Hello there- just a thought on where you write: "My head feels like its stuffed with cotton and sounds around me become muffled. "
-I think that is the point where you are near the threshold, so to speak, but sort of looking the other way~ as if turn your attention in a different direction, but staying where/how you are.
So in other words, the dropping through the rings is something you experience from there if you sort in that state let go (as if you had a stick/pencil/pen in your grip and you don’t throw it down, but you just loosen your fingers and it just slips downward)- not a further focusing of your attention, no effort (as already gathered), but a release (falling awake, instead of falling asleep).
-I don’t know how that might be interpreted by someone reading it, just popped in mind as I read the above two notes… I think the dropping through the rings and others parts EA mentions is something that one Experiences, but not something you do (you don’t try and feel dropping, or make it do that… more a landmark of state change).
-so in your post you mention some state aspects but not go after them directly, rather as you develop a state of mind (and of energy-shift) those things occur. <<sort of how one can visualize a color energy and “imagine” a feeling of movement to indirectly access/trigger an Energy-flow, but that is only as a “setup”>>… the Energy-flow, or dropping through the rings, is the thing and it has to be from and in a different state of mind than usual.
(so your sense of id-entity changes, like putting on a different “hat” -but in a big way- and that person, ie that part of you, that persona knows how to… and just shifts that way) If you think of doing that in your usual state of mind and think how do I? -that’s the first trick (the shift is where “from”)
(like how a person can glance and see if a picture hung on the wall is “straight” vs crooked, if flowers are arranged in balanced 'arrangement" or not… if clothes colors and styles match… [just running with examples there- trying to assoc with things that if you 'get it" easy, if not- how could? not try and “learn” just shift mind-set]
“Aspire to be like Mt. Fuji, with such a broad and solid foundation that the strongest earthquake cannot move you, and so tall that the greatest enterprises of common men seem insignificant from your lofty perspective. With your mind as high as Mt Fuji you can see all things clearly. And you can see all the forces that shape events; not just the things happening near to you.”