This is a little late to be asking this — and, truth be told, I was waiting for more activity from others before putting up yet another post — but I wanted to ask a few general questions about working with Exercise 9.
 The first is, how have you been working with Part B of Ex 9? I found it harder to “open up” or get into this part than the others. I think the notion of “opening sense experience” seemed a little abstract to me. I tried to play with this in several ways — noticing “borders” in my soundscape, for instance, or noticing a sense of being the “receiver” of some sensory experience, and trying to relax these distinctions. But I never went very “deep” in this part, and usually moved on fairly quickly to C. Anyone have any pointers?
 The second is, I am curious to hear how people have practiced part C. I described my first week’s attempts in a previous post. This week, I let go of the creative visualization exercise (transforming each thought into an actual character) and instead just let thoughts “be” characters, in more of a metaphorical way, seeing different feeling tones, tensions, intentionalities, etc, as the “costume” of the thought. Not transforming the thought, but just relating to it (the thought and its aura and context) through the “metaphor” of character/costume/play. This exercise also tended to bring thought to a slower pace, and I had a sense of space opening “between” thought, but I also didn’t go “deep” this week and felt I mostly went through the motions. For some reason, I just didn’t have the energy for sustained inquiry.
Maybe next week. :-)
All the best,
Bruce
Hi Brother,
I’ve been waiting to see if anyone else was going to respond to your questions, but I decided to jump in since I’ve been playing a little with Parts B and C – The sense fields and thinking. I’ve found an almost synesthetic kind of overlap or blending of sight, sound, and thought while reading words. The sounds were internal narrator sounds, not out-loud sounds. I noticed that while reading I was not consciously focusing on letters so much as the ‘mind-sounds’ of words, at times almost as if silently narrating to myself. Meaning was ‘dressed’ in mind-sound, and those ‘sound-meanings’ seem to find resonance with previously learned patterns of mind-sounds that connected in some cases with deeper feelings.
With regard to focusing on external sounds and the listening field as it overlaps with the thought space, I became very aware of ‘boundaries’, as sounds further off seemed to expand my own sense of limited space to allow for space far beyond the limits of my physical body. When doing this with my eyes it just didn’t have the same impact as closing my eyes and listening, I think because by closing my eyes, the listening field or internal space itself becomes very prominent in awareness.
Best,
David