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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

Korpo
22nd August 2007, 11:34 AM
Hello, DM*Cubic.

Sound ideas! 8)

I know about the relationship between thought pressure and body blockages. I can feel how the activation of blockages goes hand in hand with certain thoughts, and how removing a blockage can remove thoughts as well. Having a relaxed body - and real relaxation means free-flowing energy, not blocked in any way - settles the mind as well. Very good observation you did there indeed!

The last exercise you recommend seems to me like attaining a state of non-duality with an external object. Ever tried to do this with your mind only? Because I wonder why you try to empty the mind like that - there are many ways to meditate, and you can also meditate on meditation objects. The Buddha assigned to each person a meditation object according to the needs he saw.

So you hold an object in your mind, focus on it, and over time, your mind will enter the object, and a connection with the object will develop, and the meditation object and the mind will be one - not dual things, but one.

Depending on your own experiences and preferences this might be less strain than doing this with an external object, however, because we perceive everything with our mind, these seem to be two sides of the same coin - the same method, inward and outward.

I think both methods in the end work because everything is connected at the root of our consciousness. You can look for that connection within or out there, but it is there. I think you are doing great already. 8)

The thing about emptying the mind is that the goal is not primarily have an empty mind, but to be able to focus awareness. If you observe your thoughts without attaching to them you also can detach, and then you can put your awareness everywhere - in your body, on an object of your choice, on a block, a problem, a thought you focus on. The real goal is attaining that focused quality where you can move 100% of your awareness at some point, and I think trying to attain emptiness is only one way, and not the way that works for everyone. Again, your focus on external meditation objects seems to express that very well, and again, you seem to be doing fine.

A pleasure. 8)

Oliver

DM*Cubic
22nd August 2007, 07:18 PM
Amen on the last paragraph. I definitely think that any practice that focuses the mind and keeps it from wandering is a good one to do, and increases the amount of free space in the mind for the direction of willpower.

The main reason I'm fixated on achieving emptiness of mind, though, is that the two most influential metaphysical authors I've read, Robert Bruce and Franz Bardon, seem to insist upon it as a prerequisite for out-of-body experiences and higher initiations, respectively. Is it perhaps the case that I'm overestimating the importance of a totally clear mind to these two systems? Especially in the case of Franz Bardon, I've heard comments from some people (one of whom was Aunt Clair) to the effect that he overstates the importance of certain things in Initiation Into Hermetics. I'm not about to rush out and try to bite off more than I can chew from that system, but I'm wondering if one truly needs *immaculate* focus to progress steadily through that system of initiation without encountering roadblocks.

That being said, do any of you out there have any words on the issue? Have you personally had success with OBE induction per Robert Bruce, or magical practices per Bardon and similar authors, without total emptiness of mind? Is it enough, as Korpo says, to simply be able to put your awareness to some task and keep it there, or do you truly need immaculate emptiness of mind to get anywhere?

Either way, I figure it's best to just let go of expectations and see where meditation takes me. If the clear mind arises, so be it.

Thanks Korpo, and regards to all,
Chuck

Korpo
22nd August 2007, 07:36 PM
Just a sidenote: IIRC Robert just recommended mind taming for avoiding thought throughout the exit. At least I cannot remember something in the least similar to the mind development required by Bardon or by Rawn in this interpretation of Bardon anywhere in MAP.

Oliver

Blue Mage
28th August 2007, 09:59 PM
I found your mention of "body-twitching" interesting. I saw the video from the saltcube website about having lucid dreams and obe-s and it mentioned body twitching. The video said it put the body to sleep before the mind because it tricks the body into thinking it is asleep by acting like how it would while we are asleep. That doesn't really make sense to me, but that's what it said, and I wonder about how that connects with what you are talking about.

DM*Cubic
29th August 2007, 07:30 PM
That saltcube site sounds interesting, Blue Mage. Do you have the URL?

I've never felt as though my body was going to sleep while doing body twitching, so I don't know if there's a connection there for sure. I'll have to see, though.

CFTraveler
29th August 2007, 10:41 PM
Here: http://www.saltcube.com/out-of-body/cha ... um.jsp?f=0 (http://www.saltcube.com/out-of-body/chat-forum/viewForum.jsp?f=0)

stargazer
3rd December 2007, 09:04 AM
As someone who's struggled a lot with mind taming, I just wanted to give some feedback...

The twitch method is great. I've tried it before with coaxing the body towards sleep, as mentioned at Salt Cube, but I think also combining it with easing mental pressure is a really dynamic combination.. both for tricking the body towards relaxation *and* relaxing the mind. Now instead of considering mental chatter / pressure as something that must be suppressed / ignored / fought with, it's something that can be translated into a different form entirely that won't hinder the mind quieting process. Great!

Thanks much, DM*Cubic.

Korpo
3rd December 2007, 09:59 AM
I guess the need for twitching becomes less and less as you start to release stored tension from your physical body. The less blocks are in and the more healthy the physical body is, the less body-originated thought is arising. This is long-term, however.

Oliver