I'm moving my practice thread here from Kenneth's site.
http://kennethfolkdharma.wetpaint.com/thread/4655789/Yogi+Rencarts%27+Practice+Notes

Seems like this is a better environment for me since I have now devoted myself entirely to Actual Freedom practice.

-J

(Edit for clarity)

I have been really tuning into the notion of no imagination. During my day today I had several PCEs and it is just amazing that if I attempt to visualize say a coffee cup in my mind I either cannot or if I do manage to do this then it is so clear that I have completely left the PCE. It's good if I cannot visualize cause this is a good marker to look for to check to see if I am just in Excellence and fooling myself. I say the words 'coffee cup' in my head and if I see it then it is not PCE. I have to say that most of the time that this will just knock me out of PCE.

I have also had some luck in just going for the jugular of the thing and just trying to drop the sense-of-being directly now that I have gotten experience with how feelings are shut off when the sense of being is dropped - and how this sense of being is a different sort of thing than the sense of self that can be shut down through say paying extreme attention to the individual sensations that make of sensate realm of experience.

I try to work on this all the time but I really see glaring opportunities for improvement when running. I am training for a set of marathons. The first one is this weekend. Running definitely brings up lots of stuff. It seems good for teasing out what is just signals from the body for aches and pains and such and what is the emotional coloring. Tuning into appreciation and apperception can be so beneficial to get me out of my head and into the actual.

I have been reading as much as I can from the actual freedom trust site. I really want a firm grip on the specifics of all this - what to expect and what to do to make this work. I have a little word counting program called Count Anything that tells me that I have read just over a million words from the site. The words on the site have really really helped me so much to have many PCEs during the day - even though they are mostly short. These are really exciting times.

"Checking" to see if you can visualize in the way I think you're talking about is basically the same experience as visualizing (where else are you going to look besides "in the imagination", and how do you know where that is unless you're experiencing it?), so it sounds like you may be sabotaging yourself there.

Also, I experienced times when I couldn't seem to visualize anything, and yet it clearly wasn't a PCE. Early in my practice, I found there were times when not being able to visualize made me worried or anxious. Eventually that would mess things up and the visualizing ability would come back, but it was clear that there was a period where not-visualizing and negative stuff would co-exist. (It's quite possible that I had a subtle visualizing ability remaining that I was not able to discern.)

Out of curiosity, do you think visualization is a bad thing? While I do think that random thoughts are bad, but directed thoughts can be useful, especially visualizing something, is it not the case?

End in Sight,

Yeah. I'm not sure about the imagination/visualization-test thing after today. There's certainly no need for it in PCE. I started to catch on that maybe it's not a good indicator for some of the same reasons you mentioned. I do find it so interesting that something like imagining a coffee cup has such a charge to it. I don't know how I made it this far in my life without ever thinking of that. It surely does though. It seems that there's a whole other thing that the mind can do that eliminates the need for that function somehow.

-J

John P,

Visualizing is indeed good (... sort of). However, there is something that so far seems to be exquisitely better. I'm not really able to express what that something is at this point though. I'll keep you posted as events unfold. :-)

-J

I had only a few short PCEs today along with going into an ASC non-dual thing for a while (extremely centerless but not without feeling/emotion). I had some stomach pain today and it seemed to stir things up a bit. Even quite a bit of irritation came up a few points. So I seem to be all over the map today. I have an issue with stomach pain. I think this is what was causing me to have a little trouble today. I find it so annoying and it causes me emotional pain too. I'm trying to determine if there is a belief in there that I can uproot. I think I feel like I should be able to solve the issue of the pain and maybe I see it as a failure to have not been able to fix it. I'm not sure. Even a small amount of discomfort seems to bring this up. It is really pretty silly. It's really not just stomach pain. Other minor pains can trigger this for me too - now that I'm really thinking about it. Anything that is a persistent irritation. Something for me to work on.

I thought I could control this thing and sort of will myself into a PCE but lately I'm having some success with the concept of just allowing myself to relax and just somehow stepping aside and letting apperception (the key ingredient) and the PCE to take hold. It's very interesting that when not in PCE my normal life seems much improved too.

I'm still trucking along. Really trying to muster up some more dedication to the process. It is so blatantly clear that this is extremely important to take as far as I possibly can.

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(Also, I added a bit of history on how I arrived at AF on my DhO page:
http://www.dharmaoverground.org/web/j-ren-rencarts/)