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  7. Introduction to the Preparatory Exercises

  The next few chapters contain exercises to prepare you for Levels Two, Three, and Four[*]. If you continue your telekinesis practice beyond Level Four, what you learn through these exercises will be indispensable for you.

  Telekinesis is about subtlety. Gentleness, relaxation and flow are desirable qualities for this process. Straining and forcing will work against you here. Patience wins every time, while rushing leads to failure. This subtlety not only concerns our approach with the techniques, but also how we access and stimulate the mental space and the physical body.

  You may be tempted to pass over these exercises and go directly to Level Two. I recommend you don’t. The exercises are simple to do, and will help you succeeded sooner. Each exercise offered here will empower your progress.

  I will explain the purpose of each preparatory exercise below.

  Energy Follows Attention

  This exercise will help you physically experience the principle that energy flows wherever you place your attention, where you focus. You’ll combine your attention, intention, and breathing to stimulate energetic movement in your body. This experiment uses sensation.

  After doing it several times, you will notice two important things:

  The steadier you hold your attention, the stronger and faster the effect is.

  It always takes time for the effect to accumulate, and for the sensation to build.

  If you remember this when moving the telekinesis object, you’ll understand why it does not immediately respond to your efforts. The steadier your attention and intention are, the sooner the effect will occur.

  The Wall

  Do you know what joy feels like in your mind? Or excitement, anger, and desire? How about feelings of avoidance or comfort?

  How about intention? You know what the word “intention” means, or how it relates to taking action, but what I’m asking here specifically is if you know how intention itself feels?

  The first purpose of this exercise is to become familiar with how intention feels in the mind. The second purpose is to feel the difference between intention and attention.

  You’ve probably never isolated the mental factor of intention in your daily experience before. When you want to get something, you just get it. Want to go somewhere? You just go. It’s an automatic aspect of living in a physical body, and we take it for granted.

  In between an urge to move and its bodily response, there’s a silent impulse coming from what we’ll call your nonconceptual mind, the part of your mind that operates without language or ordinary thoughts.

  For our purposes, intention is better described as a feeling than a thought. The exercise will help you experience what is quite difficult to describe with words here.

  To differentiate between intention, attention and energy, imagine standing inside a strange building at night. The electricity goes out and you are surrounded by darkness. Let’s say that your legs are the mental factor of intention, and since you happen to have a flashlight, the beam of light showing where to go is the factor of attention. The light shines on a doorway, and now your legs know where to take you. Without seeing the doorway, you would remain idle inside of that dark room. What is it that actually propels your legs? Your energy.

  These are the fundamental concepts for this method. Intention, attention, and energy. You will learn to consciously direct your intention and attention toward the object.

  The energy, however, will move on its own. It will respond to your attention and intention in a natural way. Remember the working hypothesis for this method, that energy follows attention.

  The exercise The Wall, will help you draw the subtle strand of intention from the fabric of your mind. Once you’re more familiar with it you’ll be able to invoke it during your training sessions.

  Spoonfuls

  Your will-power is another required mental factor. Meditators rely on it in the moments when boredom, irritation or some other undesirable experience has arisen in their mind. In those moments, they can choose to end their session, get up, and go distract themselves with some other activity. Or, they can choose to stay, to continue on, and persevere. The will is not an emotional thing, though.

  It’s a silent force, similar to intention, which keeps you going in your originally intended direction regardless of any conflicting or distracting ideas that may have arisen. Spoonfuls is a basic exercise to illustrate the use of your will. Like intention, you will be exercising your will during your training sessions.

  While your intention is directed to the object, your will-power will be applied toward your own mind. The will-power’s purpose is to keep you on task and to deflate any urges to end a training session too soon due to boredom, impatience, and discouragement.

  The Refrigerator

  During my own early telekinesis development, I noticed two peculiarities that eventually helped me realize an important interaction between the silent nonconceptual mind and the noisy thinking mind.

  The first one concerned something that would happen the moment I gave up trying to move the object. Sometimes I would spend thirty or forty minutes straight, looking at the object and trying everything I could do to move it. Then, exhausted and frustrated, I would decide to quit for the day. Immediately following that impulse to stop, the object would begin to turn.

  This suggested that I was doing something wrong for 99% of the training session, and in that last second, when I decided to quit, I was finally doing something right.

  The second peculiarity was that I tended to allow any kind of thinking to occur while I was applying my intention and attention toward the object. This included a lot of self-talk and analysis, trying to logically discern what was happening during a session. After failing to stimulate any movement, I would inevitably begin to daydream about completely unrelated topics. This was the natural outcome of boredom.

  The daydreaming started happening more after I began employing the Mind-Stopping Breath while maintaining a good level of bodily relaxation. Relaxing my body also relaxed my mind.

  Sometimes, the object would begin to move after I had shifted into daydreaming. Even though I was daydreaming, I still kept my gaze on the object and applied the silent intention for it to move.

  Since I do not have access to an EEG machine (electroencephalogram), I can’t say for certain if the moment of giving up and the period of daydreaming caused a shift in my brain’s electrical activity. I strongly suspect that was the case, though.

  A dominance of Beta level electrical activity is typical for the ordinary daytime thinking state. Alpha is typical for a relaxed mental state, which includes daydreaming and meditation. Theta also occurs in meditation as well as light sleep, and during energy healing[*].

  I hypothesize that in the brief moment of giving up on the experiment, my mind relaxed in a specific way. This level of relaxation was sufficient to allow the necessary energy to flow in order to influence the object. Also, whenever I allowed my thinking mind to depart into “La La Land,” that also promoted relaxation. I believe that the Alpha and Theta states are optimal for the influence and flow of energy.

  The combination of the special breathing technique and general relaxation with the passage of time will organically cause the prevalence of Alpha and Theta states during a training session.

  I have a second theory regarding the daydreaming effect. Let’s create a mental model for the purpose of this discussion. Imagine that there is a line from you to the object. What part of “you” it originates from is not important for this conversation. Let’s assume that your energy follows this line.

  Let’s add another component to that line - your thinking mind. In this model, both energy and conceptual mind can ride that line from you to the object.

  While you’re directing your attention to the object, simultaneously forming the intention for the object to turn, your energy is trying to follow your attention along that line.

  Imagine that you’re also
having strong thoughts about the object, or about telekinesis, or about yourself while you’re sitting there. Therefore, that noise in your mind is crowding the line. This causes the energy to become diluted, scattered, or otherwise weakened.

  What if when we drift off into a daydream during an experiment, it actually helps to keep the line clear? Like throwing a stick to get a dog to run to a specific part of the yard, daydreaming is like sending our thinking mind somewhere else, far away from the line so that it doesn’t get in the way. Without the noise, that energy flow would be more potent and steady.

  I named this exercise The Refrigerator because the first time I realized the daydreaming effect, I had been wondering what was inside of my refrigerator. I was in the middle of a session, and the object hadn’t moved yet. Distracted and hungry, I visualized the interior of the fridge and scanned my image for food items like cheese and eggs.

  It was in that moment of distraction when the object finally began to turn, as if suddenly released from an invisible restraint.

  Since then, during these sessions when the object remained still for far too long, I would recreate that effect by purposely imagining walking to the fridge, opening the door, and seeing what food items were stored on each shelf. I still kept my attention and intention on the object, however.

  According to our mental model above, this technique allowed the energy to flow better and/or stronger.

  The Mind-Stopping Breath

  As mentioned earlier, we can affect our minds by changing our bodily state. By adopting and modifying breath work from techniques I had learned before, I began to practice what I found to be a reliable method for telekinesis. I had initially used it solely for relaxing the body. Regular practice revealed that different phases of the breath could affect the mind in different ways.

  More interesting, though, was that when I was firmly entrained[*] with an object, the cycle of inhalations, exhalations, and pauses coincided with the clockwise and counter-clockwise movement of the object. Certain phases of the breath could also stop the movement altogether.

  This relationship between the breathing and the direction of movement leads me be to believe that telekinesis is an effect of energy. Consider Yin-Yang theory from the Taoist tradition of China. Yin represents qualities like softness, darkness, downward movement, and the night. Yang represents qualities of hardness, light, upward movement, and daytime.

  In Taoism and Chinese Medical Theory, everything that exists has a yin and yang component. They are natural complements to each other since everything exists through the progression of cycles. Day becomes night, which makes way for the next day. Birth gives way to death, making room for the seeds of new life to sprout. Blood is sent from the heart to the tips of our limbs in an outward, yang movement. Then that deoxygenated blood is returned to the heart by the venous system, a yin movement. As we inhale, we draw in fresh oxygen, yin. On the exhale, we release carbon dioxide, yang.

  Entrained with an object at Level Two and beyond, I inhale, and it turns one direction. I pause, lungs filled to capacity, and my mind flickers for a moment. The object pauses its turn. Then I exhale, and the object turns in the opposite direction. I see this as evidence of the ying-yang nature of breathing and its influence on energy and movement.

  A word of caution, however. The breathing technique does not replace the need for using attention and intention. Since those mental factors are subtle and the breathing is not, it can be easy to ignore the mind’s role and rely solely on breathing in the hopes of success.

  A balance must be struck so that all the key parts of the technique are applied together, leaving none idle. Otherwise you’ll find yourself breathing without success. The resulting stress will tighten your mind into a knot. Your body will respond accordingly. With the relaxation sabotaged, the inevitable tension will block the flow of energy. Don’t overuse the breathing technique.

  8. Exercise: Energy Follows Attention

  Go to a quiet room where no one will disturb you. Any self-consciousness can prevent you from placing your attention on the intended object.

  Sit down, and place your hands wherever they can rest comfortably, for instance in your lap or on your abdomen. Close your hands into soft fists, but choose one index finger and leave it extended.

  You may either look at your finger with your eyes, or close your eyes and simply feel your finger from tip to base.

  Can you feel the very tip of your finger? Take a few moments paying attention only to the very tip of your finger, and feel what the experience is like in that specific location.

  After a few moments, move your focus to the joint closest to your finger nail. What does that section feel like? Again, give it a few moments. Simply pay attention and notice that over time new and stronger sensations arise.

  Now move on to the middle knuckle of your finger, and do the same thing. Are the sensations similar to or different than the sensations in the other parts of your finger?

  Pay attention to your whole finger for a couple of minutes, can you feel its entirety?

  Now I’ll introduce another working hypothesis. Let’s assume that energy is not only inside our body but all around, in the environment that surrounds us. Various traditions believe that this energy can be transported by the air, among other ways. When we inhale, we draw this energy into ourselves. These traditions also teach that the energy can enter directly through the skin, especially if we intend it to. Keeping this in mind, continue the exercise.

  Relax your body exactly where you are sitting. Allow your breath to become slower and fuller. You’ll notice when this is happening by how much your abdomen expands on the inhale. Breathe slowly so that you feel your abdomen stretch out a bit while your lungs fill with air. Then exhale naturally.

  Breathing this way, place your attention back on your finger. On the inhale, imagine that energy is entering your finger through the skin that surrounds it.

  Then, imagine that energy is coming into it through your forearm, wrist and hand, moving into the base of your finger. It’s perfectly acceptable to pretend that this is happening.

  Pretending is a way of visualizing, and it’s also a vehicle for one’s intention.

  As you inhale, pretend or imagine that a cool, white light is touching and passing through the skin and entering your finger. As you exhale, simply relax and continue to feel the sensations in your finger. On the next inhale, imagine this cool, white light coming in to your finger.

  Exhaling, notice the increased sensitivity in your finger. You may even feel a vivid quality, as if your finger has come to life, feeling more refreshed and sparkly.

  You have been paying steady attention to your finger and as a result, ignoring most of the rest of your body and the environment. Perhaps you were able to pay less attention to your thinking as well, while remaining in a feeling state.

  Simply by adding the visualization, the energy came and infused your finger. The new sensations of vividness, presence, and brightness in your finger are hallmarks of fresh energy stimulating the body.

  This concept is easy to experience right away. It is also something that you can improve over time.

  You may also try this exercise by following along with my video guided instructions which you can watch here:

  http://www.defyyourlimitsbook.com/iota.html

  There, you can also listen to a guided meditation to bring energy into your whole body. You might find it relaxing and enjoyable. Doing it once in a while will undoubtedly help you with your telekinesis practice.

  A Brief Note on Healing Potential with this Exercise

  Although I’ll address healing more toward the end of the book, I’d like to mention it here because of its relationship to the principle Energy Follows Attention.

  Do you have an injury to your body, or an area of illness? You can apply the above instructions to draw energy to that body part, thus aiding in healing and in pain reduction[*]. The particular body part may initially feel more sore when you start the practic
e, but know that you are just increasing your awareness of how it really feels.

  This method requires that rather than blocking out a sensation, you open your mind to it. With practice, you’ll notice an increased ability to allow any discomfort to arise, and a lessening of your resistance against it. If you stay with the process, the breath-work and attention will cause a shift in your experience of that pain. In the right circumstances, healing may be accelerated and the pain abated.

  9. Exercise: The Wall