One of the most profound parts of an LSD/mushroom trip is what I call the Meltdown. It begins 15-45 minutes after ingestion, after my breathing has increased to take in more oxygen. At this point, I begin to feel the meltdown of my hardened mental structures — my thought patterns that have become rigid and shaped my reality. They begin to melt in the rising heat of consciousness and release their once-trapped energy back to the whole. As this happens, my consciousness grows brighter and brighter and less obstructed.

I can feel the mobility of my consciousness, moving more freely, more fully following my focus. These melting structures of mind now feel like they’re petrified branches melting in a lava flow.

These hardened structures are made of the Pure Essence that we directed into various thoughts. When we do this, the essence cools, crystallizing into the forms of our thought patterns. They’re the relics of our past experiences projecting out, looking for matches.

These lines all have information at their ends. This is an example of the structure that is melting down:

The images below give the feel of the meltdown. The background color is the ambient light remaining in the consciousness because it’s locked up in the structures. As the “heat” increases, the structures melt and release more light into the consciousness. The spirals represent how fluid and flowing the consciousness is as the structures melt down. Each black dot might be a vortex from the flow of energy into habitual thought structures.

What isn’t shown is that the lines between points of habituated, structured thought begin to liquefy and flow like lava as they melt:

With my energy freed up, I can begin to feel the flow from within, from the Source.

In our bodies, we feel the energy knots loosening. That newly-released energy begins to move and flow throughout our mind and body again. This is how LSD and psilocybin entirely frees up the energy of our minds and brings us forward into the now of experience. Released into the now, our full attention flows into each new experience. We feel as if we’re moving in an intense stream of moments.

The rocking motion is from the perpetual motion of the Source, the rocking of the kundalini, like that of the Ecstasy Trance (see “The Ecstasy Trance” in flow-into-us.php).

As our visual field changes, everything we see, hear and feel takes on a newness we’ve completely forgotten was possible. All the world is fresh and new as if we’re experiencing it for the first time. It’s a profoundly beautiful experience.

Primal Awareness: Fully focused in the now, we’re in a happy, experiential state of being, attending to sensations, having fun, playing, having beautiful pure experiences without interpretation. Everything is new, and we feel our own existence in a now that lasts forever.

Symbolic Difficulty: No thoughts interrupt our pure experience. All concepts have melted, and thinking and writing coherent ideas is difficult. Our symbolic spoken and written languages seem odd. Don’t think of this as a bad thing — this is all the human garbage that keeps us from living.

Primal Communication: We engage in unfiltered joyful communication, laughing and smiling, being real, making personal connections. We freely express ourselves. We have a Primal Awareness of others’ subconscious communications (desires, distractions, and fears). We may have clairvoyant experience.

No Boundaries: Our boundaries become fluid, and we flow into everything around us with total empathy, feeling the connections and sameness we share. Our liquid selves feel what others are feeling. We may reconnect with our child self, or may feel that there are many selves looking out through each person’s eyes.

Psychedelic Visions: We have vivid psychedelic visions. The world around us is seething, melting. We may see our own neural structures, holographic rings, and energy fields. Everyone is radiant, and the light around us is different. Colors may be separated into components or fluctuate. We may see the fractal nature of reality.

Feelings: We feel grounded, solid, with an undivided will.

LSD and psilocybin allow us to become primally aware. We see that we are animals, roaming this world. We experience the all-in, free-spirited playfulness of a child. We can go to a state before we knew language, and experience the world as a baby does. We can rediscover our abilities and strength from the eyes of our child-self who wants so much to be able to do what a grown-up can.

We become primally aware of what and who we really are. This is due to a complete focus of awareness in the now and suspension of thought. It is impossible to get bored because everything feels so new. It’s like being a child again, when the world was so new.

We can focus in on a little leaf and it becomes the entire world to us. There is nothing outside the leaf that we need to be happy, nothing calling our attention away from it. Everything is enrapturing and completely fulfilling.

This undivided attention in the now brings on a profound willpower, and the will is to explore, become, experience.

Life is perfect when our attention is fully present in each moment without expectations, comparisons, and conditions. In this state, everything we experience is perfection — it is all literally without compare.

While on LSD or psilocybin, I was astonished to find that while I had experienced days worth of life, some people who were having dinner last time I noticed them were still having dinner. The sheer quantity of moments experiencing the world in two minutes is what I’d usually experience in 3 days. Our “happening” speeds up to an immense degree.

Our motivations disappear along with our limited sense of self. The extreme bliss we feels works to short-circuit motivations, for what need is there for them anymore? The only motivation that seems to remain is curiosity. Even hunger and thirst are outdone. It is difficult to motivate in any direction, for we reason that “since everything is so good, why change?” There is enough energy to seemingly last forever. There are no fears or hopes or needs to get in the way. The past has receded away in the current of the now.

Any sort of conceptual thinking is difficult while on LSD. I could read what I’d earlier wrote but the idea wouldn’t take form in my mind.

Simple awareness becomes the source of our energy and happiness, and all things are relevant to us, worthy of our attention.

Thinking is an energy-consuming process. Thinking amplifies the past, comparing situations, considering things based on past experience. This shuts out awareness. Attention on sensation and senses amplifies incoming energy, which fills us up.

My experience was pure, unfiltered through any symbolic language. Language can hugely impact our experiences by fitting it into known, familiar concepts. Language is a structure for our experience to flow into.

As all the structures in our minds melt down and release their energy, the conceptual boundaries between things also disappear and we get to experience the true interconnectedness of all things. We naturally become whatever we look at. We forget our limited selves and experience 100% empathy with everything.

See also “Attention Becomes” in attention.php

We find it difficult to know where we end and the next person begins. In such a case, we are a pure observer — detached from our identity completely.

Often, I find that the people I’m tripping with and I form a group consciousness. I feel as though my friends are part of me, that we are all specific parts of a larger mind. We each have a place in this mind and we all consider each other.

On one trip, I reconnected with the self I was somewhere around age 1-3. That me joined with the grown-up me, and we coexisted, learning about each other. That young self was so excited and amazed to be grown up and have all the abilities one has when grown up, and my adult self was delighted to be living completely in the now, outside of the thick wall of context and conditions that rules grown-up life.

My kid self forgot that his body was currently full-grown and I hit my neck against something.

I’m referring to the “airplane” game famous with kids where an adult lying on their back holds you up in the air with their feet. The delight is to be so high in the air. Then I found to my delight when I stood up with my full-size adult body, my perspective was still that high up in the air, seemingly floating.

Life is so delightful and full in this state that even pain couldn’t stop it. I see this with my kids now — while it may be cold out, they resist putting on jackets. The cold is just a stimulus to them.

The young self lives life in the now. It’s vibrant and alive. By comparison, the adult self lives in a world of thoughts and memories.

Brendan was playing ball with me during the trip. He was playing a sort of parental role, and my young self was watching intently.

I was bonding with him based on nothing more than his attention and his smiles. That’s how very young children bond, before language complicates things.

Without the weight of the adult mind’s past, we can see everything fresh and new. We can have pure, new experiences. Our past experiences are our context — old forms only kept alive by our continuing attention.

It is necessary to love your human animal-ness, to love the feel of your own flesh, to be one with our experiences. Your body is the vessel of your experiences. Love the body and explore life with it. We are a consciousness which has chosen to experience and express through this body. All this physical pleasure is felt by our animal selves.

I’ve written about the free expression and unfiltered joyful communication when on LSD & psilocybin. While this is usually the case for me, the intensity of the trip increases over time and, especially with psilocybin, can sometimes become overwhelming. I’ve at times felt too open, too uncontained. Even with my closest friends, at times like this I withdraw from communication for a time. It becomes too weird, too difficult.

This is especially the case in any strict or official setting, where we’re meant to behave a very specific way. In these cases, we must spend a lot of attention constraining ourselves in a social sense, wondering if we’re acting weird (or just thinking that we’re acting weird, which makes us act weird). We wonder if maybe we’re not doing the things we should do and saying the things we should say. It takes all our concentration to refrain from acting on our feelings. Remember the mental structures that melted down earlier? That’s what kept our behavior constrained, and it’s a real effort to reach it now.

In Primal Awareness, we feel great openness and trust, but if we clamp down on ourselves with another point of view, it could lead to feelings of shame and insecurity.

LSD and psilocybin free up our attention into the now, so whatever we focus on gets amplified far more than usual. That is why one has a very good trip or a very bad trip. One either becomes immersed in trust and love or immersed in fear.

On LSD, it feels like your body is flaring out a lot of energy:

On LSD and psilocybin, familiar biological urges can seem unfamiliar. For example, for a while I would be feeling this really weird sensation in my lower abdomen, and I didn’t know what it was. Eventually I realized that I had to go to the bathroom. I had difficulty recognizing the sensation at first!

There’s also no hunger. At best you may feel that since it’s gotten to be a certain time of day, you probably should eat, but you don’t actually feel hungry.

Our sensory input is the raw data we receive. We organize it into meaning through our context. Our context becomes very specific — a person, standing on a path in a forest in Virginia, with wife and kids, with all their memories, on Earth, within the physical universe. But to be such a specific person, we carry that weight along with us.

It is from within this context that we interpret the raw signals of experience that come to us. In this example, I INTERPRET this visual data as a physical scene in front of me, with a path and trees. . . . But it could be interpreted in any terms, via any conceivable context. This raw visual data could be interpreted as happening within an airplane, playing a part in an entirely different story. This same data could be a bear. A boat. A song. An idea. THIS input within THIS context means THIS.

One stimulus, out of context, can be understood SO many ways.

It’s all just data, in CONTEXT.

Signals. Interpreted.

And that context is our memory — the unique individual memory of the specific consciousness experiencing it.

The mind is the assembler, interpreting data within its context.

Consciousness is on an ever-shifting scale between all energy and all context; experience and memory; letting go (increasing energy) vs hanging on (increasing context); relaxing vs focusing; outward perception in the now vs inward focus on the past; unity vs the universe full of things and time. Higher frequencies shift towards the energy of the Source. Slower to more context.

Marijuana, psilocybin, and LSD all free up our attention into the now. That’s why I find them all to be wonderful psychedelics for exploring the mind. However, marijuana frees up our attention in an entirely different way, and this leads to a major difference in the experience:

Psilocybin/LSD pushes all that energy into new experience. It’s a vivid, beautiful experience, living and breathing and laughing within the eternal now of life. Thinking is nearly impossible because the structures of the mind have temporarily melted away. I sometimes think of these psychedelics as liquid sunshine. We experience “Primal Awareness” (see above).

Marijuana is more flexible. It allows us to focus our freed-up attention in the now OR it can be turned inward, to illuminate and empower our thoughts and inner experiences. I call this state “Deep Attention”. It’s wonderful for gaining insights into how the mind works, but it won’t be the blazing, life-changing experience that psilocybin/LSD can provide.

Our everyday experiences happen within our “context” — our environmental context (where we are, who we are with), and our internal context, made up of the specific searches of our beliefs, expectations, desires, and fears. These myriad background focuses divide our attention.

Marijuana raises the threshold for something to reach our attention. As that threshold rises, it shortens our contextual span, and in doing so frees up attention.

In terms of our internal context, the weakest context (fears, desires, expectations, and environment) release their hold on our attention first. When these far-off thoughts disappear, our context shortens, releasing the attention it was holding, and our available attention grows. This is because all those fears, desires, and expectations — they all use a little attention to cast shadows on our experience of the now. A shortened context removes those things, and all that energy they pull is released back to us. This provides us with a deeper pool of attention. We can focus this deeper pool of attention on any topic, or move into a state of relaxation.

TO DO: remove “mg” from image

In terms of environmental context, we hold a mental map of where we are — the room we’re in, the building that room is in, the neighborhood the building is in, the city around the neighborhood, the state beyond it. As the environmental context narrows, it may at first feel like you’re not sure which direction is north any more (if this is something you’re typically aware of). After more release of environmental context, it becomes easy to believe your neighborhood is anywhere. Further still, and the room you’re in can become detached from its location in the building. At this point, you can easily imagine the room you’re in is on a ship, sailing across the sea.

To get a feel for this, imagine how different it would feel if your house was rotated 90 degrees on your property. This can happen while sleeping, too:

As the effect increases, more and more of our past context releases its hold on our attention. The motivations caused from anything longer than say two minutes ago lose their intensity and we forget about them. Our short term memory is emptying out everything every few minutes. Soon the motivations and memories from ten seconds ago no longer are strong enough to influence us, and before long, we forget there is anything else to life than this moment. Everything is warm and familiar. Everyone around us is an old friend, for it feels like whatever is now has always been, and then there’s complete trust. This is a perfect life, bliss. Everything we do, we are doing forever.

Without seeing things through past experiences, everything is fresh and new, as if we’re experiencing it for the first time. Every emotion we feel is a new emotion that we’re experiencing for the first time.

With so much attention totally freed up, we engage in whatever we focus on with more attention than ever before. We can become incredibly skilled at whatever we put our mind to. At this point, simply thinking about things lights up far-reaching connections and brings forward knowledge that has been buried at subconscious levels. Sensations repeat themselves due to the weight of our attention, and time seems to slow down immensely.

I call this state “Deep Attention”.

While high, we can focus our full attention on anything we choose without distraction. Whatever we focus on becomes the entire world, and we sink our mind totally into it. That focus becomes all there is. The completeness of the attention being put into the awareness, thought, or imagination is much higher than our fragmented everyday attention.

We see everything in our focus with as much detail as we would if it were a movie in slow-motion. One bite of food may be experienced with as many “moments” of consciousness as we usually spend on a whole meal. The focus expands our psychological experience within physical time. When our attention is fully on a thing, we can experience it more deeply, learn much more from it, and gain a great deal more pleasure from sensory experience.

Imagine a stack of cards with various pictures on them. On the top is a card with a picture of a red panda on it. Focused with Deep Attention, this card is all there is. It’s our whole world. When the next card is brought to the top, we see a picture of a wolf, and we completely forget the last card. The new card gets the entirety of our attention. We BECOME IT. If we were still thinking about the red panda, or comparing the wolf to it, we wouldn’t be able to fully become the wolf card. Leaving the past behind is the only way to bring attention fully into the present.

Being high is a state incredibly close to the dream state, with the only big difference is that we’re still focused within our physical bodies and aware of the physical world. The state of mind is the same, and we’re able to touch the dreams going on at all times under the noise of everyday life.

With Deep Attention on our experience, there is no room to question things.

With the wonder and innocence of a child, I had fully believed what I thought I saw.

When inwardly focused, we can jump on trains of thought that lead us out of the moment. We may wonder “What if she does this?” and “What if she meant this?” These thoughts take us into their context when we give them attention. Believe, for example, that she did mean to flirt with you just now, and her other behavior is bathed in the light of that context.

Our minds wander off into these kinds of thoughts every day, but with Deep Attention the flights of fancy are far more complete and full before we step back out of them. We are traveling further into their context than usual. Since the focus on our thought is much more intense and powerful, we can miss more of the real situation. This creates more unknowns for us to fill in with the thought’s projections.

Deep Attention on one context may cause us to miss other options.

Deep Attention on one thing may cause us to miss some context on things not in our direct focus.

Since our entire attention is either relaxed or specifically concerned with one thing, everything else goes unnoticed. It takes a greater effort to move the attention, and then it moves as a complete whole. When we actually notice a joke or something interesting, our attention turns fully to it and there is a big reaction.

When our attention turns to something new, it moves fully and completely, leaving the last focus behind entirely, not even remembering it existed.

Whatever we’re doing feels like we’ve been doing it forever, because it’s all that we can remember. There was nothing before.

In the movie Head, there’s a continuous plot through many eras and environments. When high, your shortened context may cause it to appear that the whole movie took place in the same setting — during a desert scene it may seem that the entire movie has taken place in the desert, even though a few minutes ago it was a jungle.

If something happens twice, remembering the first time is like remembering it from a dream.

This is similar to the state of mind of meditators, who react freshly to a sound played at regular intervals. The expectation/memory of it is released before the next sound comes.

Consider child development, how infants learn object permanence. What does that mean? It means that where we come from, before being born, there is no expectation of object permanence. We see this in the dream state, in the more fluid state of consciousness from which we come. We slowly learn that object permanence is a foundational law in this new, physical world.

When we refocus in the now, the old thoughts seem to spin out of the back of our mind and our focus moves to the front of our mind. Otherwise those old thoughts sit around being processed and replayed while the new makes little impact. When refocusing in the now, we can feel whatever was important moments ago fade and disappear. Then we don’t even remember what it was we were thinking about.

When high, we tend to breathe very slowly and deeply. At higher levels, we may feel like we’re not breathing for a long, long time (this could be a perception due to the expansiveness of the present moment).

We may sink into the deep breathing of sleep, and it seems amazing that we can get along with such slow, deep breaths. When we finally fall asleep after smoking marijuana, it is a peaceful, deep sleep.

The subconscious contains all we know. When high, someone asked me the CD track number of a specific song from years ago, and I remembered it. I was surprised that I could pull up this obscure, distant information. The fullness of my Deep Attention brought the memory clearly back to me.

We live on a spectrum between all energy and all context. At one extreme is living completely in the context of the past. Nothing is new. Everything is a shadow of what it once was. We follow the habitual patterns we previously established. Our life moves along as if by fate. We are experiencing nothing but what was set in motion long ago, our attention trapped in past experiences and expectations.

The other extreme is zero context, living fully in the now, where everything is possible. Our minds are quiet and still. Attention is fully in the moment. This is the unconditioned state of the soul.

We live at varying places between, but far too often we are steeped in too much context to be happy.

Now that our attention has been freed up, there are two ways we can go with it. We can either relax into a warm, blissful, regenerative state, or we can focus it, either internally or externally.

Deep Attention empowers everything we focus on. It can give us an incredibly powerful imagination. It can let us experience intensified sensory experiences and synesthesia, enjoy intensified experiences of food and music, and connect with people on a much deeper level. If we focus internally, we can feel the energy flows inside the body, remember things we never thought we knew, and make profound discoveries about ourselves.

The larger pool of attention provided by Deep Attention can vastly magnify our psychological time. At these higher speeds of perception, we are capable of an incredibly detailed view of our inner mental processes. We can even watch the frames (moments) of consciousness happen, observing how our minds work with incredible clarity. Its expansiveness gives us a clearer picture of the hologram.

It’s from this state of mind that I go into the mystic, and have so many insights.

Inevitably when I get high I have some experience that I see in such amazing detail that it reveals the inner workings of the mind. It’s so fascinating that I have to write it down. Once I begin, I usually can’t stop writing. The thoughts, the insights, revelations come too fast to write them all down.

At higher speeds of consciousness, we can see the slow rate of the physical consciousness as individual frames flashing with space in between them. It’s a slower movie reel filled with additional space. We can perceive the greater context between the physical moments. This would be our dream state context peeking through. Or we can imaginatively fill in the space between the frames with so much that the physical reel takes on an entirely different meaning.

Just as concentration on a sensation can make it feel like that sensation is continuing forever, concentration on a thought or experience can continue that experience for as long as we focus on it.

Long-term, recurring negative emotions like depression, insecurity, and self-doubt typically come from contexts far outside the moment. When marijuana releases that context, the negative emotions they cause disappear completely.

The other side of the coin is that if you choose to focus on those negative contexts, then you may experience those negative emotions amplified with your full attention, which I wouldn’t recommend.

One of the greatest things about a one-pointed attention is all the things that can be left behind. For example, physical pain can only reach us if we focus directly on it.

One experience I’ve heard several people have with marijuana is feelings of paranoia. I’ve only had that experience once or twice — enough to see how it works. It’s due to a large focus on yourself that you project into the minds of others. “I feel so different, surely everyone else must be able to see it! I’m acting weird! Everyone knows I’m high!” You attribute everything you see around you to yourself — it’s all about you. “The person over there, doing something — it’s because of me! The light turning on in that building? It’s because of me, too!” You see everyone else as focusing on you as much as you are.

It’s an unwise use of your imagination.

Focusing on sensory input brings a cool, clear feeling. Lights seem brighter. We feel profoundly aware of our surroundings. Music is totally beautiful. Pleasure can be all-consuming. If someone is touching us, our attention flows into the contact, takes its shape, intensifies it.

Our attention naturally focuses on sensation when we are in the present moment. When our minds are elsewhere, physical sensation goes unheeded.

By putting our attention deeply onto a sensation, we can cause it to continue even after the initial stimulus is withdrawn.

I was high. My head was hanging forward and someone was playing with my hair. I love this feeling and put all my attention on it. Afterwards, when I moved my head to its natural position, I could still feel those sensations in the same position they were in moments before. I felt the sensation of my hair being pulled upwards even when I changed the position of my head. My attention had taken that shape, become the sensation, and didn’t let go of it immediately.

TO DO: add a “before” picture.

Bright images burned into the retina flicker slower and slower as they fade away. Attention can keep it from fading, however. When holding the image like this, I saw neurons flashing all around it.

Deep Attention on touch sensations also increases moments of psychological time experiencing that sensation. This may make it seem that the sensation continues on beyond usual. In some situations, this can lead to odd experiences. For example, when turning my head with Deep Attention, it seems to turn further than possible.

I was sitting in a chair, my back arched, head leaning back. I felt I was taking off, spinning out backwards over my head into the air, truly all the sensations of flying.

Music sounds so good. Deep Attention on music allows us to entrain to it more deeply, and enjoy it more fully. We can feel the sound waves hitting our bodies. Those sensations are a positive flow of energy into our bodies and as we focus on it, we intensify it, and we can channel that incoming energy to movement, to dance.

Food is so delicious. Deep Attention on food makes it the most delicious thing you’ve ever tasted. Marijuana is known for increasing the pleasure food gives. This is not true for LSD or psilocybin.

To the degree that we’re in the moment and are approaching zero context (using marijuana), it becomes difficult to fit raw sensations into a meaningful framework. With a taste, we may lack a reference point. Where to begin? We lose ground zero. It is the same as having no context. Is the shower hot? I can’t tell. It’s just sensation. This is just the way it’s always been.

At increasingly high levels of marijuana, it becomes difficult to focus on anything, because our memory doesn’t last long enough to cause any sort of motivation at all. It would take a really strong desire to allow us to concentrate on one context long enough to be motivated from it.

The rotating energy in my mind lit up different parts of my body with thousands of cool pinpricks of sensation as it passed over them. It made my hair feel like it was standing on end and sometimes made my muscles twitch. While an energy field rotation takes about 4 seconds to complete, these sensations are felt like a tapping sensation at about 4 cps (cycles per second). This is the frequency of energy body sensations (see “Feeling the Chakras” in energy-bodies.php).

I found that as I was thinking, different body positions associated with those thoughts lit up, as if every thought has an associated body position. This correlates with the idea of mental pain points being stored as muscle tension.

One feels the movement of large waves in one’s mind which start at the back and move forward. One can also feel big waves of energy moving up their spine.

With shortened context, you can imagine that when you kiss your girlfriend, that you’re about to kiss her for the first time, after wanting her for years. We can imagine anything outside the walls of the room we’re in. Whatever fantasy situation we want to experience, we can imagine that context and it becomes 100% real to us.

We can have amazingly believable fantasy experiences, wherein we fully experience all the motivations concerned with the reality of that fantasy. Take this example:

The reality of any imagined situation is equal to our ability to believe it. The real context is there if we let it back — we know we’re imagining this but we’re feeling the thrill and suspense of it as if it were real. It’s just like reading a book or watching a movie — we leave our own context and become the characters, feeling the suspense and drama of the situation.

Continuing the above example — what if I wanted to imagine I was in a high-tech factory? This is more difficult. I am in a partially-finished attic. My eyes reveal a context that I can’t easily release. But if I were to close my eyes, it becomes possible — anything becomes possible. This is what happens in the dream state. Sensations from the physical body enter in and we attribute them within the dream. That tickle on your foot might be a feather or a ghoul or a kiss. It’s up to you. If we’re with a harem in Egypt, it’s probably a kiss. Or it could be a spider to add drama!

When near zero context, the meaning of everything can become completely arbitrary. Since context determines meaning, and our context has become incredibly short, we have the opportunity to fill in the blanks with anything we imagine. Without any past, our minds can easily explain the scene before us in any number of ways.

The ultimate imagination can transform the meaning of any single-moment picture into absolutely anything by filling in a whole new past and future, and thus through imagined context we can create any meaning. We can read any sign from any behavior through a complex-enough context. We can think up any explanation for things and if it makes any sense at all, we can truly believe it.

As we focus Deep Attention on one thing, other things disappear from our context. These blanks can either be filled in with our imagination. . . .

Or the object of our focus can be experienced without any context:

Our spotlight of attention can be so strong and tight that we disregard the rest of the photo. To the regular mind, it’s obvious that the blue area at the top of the photo is the sky. But the tightly focused spotlight of the high or dreaming mind can so forget the context of the photo, that the patch of blue can become a pool, a glacier, the pattern on a shirt.

TO DO: show zoomed-in bits of a photo in this fashion, then show the whole photo.

Length of sensory repetition gives an idea of the shape of ourselves.

Once I changed my perceived energetic shape from a human body to a large hawk. Short repetition on beak, longer for wings. Then I felt myself fill the shape I was imagining.

TO DO: change the bottom half to a hawk shape

Deep Attention can lead to feelings of expansion in this way (see “Feelings of Expansion” in skylike-awareness.php).

When we disengage the spatial aspect of a sensation, we can reorganize how it is experienced due to how we imagine it. The random pokings of a Koosh ball can be imaginatively organized into a center ring and an outer ring.

TO DO: show a picture of a Koosh ball

When high, our expectations can provide such a powerful context that our experience bends completely to fit into it.

I was able to imaginatively experience Weezer (rock music) as bluegrass music. It was so brilliant and funny. To do this, I had to wrap it within a new context. I built up a strong expectation that I was about to hear bluegrass music, and when the song started, I heard Weezer as bluegrass music.

This inner connection into psychological time is through the now:

Our experience of time changes based on where our attention is focused. As attention expands in one place, our perception of time expands there, and it contracts in others. As always, our attention phases as it transitions focus from one subject to another.

Time outside our point of focus seems to fly, for things go on with little to no peripheral cataloging of its progress. If we are able to focus 100% of our attention on writing, for example, we wouldn’t notice that there is a a movie is on in the other room. The world outside of our focus disappears. We don’t notice the passage of time in another context until we shift our attention to that context (for without attention there, it doesn’t exist in our experience). After coming out of our deep focus on writing, we look over at the screen and are amazed at how much of the movie has passed since we last noticed it.

Hasn’t it seemed like forever when we are waiting for the arrival of a friend? If we are waiting without distraction, our minds are focused on the waiting, and time will drag. Our focus expands the waiting. But if we’re distracted by something, the wait will be much more bearable. This can be nice, too, on a relaxed summer day where we lie out in the sun, clear our minds, and feel the day drag by like molasses.

If we’re focused in the now, time goes slow because the now IS our focus.

Since we are often very deeply focused in the dream state, we usually don’t remember time passing through the night. Dreams can seem like they last longer than is actually possible due to this full concentration and attention on them.

During one summer, I’d take a 10 minute nap during my lunch break at work and would experience what felt like 2 hours of dreaming.

The effect that the focus of Deep Attention has on the expansion and contraction of time is significant. My altered experience of time is something I regularly note.

Attention is a spotlight and magnifying lens that empowers pathways of information. It does this by adding its weight to the energy of that pathway, which makes it clearer, brighter, and gives it a broader reach in our mental network. A focus of attention is a quickening, taking us more rapidly into psychological time, and thus relatively slower through physical time. Essentially, time expands to us. When this happens, our projector speed increases with a soft vibration like the fluttering of moth’s wings. Our moments of awareness change from 1 2 1 2 to 12341234. It increases the rate of perception: “| | | || ||||| || ||| || ”.

Here are some visual metaphors that show how attention speeds up our psychological time relative to physical time. We experience more moments:

This one shows how liquid attention, like a drop of water, enlarges and increases resolution:

I took 10mg of an edible Delta 8 (marijuana) and, while waiting for it to take effect, agreed to walk the dog around the circle (a 10-minute walk). The effect came on strong just as we departed.

My experience of time expanded massively as my perceptions increased to pull in my subconscious knowledge and see the light of my wife’s attention as she talked with me. I got into what seemed like the most strange and awkward conversation ever with a neighbor that seemed to last half an hour but was probably only a minute or two.

Imagine a period of 2 seconds, in which we have 400 moments of consciousness (2000 ms / 5 ms “moment”). In our typical distracted consciousness, we might only spare 15 moments of consciousness in the now. When spinning through our thoughts, time flows by without our taking much notice. We see little of what’s going on around us. But if we spend all 400 moments of consciousness fully in the now, we will see with an incredible clarity, and physical time will seems to stand still. Higher frequency perception is more REAL, as we are seeing more. How much we go into the moment determines how much we get out of it.

Memories are saved at the emotional frequency we had at the time they happened. Similar memories become part of our context when in the same emotional state. That’s why when we’re feeling down, we can be haunted with memories from other times we felt down — negative memories that can keep us in this state.

It’s hard to remember childhood and baby memories because the memories we made there are recorded at a frequency of consciousness that we no longer spend time in. But they’re still there, and if we return to that mental state, they’ll be readily accessible to us again.

Consciousness can drop back into earlier states, until it reaches a state that feels primordial, in which our first memories can be reached. We can remember all the way back to the beginning, the single impulse.

The above memory was confirmed by Emma later, who said it was Bob’s Farmer’s Market just a few blocks from where we lived in Spring Lake Park, Minnesota. She’d take me with her shopping, and she thinks she was pregnant with my sister at the time. That would have put my age at 1-2. Or maybe she was pregnant with me.