Just tried an interesting exercise and thought i'd share since it was relatively easy to do, but produced fairly strong results.

While sitting on the toilet before having a shower, I noticed that there was a very small particle of dirt on my transparent shower curtain. It was about 4 feet away from my eyes, and I decided to vippanise it just for fun. As I focused on it, it began to flicker a bit, and then disappeared, came back etc. I'm used to that sort of thing from doing this with other objects, but then I got the idea to play with space as well. I started moving my head to the side, up, down, forward etc to see what effect it would have. I was expecting the dot to move in relation to my head movements in a linear predictable fashion, but instead it started leaping about "randomly". It would suddenly disappear and then reappear a few inches away from its previous position, even though I was moving my head in a predictable and slow path. It was as if the visual processing subminds were getting confused and couldn't predict its position, and just made the "best guess". Essentially I was able to see very easily that I was looking at fabrication, not the actual visual data coming from the eye.

It's as if the transparency confused the visual minds, they couldn't figure out if the dot was on the wall behind the curtain, or in space (like a dust mote), or on the curtain, so it was unsure of where to "place" the dirt in the processed visual when I moved my head. That's just a guess of course.  

Anyone else experimented with anything like this (specifically the kasina being on a transparent surface a few feet away, combined with moving the head). I'm fairly new to kasina practises, so my apologies if this is really basic stuff lol.

Fun with optical illusions:


Staring at a wall with de-focssed eyes soon reveals don juan's allies trying to break through.

Or try looking into  a mirror from  about a foot away, keeping absolutely still, you wil find your face going a bit impressionist.

I was looking for  a necker cube  piccy to link to and found this cool site

Or there's a book called Visual Intelligence that is very convincing on the subject of 'created reality'

I've done the staring at a mirror thing before, and yes it produces very odd visual disturbances. This exercise seemed to be different, in part because I moved my head (which would usually break the effect when staring). The way the object initially broke up was also similar to what happens when I do it with sounds (or pain, itching, etc).

Your response also makes me wonder, what are optical illusions other than fabrication? Our mind gets confused while trying to make sense of raw visual data, and creates visual impressions of questionable accuracy. The classic "old crone/beautiful woman" illusion is essentially your mind flipping back and forth between two possible interpretations of the same data, instead of just seeing it "as it is".

Also entirely possible that during/after this exercise I created a false view and am now clinging to it. 

I'll keep playing with it for now and see what happens.