Right Shift

The right-shift thing. I tend to use my body as a mandala– what I mean is that I use it as a reference point to initiate conditions, etc, that may not be body related at all, so when I talk about something happening on the right side of the chest it isn’t necessarily something that takes place physically—although you can focus your attention in a particular area and generate physical symptoms such as tightness or warm or pressure. What this means is that there isn’t necessarily a cause-and-effect thing happening—if you focus on the right side of your chest then this thing will happen because you’ve focused on the right side. I can bring on the right shift very strongly by focusing on the right side of my neck, relaxing it up into the occipital region behind my right ear. Similarly, I can do it by imagining myself sort of reaching out to the right and pulling the space to the right of me over toward my left, or imagining the space to my right flowing toward me. It doesn’t *have* to be me who’s moving into something or somewhere else—I can pull the space to me, or the somewhere else to me. This is something that’s important, that’s *key*—in the ‘sphere’ state, where you have the sphere around your head and you get to the point were you feel your awareness is in all directions, you can forget about being ‘here’ and going ‘there’, because you can draw ‘here’ and ‘there’ to you. You don’t need a second body to ‘travel’ because you don’t need to go anywhere, you don’t need the sort of classic OBE scenario anymore.

In a previous letter I said “I looked out over the meadow and found I could change my vision to see anything I wanted—I could look at the distant mountains, think that I could see them up close, and suddenly I could see every detail, and they appeared to be right in front of me.”—what I was describing there was being able to pull space toward me—I could see to whatever level of detail I chose, only I was doing it with my eyes open. I’d done this before several times—once I was sitting in a sort of cave/alcove space up in the Canadian Rockies near Jasper, on the side of a cliff that overlooks a large hanging glacier, and my vision shifted and I could see the ground a couple of hundred feet below me as though my nose were pressed up against it—at the time I was *very* tempted to step off the rock and onto the ground below—it was so close and I had the distinct, but probably very foolish feeling, that I could make that step—I chose not to, but I still sometimes wonder what would have happened—beyond the big splat I would have made as I hit the ground from 200 ft.