Hello!

I haven't posted here very much but used to post some at the old site -- perhaps some of you recognise my handle.

Anyway, practice has been hit or miss for a while, but lately I've been able to get back into it. Last night I was sitting and had an insight. I was doing Shinzen Young-style noting, categorising everything into one of the senses -- seeing (anything in my visual field -- eyes closed), touching (all tactile sensations), feeling (emotional), hearing, smelling, tasting (not much of that) and thinking. Not paying attention to content, just which sense door. I found that I could generally sense two streams at once, say, seeing and touching. One would be much stronger, the other weaker. I think Daniel states in MTCB that the brain is a single-threaded sensory processor and only one sense can be in awareness at a time. If that's true, my observational skills are not yet keen enough to see it. Regardless, my insight was that when there was a context switch between whichever was primary and another one, I saw that for a brief instant the other would disappear. So if I was seeing with touching in the background, and my attention shifted to hearing, there was a momentary realisation that there was no seeing awareness at all. I guess "no eye consciousness" would be the technical term. If I was seeing that I was hearing and seeing that I was touching, I could also see that I wasn't seeing seeing, see? ;-) The awareness was fleeting, and just as quickly as I could detect it the condition would vanish.

I'm still trying to figure out how this fits in...

Comments welcome!

Cheers!