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.
Conversation
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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