreign that the mind temporarily drops its habitual thought patterns when faced with this alien situation. It's a very powerful effect that has given me some of my deepest moments of clarity. The trick is to feel this paradigm shift on an existential level rather than merely on the level of abstract intellect. This may be easier or more difficult for you depending on how your brain works, but in any case it's a good exercise to try, and it yields positive fruits in terms of its effect on "your" mental focus.
The more advanced variation of this combines focus upon an object with the intent to upload our mind into it, in a manner of speaking. Gaze upon an object as above, feeling it become such a part of yourself that you aren't even sure what "yourself" is anymore. Then feel a stream of awareness connecting your third eye to the target. Presumably this stream could come through your awareness hands, or your solar plexus, or wherever else on your body you want it to come from. I find this connection is the easiest to emplace when the object is in my peripheral vision rather than in central focus. Once this connection is established, *feel* your mind, with all of its physical pressure, drifting into the target as if it were being carried on a light breeze or a lazy river current and taking up residence there. You aren't pushing it into the object, you instead wait for it to move as if by its own accord. This practice is a bit like transferring data to an external hard drive, to remain on tack with the computer analogies. Keep the connection lightly established thereafter, present in the background of your now-disembodied awareness. When I do this, I feel as if thoughts are arising from far away and are only capable of entering me along one vector, namely the connection to the target object. This allows me to fend off thought pressure with light, easy strokes which don't stir up further mental ripples that turn into an avalanche of thought.
Well, hopefully you guys and gals all find some inspiration here and try some of these practices. May we all profit from our sharing of information on this site!
Regards,
Chuck