Watching → Hearing
To go from watching something to hearing another thing (for example) watching has to stop and hearing to begin. For hearing to begin, hearing must arise at the ear, giving rise to ear-consciousness, and so on. This means there is a gap before ear consciousness has fully arisen (or at least before contact has fully arisen), after watching has ended. This is what I call the gap (or ‘mind the gap’ perhaps?).
Watching [stop]. sound+ear → Ear consciousness --[experiencing of the sound in non-samadhi state of mind].
Practically this is done in the following manner:
The meditator starts being mindful in the following manner, observing sensory stimuli from all directions:
sounds – sights – sensations – smells etc. one after the next/ only one at a time. Its important not to get caught up with just one stimuli- this will lead into samatha meditation, and samatha meditators habitually do this. They need to shake it off and let mindfulness pick up stimuli naturally. Naturally the mind does this, without any mindfulness. Mindfulness slows down this natural process and allows us to see the details within. It stops this process at contact level with ‘bare awareness’, not letting us get caught up in too many feelings, identifications and fabrications- that would make us loose mindfulness.
With some skill with letting the mindfulness ‘drift’ with the flow of stimuli it starts seeing another phenomenon:
sounds – movement of focus–> sight. movements of focus–>sensation. movement of focus–> sound etc.
This is contact. vinnana fusing with sense base–> contact. fusing with sense base–>contact. etc
At the next level (but much harder) it is possible to see another layer of experience:
Visual stimuli–>movement of focus–>seeing. Sound stimuli–>movement of focus–>hearing. Skin stimuli–> movement of focus–> skin sensation
this is rupa x2 (stimuli+sense base) → specific consciousness–> specific contact.
However even seeing the vinnana level is adequate to make progress in the meditation as it shows the basic pattern of any of these steps.
with metta