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HOW TO DEEP-DOZE

All just in note form – not properly organised
So please read the beginnings before you read this!

Animals sense of their world is experienced and understood by touching, smelling, tasting, listening, and seeing. I believe their inner body sense is also largely understood in terms of these senses.

I suspect also that our archetypal fully enlightened being would be aware with all five physical senses (and the mind), both internally and externally. simultaneously. I have to experiment – at first combining seeing and listening – sometimes seeing, smelling and tasting, sometimes smelling and listening.

Sensing Inside The Body

It's a good idea to start with, to be able to feel our bones, muscles, flesh and skin from the inside. To touch inside our own body. Read Body and Breathing.

Listening

Listen to the sounds inside your body. Listen to your stomach rumbling, wait for it ... listen to your heartbeat.

Then realise you can listen to bones and joints. In the same way you can 'listen out' in a specific direction outside your body, you can listen to your body internally, to specific muscles and joints, they don't often make noises, but just being open to the possibility, opens up this unused facet of our awareness.

This is not anything mystical. Listening activates the awareness in a special specific way – listening, seeing, smelling, and tasting all activate the awareness in individual and specific ways – they bring out new facets of awareness, possibilities we don't have with our brain guided awareness.

Once you can combine seeing the panorama and listening out for dogs barking, add the smelling exercises. Digest the smells as described in Savouring Scents

Tasting

Continued from Tasting and Smelling Games
Very much a beginner here but i feel a vague sense of taste, not just in my mouth and digestive canal but all over my body, ... i try to taste it, i imagine a big tongue tasting me inside. Food and drink overpowers our own body taste, but if you just drink water or whatever is your habitual drink for an hour, then the basic contrasts are obvious around the mouth area.

The roof of the mouth is salty, underneath the tongue is sweeter, roof of the mouth and inside the scalp are nutty and downwards in the throat is watery, vaguely like rhubarb, just a tinge of rhubarb-like flavour. These differences and contrasts are all only a tinge of this taste direction, and these tinges of taste sensations are the parameters of our sense of taste in our own body. It's all very samey compared to food. Its best to get the taste of yourself on an empty stomach.

The lips are sometimes salty but sometimes rich ... first i thought cherries, then raspberries ... then i thought it's red – blue ... blood? am i tasting blood there? – but it's red. Then i tasted between my lips and teeth and thought its yellow almost a tinge of pineapple – I'd love to be guided by a child's drawing of the colours they can taste. (see Questions for Children). – Top of mouth is salty, (maybe silver) but under tongue is sweet but i have no feel for colour.

From the area down in the gums between the lips and teeth, out to in between the jawbones it's rich, strong, seem to be always changing, sometimes vaguely like prunes, ... brown ... (sometimes there's so much tension in this area between the jawbones, that it's not possible to taste there, it just feels warm. Trying to taste will relax the tension. Trying to taste is an effective way of relaxing any stiffness in the mouth).

After eating i can taste the food down my esophagus and spreading out across my stomach area – like an upturned 'T' shape. I find the taste of what i've eaten – if it's mild like tomatoes on toast – after a while the feeling permeates my entire central body upper legs and upper arms. If i eat something like eggs, then my whole body feels eggy. I eat very little, i remember after fasting how the taste of a bit of thyme seemed like an explosion, in my mouth and body, so maybe with 3 rich meals a day, you will hardly notice such dramatic effects.

Seeing with eyes closed

Lastly comes seeing with the eyes closed again. This is nothing mystical, but it is the only sense where i feel i could be accused of using my imagination. With the eyes closed i have a sensation of light spreading outward from my whole head. I just have to go broadband, maybe imagine i've two eyes on either side of my head, and it's there, often at first just infront and at the sides of my head ... and then with time, this sensation sometimes automatically spreads through my whole body.

I would like to argue that this is natural, but don't know how! Maybe it's something like a naturally occurring optical illusion. Parents, please ask your children. Other questions for children. Maybe it happens as a consequence of listening and smelling, they just all seem to go together ...

There is another very interesting aspect of seeing and inner vision. It might sound even more fanciful and i wouldn't mention it, except that i can remember doing something like it as a child, and it is very effective. I can also imagine that animals would be familiar with it.

I'm talking about the feeling of looking inside the body with a sort of x-ray vision. Its a sort of visualisation of the sense of touch. You may find a mild general x.ray feeling without trying too hard. You can intensify this by looking from different perspectives all over your body. For some reason (maybe the more varied bone to flesh relationship), it's easier to start feeling this sensation in the body rather than the head.

Obviously this involves a strong element of imagination, and although this is based in an actual feeling of touch inside, it still means it's open to all sorts of wierd influences. The effectiveness is that the body feels much larger than it actually is, there is a pleasant sense of emptiness, and it's very good for healing stiffnesses.

Seeing, listening, smelling, and tasting; – each have their own dimensions ... other aspects of our being alive ... other dimensions of what we are and absorption in being alive.

Two Modes – eyes open and closed

I have two different modes of meditation: one with the eyes open, usually sitting  – the other with the eyes closed, usually lying down.

Lying Down (Eyes Closed)
This starts with breathing expanding and contracting, then smelling, filling up and emptying out. Then listening inside my body is very effective, listening to the hands and feet, arms and legs, then central body. I notice light coming through the closed eyes, and sometimes it spreads, it's secondary. Sometimes i listen to the outside world ... i experiment ...

Eyes Open, Sitting
This starts with seeing and listening to the world outside, in the broadband way.

Once i've got the seeing and listening working together, and my thoughts have slowed down, then i often try and add the smelling to complete the broadband senses. But i experiment, maybe adding taste, or the tactile sense is easier at first ... can't say ... not enlightened ...

Generally

Animals don't generally understand mirrors – but they have broadbanding and touch from outside and i could well believe all the senses from the inside – this is a completely different way of feeling what 'i am'. I'm not trying to argue that it's better this way, my point is it's another dimension – it gives a new depth to our normal 'mirror' understandings.

It is a sense of reality and new worlds of feeling and being which i don't know well enough to explain. There's sometimes a feeling of oneness – sometimes emptiness – sometimes heat from the belly ... these are recurring feelings but at present i can only guess how to recreate them, they seem partially dependent on basic moods or attitudes. Often i feel nothing in particular, just a sense of solid peace.

Combining the sense of taste with broadband seeing (eyes open) gives me a sense of oneness. I think this is an important connection. I'll be experimenting ...

And that's as far as i'm sure of, and i wish i'd have known about all this 50 years ago. And i hope somebody else spends a few of their next 50 years developing it.

My basic experience

My experiences started when i was very young. I started to be conscious of something beautiful and fulfilling between 11 and 16 years old, and this was before i read anything about it. It was habitual, at nights before sleep, i would breathe and feel my whole body expanding and contracting. There was nothing mystical, i was very naive (i didn't even realise we had lungs till i was 17 or 18). And it was connected with a sense of seeing and hearing inside my own body.

The feeling of expansion and contraction would regularly lead to a loss of spacial sense, i would feel as big as the room or very very small, often as well with a floating feeling. This was happening from at least age 14.

There was a feeling of reality and truth, and it was more interesting than anything i was learning in school, or from our culture – so when i found Taoism and then Buddhism with their breathing exercises, i immediately felt the connection, but really the sidetracks, the clever things 'honourable teachers' were suggesting ... were mostly useless detours.

So, unfortunately i started to lose the feeling when i was 18 - 19 - with so many fascinating astral worlds and chakras and hidden secrets to read about and experiment with, all of them so much more bright and attractive than those naive childhood experiences ... but really ... my original experience pre-18 was far more pure and real and simple than almost anything i've learnt since.

Over the years i've spoken with a number of teenagers, who lie on their backs and experience a sort of peace and completion, ... it's a 'just being' ... – and it seems to stop when 'real' life begins, with the multiplicity of wants, sex, work, learning, and being an adult.

I started remembering and reconnecting with these childhood experiences again about 12 years ago, ... by observing animals.

And, that's my story. I hope others, especially young people, can learn from my experience ... and spend a few of their next 50 years developing it. Contact me.

Back to Chapter 4 : Smelling and Tasting