Hand exercise for self inquiry - Absurd first report

[billiesimon]

Leo suggests in some videos to look at your hand for an entire session of self-inquiry/meditation, and see what insights you can get.

Yesterday I tried it, and I intend to keep doing it for some weeks. 

This is what happened:

- I did a 45 minutes session, without a break. Only some small blinking to refresh the eyes.

- At first it felt very stupid. "This is my hand, wtf am I doing?"

- Then thoughts almost disappeared and my hand became clearer and more "as it is", less conceptual.

- Around half of the session, the hand started to feel alien to me. Like some kind of space creature's hand, a humanoid hand.

- Then the shape of my hand started slightly shifting, and it became somehow skewed and crooked, like the bones were almost injured. The hand was still alien, and now the alien sensation increased.

- This is where I freaked out: the hand started to become partially psychedelic! The flesh started pulsating, and the patterns of the skin started to move in rythm like when you are influenced by LSD. 

- In the last psychedelic stage (again, I was completely sober) the outline of my hand gained this dark blue neon aura... and the aura was somehow melted with the floor under the hand. The inside of the hand was still psychedelic. Then the neon aura started to pulsate and spread inside the hand itself, intermittently, like a christmas light, the inside of the hand was one moment made of psychedelic skin, then made of neon blue light and so on and so forth.

 

At some point I freaked out and squeezed my eyes to check if it was just an illusion. Reopening my eyes, there were still some traces of psychedelia, but the hand was returned to the alien-humanoid appearance, no more trippy effects.

After some minutes, the concentration somehow disappeared and the hand reverted back to human, just not my hand.

As soon as I thought "ok, that's enough, it's 45 minutes", the hand returned to look exactly like MY HAND, and that's it.

 

 

So... what I don't understand is....
Is this just a distortion of the mechanics of my eyes/brain? Maybe due to the fatigue of looking intensely and with concentration at the same object?

Or does it have metaphysical meaning?

I can't really tell..... 

[CultivateLove]

Did you get any insights?

[billiesimon]

10 minutes ago, CultivateLove said:

Did you get any insights?

Not intellectual ones. I mean, I was just shocked. What I realized was just that I never really perceived the hand, but only conceptualized it all my life. And even if I look at it right now, it seems actually different from how it's always been in the past. There's less concept about the hand, and more marvel at its "weird" shape.

[billiesimon]

UPDATE >>> Session 2 and 3

2nd session 

No particular insights, just a slight sense of alien-hand, and a lot of monkey mind noise about "this is my hand, what the heck are you contemplating about?".

3rd session - HOLY F*CK!!

OH MY GOD, if this insight is true... it means that a huge chunk of reality is a HUGE misconception!

I don't know if it is true but... it seems to point to a very important insight.

>>>> After 30 minutes of looking at my hand in movement (i was constantly moving it to see its shapes and forms)...

I realized that I can't actually see the back of my hand!!!! I mean... you ALWAYS see the front appearance of an object!!!!

"What are you talking about? You can turn your hand and see the back , or the inside, if you are looking at the back" 
That was the logical voice in my head.

NO!!! You always look at some perfectly painted picture where the images are CONCEPTUALIZED to be the front/back side!!! 

 

Kids DON'T see the back of the hand when it's on the front, and to them the back doesn't exist until it shows up.

But.... the back and the front are just LABELS!!!!! OH MY GOD!!!! We have labeled some many aspects of the objects around us that we THINK that reality has a back side!!! 

At least from what I have felt in this session... there seems to be NO BACK SIDE to reality!!! 

What you see is what IS. 

I'm still not sure if this is right but... I've noticed that when the hands move, they are just shapeshifting, and we are just taught at school that they do not shapeshift, but they just turn around to the back.

WHAT IF they ACTUALLY shapeshift on a screen?!?!??! 

 

Let me know what you think about it... but I'm actually puzzled by this semi-insight.

[mandyjw]

@billiesimon Woah. That's pretty cool. So many beliefs we hold without knowing, right?  What if you've never actually moved but everything around you appears to have when you're "moving"? 

[zeroISinfinity]

38 minutes ago, mandyjw said:

@billiesimon   What if you've never actually moved but everything around you appears to have when you're "moving"? 

Well maybe  that's true. 

@billiesimon❤️

[Aaron p]

I love the look at your hand technique. 

[billiesimon]

1 hour ago, mandyjw said:

@billiesimon Woah. That's pretty cool. So many beliefs we hold without knowing, right?  What if you've never actually moved but everything around you appears to have when you're "moving"? 

I'm still shocked at how FAST these insights came in.

I'm still new to self inquiry, while with meditation I have more than a year of exp.

 

That possibility is open to me.... I need to inquire all 5 senses and then emotions and thoughts.

Then I'll move to my existence. My end goal is finding where I am, what I'm made of.

[billiesimon]

I have started a Self Inquiry journal here:

I will explore more of the Hand Technique and more of the different variations of Self Inquiry, to exit the matrix of ego