Apart from sinking into the breath felt at >2 locations, I have tested a couple of other ways to help the appearing of the multi-focal awareneness as explained above.
A very fast way to engage the „covert attention mode“ is to feel into the vertigo of a merry-go-round or rollercoaster-like. I feel the movement in various parts of the body from within, without directing the (mind’s, if closed) eye on the body. I need to hold the clear intention of not moving the body in any way, in order to create a feeling of the change in gravity which is completely mental. After a bit training I can now do this also with eyes open. It’s also a nice tool to combat socially difficult situations, or to counter the bubbling up of fear.
I believe there is a connection to what Stephen LaBerge calls „spinning“ as way to prolong lucid dreams.
What also helps is to put more weight on 3D (or no-dimensional) modes of perception:
- Sound à la Kenneth Folk’s „Mahamudra and the Ships in the Harbor“. This particular open receptivity is clearly a kind of covert attention in the sense explained above.
- Also effective is to hear hear a mantra from within, vibrating with the word, feeling the energy emenating from it, from the inside, in an all around way.
- Smell: Pull the air into the top part (frontal sinuses) and the behind part of the nose (ethmoid sinuses), to experience and all-around feeling. It needs to be really meant to smell something barely perceptible but still out there somewhere with unknown direction, so that we get an all-around body feeling.
I do a lot of walking in the woods. What I learned is that I can complement the normal way of focused seeing with an unfocused seeing from the corner of my eyes, by attending covertly to the parallax of the barren trunks of the trees. The trees are gliding past, gliding past, gliding past. Quietness ensues.
Another way of taking the perspective out of the visual perspective-making is to imagine that I drag the whole world with me while a walk, a bit like an all-around cape which wraps around me. This is often enough to make awareness drop inside, which is accompanied by a kind of opening into the outside. Very resting; difficult to explain; loss of words; needs more research.
