4: If you've had dissociative experiences, say from severe trauma, your body has learned to do this on its own, and sometimes you can do it on purpose.
Otherwise, meditating a lot can teach you to recognize your anchors and to acquire an awareness that allows you to move them.
Conversation
5: How this works is essentially similar to training your awareness of some underutilized muscle in your body.
Once you *know* what it feels like to move it, you can elicit the sensations necessary to assume conscious control of the process.
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6: Why would you want to do this? Well, mostly because it tends to completely change the quality and contents of your conscious awareness.
Sometimes this reveals new information not available in your default mode awareness, other times it allows you to control your focus better.
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7: In my case, I learned to do this deliberately after a traumatic experience made me not want to "be" in my body.
Because I've meditated for over a decade, and had occasional brushes with that anchor moving in the past, I noticed the feeling and was able to replicate it later.
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8: What this felt like was that my entire point of view, my internal sense of where I was"looking from, shifted from inside my body to a short distance from my head.
It hadn't really occurred to me before that you could view things from outside the body like this, but you can.
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9: There is no essential anchor to consciousness. All the things you are experiencing, body sensations or a distant view kilometers away, is *inside*.
There is no outside view on consciousness, and none of the contents of consciousness are actually separable from consciousness.
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10: This sounds like an academic point until you realize your propensity for viewing from inside:
- your body
- your head
- your thoughts
.... is a completely arbitrary habit that you don't need to perpetuate.
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11: However, you ever notice how viewing a thing from different angles completely transforms your understanding of said thing?
So it is with moving your consciousness around your field of awareness, too.
Viewing things from outside the body is so different from the inside view.
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12: What I discovered when my anchor point jaunted to outside my head, was that my behavior became very detached, disembodied, and incredibly calm.
Inside the body there was turmoil, many powerful feelings vying for attention, but outside, relatively little was going on.
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13: Instead of feeling trapped in a feedback loop of the kind you sometimes experience when deep in suffering, "I" could think, talk, act as if very little was going on.
It was interesting to note that from this perspective, my self-interest was a lot clearer, but less personal.
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14: While not greatly moved on an emotional level by anything going on, I was very much receiving signals as to what was necessary for me.
This unnerved the person I was with at the time so much that I slipped back into my body just to prove I could... and exploded with rage.
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15: It wasn't that the feelings that had prompted this little act of dissociative rebellion were gone, but rather they were just body-local.
When viewed from inside the body, they were still very much the dominant force in awareness. From outside, not so much.
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16: However, more than being just a simple tool for dissociation, out-of-body awareness had a lot of other strange side-effects.
I became deeply attuned to sensations in my environment. I could pick up those kinds of sounds that people hear without really hearing, for example.
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17: I noticed that, while my own emotional sensations were very low-resolution, other people's visible body language was much more salient.
This caused some unnervingly odd side-effects like feeling like I was reading minds. I could *see* the emotional processing on other faces.
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18: When thoughts and emotions were low-res, a lot of conscious bandwidth seemed to free up naturally for extrabodily processes.
It was as if that information was always there, but simply undigested. Environment - people, sensations, objects - became more vivid as a result.
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19: There are many permutations.
Your legs have a lot to say about your sense of balance, the strength of gravity and many other things you are typically less than aware of.
Your fingers are full of interesting information about texture.
Outside, inside, it's all the same.
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20: Almost all your sense of the limits of awareness is formed by habit.
You can put your awareness *inside someone else's head*, and extract all the information you can possibly process from that location.
(This will cause your mirror neurons to do very weird things, btw.)
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21: I should mention that I stopped doing this for a long while. State-shifting in this way brings out a lot of weird stuff.
I didn't just have intuitions about people's thoughts. Walking past someone in the street would give me a "read" on their energy like a static buzz.
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22: Being in any particular environment would give its own read on what that quality that environment had, on an existential level.
This is often very uncomfortable.
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