Stop Your Distracting Thoughts And Perfect Your Meditative Gaze

I am sharing a video tool, and a proven method that can be used with it, to immediately stop distracting thoughts, while, if you desire, giving you direct feedback so that you can perfect your meditative gaze very quickly.

Stopping distracting thoughts relieves your anxiety, stress, burnout, and overthinking so that your presence and inner peace are enhanced, giving you space for healing and advancing your meditation. The muting of these intrusive thoughts can be an antidote to so much suffering in the world, and in our lives.

How does this work? By using a two-minute video structurally crafted to overwhelm our visual perception, intrusive and distracting thoughts are stopped. As well, the presentation of the video’s images, in response to your gaze, gives you immediate feedback when your attention wanders. It is from this feedback that we can immediately recognize when we are seizing mental and perceptual distractions.

Briefly, your perception of the video changes immediately in response to your focus and concentration, or lack thereof, and in response to your attentional ‘seizing’ of images that your focus unintentionally moves to. These lead to, in order, an apparent jerky succession of images, apparent wave-like flow of images, usually left to right, slight hesitations between images, galloping arrival of images, slight bobbing around of images, slight blurring of images, and finally no motion or blurring at all in a ‘jump-cut’ fashion of presentation of the entire succession of images. A secondary feedback is that you only see some of the images being displayed at first, with that number climbing until you finally have the correct gaze, when you see all of the images uniformly.

The desired gaze is equivalent to that of “sky gazing” in the Tibetan Dzogchen practice of Trekchö. The benefit of this method over the traditional methods is that your limitations do not slow your progress. Combining this with the absence of intrusive thoughts results in the perfection of your gaze linearly with the time you invest.

Basically, what I have done is taken an idea from my doctoral dissertation on “biphasic perception” and applied it to the problem of learning to stop seizing mental phenomena. I felt that if we could facilitate our developing the correct gaze at all times, then we could more easily train our mind. What I didn’t expect is that it would immediately stop our mind from producing these distracting mental phenomena, leaving only our perception active (and only the initial bare ‘immediate experience’). It is an amazing state to be without thoughts. It is like being clear space in which only sense perceptions are present, and a ‘seeing everything clearly,’ without identity, from which your normal meditation can leap forward.

So in early July I asked the subscribers to my website for volunteers to test this video tool (referred to as ‘FSR Images video’). I got 25 responses from around the world, and so we worked together for over three months. Their findings validated my initial idea, and in fact built upon it. Most of the volunteers were established meditators with a range of practices. Two were relative beginners in their twenties, and two were doctors. Almost all of the testers confirmed that the tool’s feedback was helpful in their practice, and were surprised by the responsiveness of its feedback and the way that feedback manifested. Some of them also reported surprising results. Among these were four cases of individuals experiencing a complete removal of ‘brain fog,’ and one volunteer, who disclosed that they had a very traumatic childhood and discovered that emptying their mind by watching the video immediately stopped the trauma from being replayed yet again. One exception to these positive results reported a strong fear that the video tool was potentially harmful, because it defeats our perceptual faculty’s ability to make sense of what we are seeing, so they didn’t test it, and dropped out.

I released an introductory video on YouTube recently. In it, I briefly explain what the tool is, and what watching it can do for the viewer. The last two minutes of that video are the actual FSR Images video which I embedded into the Youtube video, so that people that are curious can try it out immediately.

There is a link in the description of the introductory video on YouTube with which viewers can download the FSR Images video directly. I am including that URL below. Looping the FSR Images video allows you to practice with it for longer periods of time. And doing so, more quickly trains your mind to stop producing invasive and distracting thoughts. Given the structure of the video, it’s 2,880 frames doesn’t feel repetitive even when looping the video, especially given that initially you won’t be seeing all the images. I am giving this freely to everyone that wants to benefit from it, because I believe that it can truly help others, both meditators and non-meditators alike.

My next video will cover the method in full on how to use the visual feedback of the tool to train your gaze. If you want to be notified when new videos are posted, please subscribe to my YouTube channel there. If you want to ask questions, you can do so either on my Youtube channel, or on my website (stilljustjames.com), but you will need an account on either of those.

Best Wishes,

James

Click here to get the link to download the FSR Images video.

Click here to go to my YouTube channel.

Click here for a deeper dive into the process behind this tool.