Thread: Visualization Difficulty.

Try re-positioning your awareness from behind the eye-lids to the back of the head. Let everything happen back there and watch it all unfold.

Originally Posted by velmwend

Try re-positioning your awareness from behind the eye-lids to the back of the head. Let everything happen back there and watch it all unfold.

Your statement is similar to other ones that simply confound me

I just don't understand how you "re-position" your awareness, same with the whole "visualize a lotus flower on your neck" (one of the Tibetan WILD techniques) or "visualize a white dot on your forehead" (Tibetan Technique from EWOLD). I think I just overthink this stuff (as with almost everything) and simply get to worked up when performing the visualization.

Originally Posted by Drax

Your statement is similar to other ones that simply confound me

I just don't understand how you "re-position" your awareness, same with the whole "visualize a lotus flower on your neck" (one of the Tibetan WILD techniques) or "visualize a white dot on your forehead" (Tibetan Technique from EWOLD). I think I just overthink this stuff (as with almost everything) and simply get to worked up when performing the visualization.

If you're visualizing something, you don't *actually* see it, as if it's an elaborate hallucination before your eyelids. Right now, think about the front door to your house, especially its colour and the style of the door nob. There you go, you just visualized it. When I say 're-position' your awareness, just touch the back of your head with your index finger for 5 seconds. Take the finger away and feel the 'after-touch' on the back of your head. There you go, you just placed your awareness there. Now, re-position yourself to that spot when you're doing your practice. Might work, might not. Worth a shot! If you're getting stressy take a week's break and read a book!

Drax, when you visualize are you interacting with your visualizations? Staring at a wall or something is going to get boring after a few minutes. One of the mistakes I made first starting out was that when I visualized things, I was always stationary and not actively participating in the environment I was trying to visualize. Passively sitting in a chair watching a fire wasn't enough, I had to get my butt out of that chair and actually actively explore the room.

Don't just visualize a stone wall - in your head, run your hand along it. Feel how rough and cool it is. Tap your fingers on it and imagine the sound. Don't just imagine a chair, imagine a room around it - and walk around the room. Listen to the sounds of your footsteps on the wood floor - or maybe you're shuffling across carpet. Really get into it and fill in all of those things. Watch a fire in a fireplace, watch the little motes of red-hot ash lift off of the flames, feel the warmth on your face, smell the woodsmoke. Poke it with a stick, listen to the wood pop, watch how the fire reacts. This will all be faint, blurry, and unconvincing at first but it's important for you to imagine every aspect of it that you can.

You don't literally see visualizations, it's more like the concept of what something looks like in your head (like when you "see" things in a memory). My visualizations are always frustratingly blurry. I still work at them and try to fill in the blurry visuals with sounds, textures, and smells. They don't actually start to get clearer or more vivid, I just suddenly go lucid - BAM - and sometimes it's a bit of a shock. When I go lucid, the blurriness is completely gone. Everything is suddenly crystal clear, like an HD television. It still startles me so much sometimes that I immediately lose it and wake up.

It's easy to lose yourself in the environment you're exploring, so I built myself a "base". Whenever I find myself there, I know immediately without a shadow of a doubt that I'm dreaming.