Nonlocal Attention Under the Occlusion Hypothesis

Why this note exists

Counterplane Awakening has collected practice logs for longer than it has had any settled idea of what those logs are evidence for. This note is an attempt to fix the question before the material grows any further, so that later readers can judge whether we were asking something answerable.

The Bilateral Consciousness Project holds participant accounts as testimony. Testimony records what a person reports having experienced and when they reported it. It does not, on its own, establish what caused the experience, and the project has no instrument that would settle that question. Everything below is written on that footing.

The occlusion hypothesis as we use it

Published Meridian material describes a boundary region where instruments degrade, return inconsistent readings, or fail outright. We use the phrase occlusion hypothesis narrowly, for the proposition that this degradation is a property of the boundary rather than a series of unrelated equipment faults. That proposition belongs to the institute's own literature and is contested within it.

Our use of the term is looser than the institute's and should not be read back into it. We are not competent to assess instrumentation at the boundary, we hold no data of our own on it, and nothing in this note should be taken as an institute finding, an institute review, or institute endorsement of the project.

The question we are actually asking

The project's central question can be put in one sentence, and it is deliberately weaker than the sentence people tend to hear.

Three things follow from that phrasing. Stability is the object of study, not truth: we are asking whether reports hold their shape across sittings, pairs and months. Comparison is the method: a single vivid account tells us nothing that a run of ordinary accounts cannot tell us better. Disconfirmation has to be possible, which is why section five exists and why it was drafted before the trials were run.

The question is also bounded by the practice it studies. Counterplane Awakening works through devotional practice, bilateral attention and threshold sittings, and this note covers nothing else. Members occasionally ask whether the project intends to extend its recording to the practices associated with Second Sky. It does not, and requests to that effect are declined at the note desk.

A deliberately modest recording method

The method below is smaller than the phenomenon people believe they are reporting. That is intentional. A modest protocol produces a record that survives disagreement, and the project would rather hold a thin record it can defend than a rich one it cannot.

1. Fixed conditions. Same room, same seat, same hour where a participant's life allows it. Sittings run to a set length and stop on a timer rather than on a feeling of completion.
2. Blind first logging. The first pass is written alone, before any conversation with a partner, facilitator or circle. Paired logs are sealed until both are in.
3. Description before interpretation. The first pass records sensation, imagery, duration and interruptions only. Interpretation is written afterwards, in a separate field, and is filed as interpretation.
4. Fixed prompts. The same four prompts every night, in the same order, so that the shape of the log is not set by how notable the sitting felt.
5. Null and decoy nights. A proportion of nights are logged without a sitting, and a proportion of paired nights are unpaired without the participants being told. Both are filed identically.
6. Failed sittings retained. Sittings that produce nothing, sittings abandoned early and sittings a participant later disowns are kept in the record with the reason attached.
7. No editing after filing. Corrections are appended and dated. The original wording stays legible underneath.

The method's weakest point is that we cannot blind participants to the practice itself. A person knows whether they have sat. Expectation therefore runs through every log we hold, and no arrangement available to us removes it.

What would count against the hypothesis

The following observations would tell us that the question in section three has been answered in the negative, or that it was badly formed. They were written down before the current trials began, and the project is committed to reporting them if they arrive.

• Recurrence in practice logs runs no higher than recurrence in matched logs from null nights, once both are scored blind.
• Convergence between paired observers is predicted by shared briefing vocabulary, shared reading or prior conversation, rather than by the sittings themselves.
• Recurring motifs can be traced to circulated material, facilitator phrasing or forum threads that the participant read before the imagery first appeared.
• Convergence disappears when pairs are separated, blinded to each other's schedule, or given decoy nights, and returns when they are not.
• Scorers who do not know which logs are practice logs cannot sort them above chance.
• Participants who expect a given motif report it at higher rates than participants who have not encountered it, with practice held constant.
• Failed and null sittings turn out to have been filed at a lower rate than successful ones, which would mean the record has been shaped by what felt worth keeping.
• The apparent stability of the record depends on a small number of prolific loggers, and dissolves when their material is set aside.

Several of these tests have been run only partially, and two of them have produced results that are uncomfortable for the project. Those results are recorded in the field memo on paired observer drift rather than softened here.

Weaknesses we already know about

Our sample is self-selected, small, and drawn from people who already believe something is there. Participants talk to each other constantly, on the forum and at retreats, and no protocol we can enforce prevents that. Scoring of imagery involves judgement, and the people making those judgements are not naive to the project's hopes.

There is also a subtler problem. The project's own vocabulary is now widespread enough among participants that it may be supplying the categories people report in. A motif that recurs because everyone has the same word for it is a fact about the word.

Claims this note declines to make

This note stays with the question of whether reports can hold a stable shape across sittings, pairs and time. It offers no account of contact, transmission or perception at a distance, and it leaves the cause of recurrence open to the competing readings held elsewhere in the file.

It also makes no claim on behalf of anyone else. The Meridian Boundary Institute has not reviewed the project's methods or findings, and the project holds no standing with it. Where our participants use institute terminology, they are readers of published material and nothing more.

Status and handling

Note 02 remains in internal review. It has been through four drafts, two of which were rejected by project readers for stating the central question more strongly than the record supports. The present formulation is the weakest one the project has been able to agree on.

Readers who want to test the note against material should begin with the field memo on paired observer drift, which reports the convergence and drift patterns that this question was written to describe, and then read the protocol review, which argues against the project's own most contested position.