Concentration Practice - Staredown

[Infinite Tsukuyomi]

Here I'm sharing some observations from my modified meditation retreat just over a month ago. The challenge itself was 7 days of 6-8 hours of: meditation, do nothing, self-inquiry, breathwork and concentration. On day 3, I sat down to focus on this statue of a duck. I set a timer for one hour and began the stare down.

-I counted 48 distractions in just the first 10-20 minutes then I stopped counting, this isn't including everything that I didn't notice

-About 30 minutes in, the background would briefly get grainy then resolve and repeat for a few minutes

-The statue appeared to me to become different things: an astronaut, a rabid monkey, an old man and some others I can't remember now.

-About 40 minutes in, the statue was sharp and everything else was noise. If I got distracted I could get back to that resolution in a couple seconds

-The last 20 minutes was just more changes in the statue visually and the contrast from the background. At one point a squirrel ran between us and was in high definition

I am excited to continue using statues, myself in the mirror or anything with eyes for an external concentration practice to supplement meditation. Prior to this (same day), I had meditated for two hours. All in all, it was definitely hard to pull off this modified meditation retreat but it caused all the things I was going for: boredom, frustration, some peace, various pain from sitting. I even wrote in my journal at the end of day 7 how horrible it was. After journaling, I decided to dance to undo my frustration. I was in a giving up mood, and decided to just surrender to the music. I thought "Just become a puppet I don't even care", and sure enough the annihilation sequence began about 5 minutes in, and I started to fade away into the primordial chaos I experienced on 5-MeO. Man, I forgot how terrifying it was, but I knew better than to resist. It was a brief glimpse back into Infinity. I got what I wanted but I want to stay with it longer. 

So grueling work followed by surrender in dance seem to be a recipe for Awakening for me. It might only now be possible BECAUSE of 5-MeO having shown me what was actually going here. Have yet to recreate it again, but I haven't done that much consciousness work since either.