Concentration on nothing

This technique requires you to close your eyes and imagine nothing – just the blackness in front of you. 

By doing this the objective is to suppress any learning [suppression of learning] activity, so you have to focus your attention on ‘nothing’ and not try to think.

The technique has the advantage that it also works via sensory deprivation. Because you have created an unchanging sensory input – blackness - there is no change to the messages coming in from your senses and thus the senses are as deprived as if you stared at nothing.

Simply look through your closed eyes at the blackness ahead of you.

Do nothing more.

After a number of these exercises, you may hallucinate "mind pictures," or light patterns.

According to Robert Monroe these “seem to have no great significance, and may merely be forms of neural discharge. I can remember, for example, attempting to achieve this state after watching a football game on TV for several hours. All I saw were mind pictures of football players tackling, running, passing, etc. It took at least a half hour for the pattern to fade away. These mind pictures are apparently related to your visual concentration in the preceding eight or ten hours. The more intense the concentration, the longer it seems to take to eliminate the impressions”.