Steve's practice thread for grounding in the present.

I have come up with a practice that has helped with grounding in the present moment. After running it past a few yogis on this site i think its about time i posted it.

It was Inspired by a post on Antero's thread, where he asked him self " What will my next thought be ?" ( Eckart Tolle originally came up with this i believe )

So you begin by asking the question " What will my next thought be?" What you get is silence and a gap of peaceful awareness, then after a few seconds, thoughts
and narrative start to come back in. Then i wondered, what if i continually ask the question in a loop ? I tried this for nearly a hour with some success, almost a
continuous loop of awareness! The mind naturally got bored of this, so i cut the question down to " next thought, next thought, next thought.........." I managed to keep this up with improving success. The mind, getting bored again, and i was reminded of a ' reset ' button on a machine i used to operate in a print factory once. The machine had a counter on it that totaled up the number of sheets of paper printed in the day. You could reset this counter by pressing a button. when the button was pressed an orange light came on. This gave me the idea of imagining an orange light flashing on and off in continuous loop. The Result - even more of a continuous loop of awareness. Then i imagined, an imaginary finger on an imaginary reset button continuously keeping on an imaginary orange light. The result - continuous awareness!
I imagining the orange light continuously on, and soon was able to do so with out any effort . This resulted in lots of activity in the crown area, which eventually seemed to overflow with energy all down the body.

Cont'

There then came an ' Ah!' moment, there was a realization that there has only ever been the present moment, and only ever will be, anything else,past, future, just seemed ridiculous.
My grounding in awareness has pretty much stayed constant since.

I would love some other Yogis to try this, and report back! Since doing this practice, I seem to have much more peace and contentment than i used to and that is what we are essentially all here for.

Much Metta Steve.

I've done a similar practice (and am doing it nowadays as well). The question/pointer changes sometimes but the method is relatively unchanged. I was using the tollbooth guy (which is essentially what you are doing).

kennethfolkdharma.wetpaint.com/thread/42...ar%3A+The+Toll+Booth

"I've done a similar practice (and am doing it nowadays as well). The question/pointer changes sometimes but the method is relatively unchanged. I was using the tollbooth guy (which is essentially what you are doing).

"

Did you get the same realization that there has only ever been the present moment ?

Yes. That's key I think.

I think the key is that this is a path to opening the mind to questioning and receptivity toward phenomena arising in the present. This seems to be the same as trying to find awareness (which cannot be found) or "listening for the ships in the harbor".

I've noticed that there is a slightly different flavor whether I am actively searching versus just resting with what IS.

Ken Wilbur also has some great pointing out instructions that can also evoke the same thing:

wilber.shambhala.com/html/books/ontast_wharyo.cfm/

Personally, I like just recognizing awareness as often as I can. I have realized a lot this way though I haven't, to my knowledge, come to experientially understand cessation, fruition, or path in this manner.