Hello all. I did a little experiment to see what jhana I can get to. I took a naked juice cap, put it on a white piece of paper, and set it down. My guess where I am in the brackets. Over the next 3-5 minutes:

[1st jhana] At some point, I can focus on it a little better. Not seeing the whole of it, more like the center a bit more clearly.

[2nd jhana] A little time after that I can kind of see the cap itself more distinctly. It sticks out a little bit.

[3rd jhana] Shortly after that the edges come into focus. The center got very dark here, almost black at some points. The edges stick out though, and there's kind of a thin greenish line around them that I pay attention to. If I blink, as I had to by this point as my eyes were getting tired, the edge goes away for < 1 second, but comes back. I don't see all the edges at once, so I kind of have to focus to see everything. Somewhere around here, or the [2nd], my whole field of vision starts shifting around. Ah yes! Someone described it as "space being fluid." That is somewhat accurate.

I'm wondering how much is just physiological stuff, since I just realized that the retina burn of the purple must have mixed with the actual purple to cause the disk to black out, and that is what the green edge was.

[4th jhana] Then another shift where suddenly I can see everything around it too - the laptop I put it on, salad bowl on the left, random crap and papers on the right. This whole field is kind of into focus then. accompanying this is a kind of grayness about the whole thing. At this point I also notice my hands resting on my legs and stuff like that. I didn't stay here long but maybe the whole field was moving around in a blocky way. Not like the fluidy-space movement of 2/3 though.

I still saw edges of the disk here, though, so I'm unsure about it.

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These were pretty soft, cause it didn't feel like anything special at all.

I'm curious to see how far I can get, though, so how would one go to the formless realms from here? The description from MCTB seems to be using the breath as an object with eyes closed. I tried closing my eyes and seeing what happened but I got distracted by the afterimages. Should I keep focusing/being in it, and at some point my field of vision will kind of black out completely? It was starting to become dim a little in a way different than if you squint your eyes.