Alright, that's one way to look at it.

However, as one who does actually perceive reality this way whenever sensations arise, I can say you are missing a few points, at the very least, and they are of relevance.

One can speculate all one wants to at this point about the exact physiological or neurological basis for this experience: I am not sure we are quite there yet with the science, but I suspect it will likely not be that much further down the road that someone will come to some at least basic structural understanding of what has changed.

Everything we perceive, every sensation, thought, intention, conception, and all the rest is clearly due, at a purely physical, biochemical level, to the wiring of the brain, or largely due to it. I don't think mysticism gets us around that, though it can't be proven one way or the other that there is not something else going on, but regardless of those mechanistic explanations, the thing has value.

As one who has integrated the sense field through years of long, hard work and careful training and application, I can tell you that it is the greatest thing I ever did, and I can't imagine doing anything more fundamentally important than that.

It answered and laid to rest large numbers of questions and areas of confusion, such that now I perceive directly what most philosophers, modern physicists, the blindly faithful and the like merely speculate about.

It solved the Dark Night problem that I got into when I first crossed the A&P: this is a gigantic benefit to me, one that I am extremely grateful for.

It opened doors of perception, avenues of experience, and other options that were closed but somehow at some deep level seemed should be available.

I hesitate to go here, but the fact is that it greatly increased my mental, emotional and perceptual clarity in radical and profound ways: those who are familiar with my critique of the models that go there: those specific critiques still hold.

Slice it any way you like, this beats the pants off the way I perceived things before, and everyone who has ever attained to it that I have had the honor to know personally will tell you their own version of the same thing.

If you say this is illusion, you could just as easily say that duality is an illusion, or that perception is an illusion, but given that we live this flesh and blood "illusion", and this way of perceiving reality is so vastly superior to the other, I say: go ahead and get it, and if you don't like it, I am sorry, but you will be the only one who I have ever heard of who had that reaction.

Just curious, why did you post that post here, where so many who have done this or done parts of it hang out and help others to do the same? What did you think would happen? What were you looking for?

It felt like some part of things directly related to time and some perception of time synchronized in some way that I found totally surprising. The analogy that always comes most readily to mind is that of an engine with its timing belt off one notch: it will run, but it will shake just a bit, or perhaps a lot, depending on the engine. Yet, strangely, this was a shaking I never really noticed until suddenly it was as if the timing belt of the mind jumped back into the right alignment and suddenly the subtle shaking stopped. The entrance to this was not during a Fruition, making this the first of two major shifts that would involve some seemingly somewhat permanent (who though who knows, really) transition into an alternate and better way of perceiving reality that didn't involve that entrance into it.



After that, time pressure was suddenly really different and seemed nearly totally eliminated. Further, the perception of time itself was totally different. Whereas before I could clearly see that time was constructed of thoughts of past and future happening now, and that was something that I could notice when attention turned that way it had taken that sort of attention to that specific aspect of things to receive that benefit of seeing through time creation itself. Now it seemed that those benefits were now hard-wired into my baseline way of being, and those benefits were immediately obvious.

"Most of these (eg. Chronoception, vestibular equalibrium) exist in the "1st person subjective experience of reality in the present moment" only as subsets of other senses. So from a meditative point of view they are aggregated phenomenon."

Maybe one way to think of it is that, there can be no acceleration in the present moment.

I'm not sure why one would think that there is no acceleration in the present moment. At every moment we are being accelerated downward due to gravity, and we feel this through the vestibular system (although it's hard to attend to it because it's fairly constant and uniform). Note that acceleration is not the same as a change in physical position over time. However, my own practice has shown me that the sense of gravity pulling downward is a present moment sensation. It can be seen to be impermanent and made up of a combination of physical and mental sensations like any other physical sensation can be, but after being dissolved and put back together it's still there as a simple physical sensation. Of course, I could be wrong about this, and further inquiry might reveal otherwise. It would be very strange to me though if there weren't some basic physical sensory information coming from the vestibular system that could be taken up as an object in vipassana practice.

Classic Buddhist teachings say that there are 5 physical senses plus consciousness, making 6.

Modern science has discovered at least three extra senses...

...Has anybody else found it useful to adopt a modern scientific approach to the sense modalities rather than the traditional 5 sense model? It would be interesting to discuss some of the ways that this could be used to improve practice.

Avi

Dream Walker,

However, this makes me wonder. Suppose one were largely ignorant of a weak sense like magentoception, i.e., had never brought any mindfulness to bear on it. It seems unlikely that it would somehow magically get integrated along with the other more noticeable senses simply because it's along for the ride. I wonder if Daniel or some other Arhat could test this hypothesis by starting to meditate with a meditatively undeveloped sense and see if they have to go through the integration process again, or if it's already integrated. For example, until recently, I've always meditated with my eyes closed, and so my vision didn't really get developed as a vipassana object. I've been spending the last week really focusing on it, and it's frustrating because it's like going back to square one, not even being able to see the impermanence. Except, that it really isn't square one because the object is developing a lot faster with less effort than my original sense object. After just a few days of serious effort, visual field is starting to flicker, whereas that took almost a year when I first started with body sensations. Still, it wasn't automatic, so I suspect that if Daniel ever cared to develop his magentoception, he'd likely have to spend a bit of time with it before it got integrated with the rest of the senses. Although, who knows really!