Hi JPG, I’m guessing here, but it looks like you hit the ‘start a new thread’ button rather than the ‘join an existing thread’ button – but what do I know, I can’t figure out how to connect up my Blackberry. In answer to the questions not directed at JG, and if I may: The entire thrust of Castaneda’s ‘stopping the world’ is that you would not only come to your senses – to all of your senses, and sometimes with surprising ‘signal strength’ or intensity - but in that state, you would also have the opportunity to notice other ‘energy systems’ that – for some people – are perceivable. Which perception might be useful, if not entertaining. Such notions as ‘auras’, ‘chakras’, ‘cosmic eggs’ (as in Joseph Chiltern Pearce), and ‘lines of the world’. Some people don’t hold with that stuff, saying it’s self-delusional, wishful thinking, or just superstitious hogwash. Or else, these ‘artifacts’ are present in a person’s subjective awareness, but are the result of some brain abnormality. What does seem to be beyond doubt is that, if you stop all Ad, you do get quite a tidy rise in the energy level of all of the ‘regular’ sense systems. What this also says is that, for a lot of people, talking to themselves all the time has the desired purpose – or else, the unintended result - of keeping a lot of the world at bay. As to the thing about different parts of the visual array moving at different speeds – that is actually what the environment is ‘affording’ you at speed. As far as I know, that is actually ‘unfiltered’ seeing – as Alan Marr said, most of the time, we construct what we see, rather than see it. (You can of course use that combination of sub-modalities to induce an altered state and then lead into a trance, as Bandler used to teach in the late 80s. But it’s utilization of an effect, IMHO, rather than automatically a hypnotic one,) On the smell thing, I can’t help but thinking of Eric Berne’s neat observation that when a person was or is what Berne called ‘out of script’, they really do wake up and smell the coffee. In other words, the sense of smell is one of the first and most noticeable indicators that your constellation of beliefs and endless yama yama have stopped running you. ER. PS. Flip over to the 'other' thread, and see what else is there.