pointilism

cmarti very helpfully wrote on mpavoreals thread :
"It's about developing a certain sensory sensitivity over time so that you will be able to detect finer and finer sensory phenomena. I can feel my pulse (the blood pumped by your heart) in various places when I sit. That leads to deeper investigations. I can put two fingers in light contact with each other and feel that blood pulsing and.... wait, there are some other sensations occurring there. I can feel a light, fine set of fast vibrations. What's that? WHAT IS THAT?"

Whilst doing kasina samatha this evening, this started bugging me.

Now my kasina image is getting real steady for periods of time and the pointilist nature of vision is increasingly 'distracting' me. The point of samatha as I understand it is to keep the sensation aggregate that is the kasina image as the object. But Im tempted to set aside sessions where I bust that and investigate the pointilist, corpuscular nature of the image, (WHAT IS THAT?) as maybe, it seems this is the visual equivalent of what cmarti was talking about with regards feeling of the pulse.

Now my question is whether this is worth doing, or is it a dead end road as far as visuals go?

Hi Sparqi,

The kasina is always a means to an end. It helps you strengthen your ability to remain undistracted. A basketball player lifts weights in order to get stronger in order to play basketball better. If you can see the constantly changing nature of phenomena in real time, you are "doing it right." At that point, drop the kasina for awhile and just groove on the impermanent nature of manifest reality.

Kenneth

Thats a green light!

thx Kenneth.

update:
Definitely got to a new level in samatha and rested there for an hour, the background hue of the experience was easy, smooth & totally stable. It was the first meditation of the day, I didnt do anything special, it just became available to me it seemed. It was heralded by the kasina whilst a sharp bright image smoothly drifting around the visual field whilst the flesh eyes were seemingly totally still. Spooked me a bit as the wall hinted at distorting to a spiral. Full scale wall melting type hallucination...first time Ive seen it in meditation (cough). Began metta recitation to calm myself (verbalising thought didnt disturb concentration)...and felt a 'metta particle' i.e. something 'real' feeling, which didnt have the quality of imagining/thought arise which felt like a genuine wish that all beings be happy! Seemingly without an agenda of an enlightenment pay off, or that people would like me more etc. Man. Damn. Almost shocking, outside my previous imagination/experience.

Seemed like many possibilities to explore, the heart beating at my crown or deep in my chest, the pointilism or go get a mirror etc from this new level of concentration. Decided to acclimatise as much as possible and groove it in to ease return.

(cont)

Next sit(afternoon), no potatoes until the end. Got to smooth and steady hue, but required effort to sustain. As only a few minutes to go began intently examining the wobbling edge of the kasina and the pointilism aspect. At times the points drift in a herd this way and that, but at the edge they swarmed along the contour, sometimes clockwise other times anti-clockwise. At times during the last sit and before they seemed to grow much smaller to pin prick size, go still and scintilate ever so slightly (perhaps between red and blue). This time the larger moving corpuscles (like one sees on the back of the eyelids) gave way to what looked like even larger corpuscles. It was if there were several strings of pearls layed closely side by side and were being pulled together along the contour. It was if the edge of the kasina had torn away and revealed what was going on below. Not seen that before.

Next sit (evening), no potatoes at all. Eyes flickering almost continuously. Noticed I was leading with the left eye and so experimented with leading with the right eye, by rotating head to the left slightly...seemed to calm things down....perhaps this is because it was later in the day and brain had been stimulated with reading etc.

Next sit (late evening), had previously noticed eyes were really over charged with tension, decided to switch to belly as feeling object. Totally different kettle of fish to visual object. Had previously received some stressing news...very agitated...decided to bust and just be, no struggle, no thinking, no focus or effort. Calmed down. End.

sat this morning and hovered around kasina smoothly moving, but left eye flicking seemed to interrupt getting over the effort hump. Shifting position to lead with the right eye helped. After sit whilst just sitting in no-meditation, remembered the old trick of stretching the face in lion pose and whirling the eyes around deliberately, crossing the eyes and splaying the eyes (opposite to crossing) and this worked, could relax down into visceral feeling without distraction of left eye flicker...note to self...do this again!

On dharmaoverground Kenneth posted this link:
www.web-us.com/brain/Visual_Test_Hemispheric_Dominance.htm

Also on mpavoreals thread Kenneth advises:
"spend some time sitting with your eyes open, moving your eyes back and forth from left to right, left, right, left, right. This seems to balance the flow of energy between the two brain hemispheres and is almost certain to shake things up in there. Just do it for two or three minutes at at time at first and see what happens."

I'll have to explore this methinks.

I wonder if this is relevant

"It is a common but false belief that during the saccade, no information is passed through the optic nerve to the brain. Whereas low spatial frequencies (the 'fuzzier' parts) are attenuated, higher spatial frequencies (an image's fine details) which would otherwise be blurred out by the eye movement remain unaffected. This phenomenon, known as saccadic masking or saccadic suppression, is known to occur in the time preceding a saccadic eye movement, implying neurological reasons for the effect, rather than simply the image's motion blur.[7]

A person may observe the saccadic masking effect by standing in front of a mirror and looking from one eye to the next (and vice versa). The subject will not experience any movement of the eyes nor any evidence that the optic nerve has momentarily ceased transmitting. Due to saccadic masking, the eye/brain system not only hides the eye movements from the individual but also hides the evidence that anything has been hidden. Of course, a second observer watching the experiment will see the subject's eyes moving back and forth. The function's main purpose is to prevent smearing of the image."

And this:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eye_Movement_Desen...ion_and_Reprocessing

hey mumuwu...thanks for reading, and the interesting reading
I think the smooth movement of the kasina could be a saccadic movement effect, in the sense that the aggregate of many perhaps hundreds of saccadic movements a second becomes slightly offset from the original position. In order for that to be seen I perceive the flesh eyes as being absolutely still and relaxed, which seems for me to herald the beginning of a shift in level of concentration. I remember that whilst in that level of concentration the involuntary flicker began again at a lower frequency but did not disturb the concentration nor was it bothersome.

Being a programmer, reading, logic problem solving etc tends to habitually load the brain in one way and perhaps this is a large factor in the 'imbalance'. Ive certainly noticed it gets harder to concentrate as the day draws on. Probably there is a psyche component as to the eye flicker, time will tell how big that proportion is. The emdr article reminds of EFT where they sing and calculate whilst rotating the eyes and tapping the meridian points...this might also be something worth trying if it continues to appear like an unnecessary impediment.

Options abound!