I have a suggestion for a practical exercise. I first tried it as an experiment in (so-called) "balancing" and have since made it a recurring part of my life. It's a bit easier to write it in second person, so here it goes:
Start by forming an overall purpose of eventually making a thorough mental map of your entire physical neighborhood, though you're going to actually start this exercise on a smaller scale. Begin with the room you're in and include the whole house, apartment or whatever, room by room (another possible use of this structure would be for pegging items you need to temporarily rote-memorize). You will probably quickly notice that this activity expands the working memory by loading it up with as much detail of your surroundings as you can hold in mind at one time.
If you begin to feel fidgety or nervous and you are spending more than typical amounts of time in the mind mentally mapping your surroundings, complement the activity by physically interacting with something around you to allow the body a feel for how relatively solid everything is. Touch stuff, dust off a picture or something. When feeling settled a bit, go back to observing stuff and placing mental representations of everything you sense (see, feel, hear, etc) on your map. Don't add anything to your map that's not actually there. Examples would be: random thoughts about what you're doing, how you feel about that dang sofa, how hard this is to do, etc., etc.
Stop any random thought or other imaginary element by simply trying to look directly at the thought as if to see it as clearly as you do the floor. You'll notice that an intent to actually look directly at random thought will cause it to disappear because it's only as real as vapor to begin with. Since any thought or thought loop with any basis in imagination will dissipate under force of direct observation, and since the activity here is all about disciplined, focused observation, this shouldn't be too hard to do. If it is hard to do then notice your aversion to looking directly at the 'offender'.
Keep your attention moving, observing stuff, noticing angles of view and comparing the relationships of one thing to another in your mind with the way they actually exist in the physical world to keep it all together in one picture or mental structure. This reinforcement is like a constant error checking that keeps the working memory stretching.
If you're doing this right, you are controlling your attention to make it mobile and to move, not only back and forth across the boundary of the physical world and the inner mental world, but you're also moving the attention around the domains of each world ("outer" and "inner"). At this point, it's probably obvious that the mental and physical are working together to accomplish an aim, so how is "feeling" involved?
First, I should mention that after the immediate environment has been mapped with one-to-one relationships to what is actually perceivable, the work naturally extends to the yard, or area surrounding the home and eventually the whole neighborhood since that is the originally formed purpose. Also, other than what has already been described, an additional benefit of expanding this mental map in the working memory is the experience of keeping the aim linked to a wider purpose - the eventual goal - and all this takes a controlled expenditure of energy.
After a certain time, as you go along continuing to build your map (and it doesn't have to be done all in one day or even worked on all day long - the keys seem to be actually doing it, accuracy and thoroughness), you will start to notice a 'feeling' building. My take on this is that the sense and feeling of something building comes from the aggregate qualia of individual sensate joining together in a medium (the working memory or the material of the mind), just like what would be happening on the substrate used by organisms forming interconnections in the physical world that we also experience on our particular substrate of reality. At some point, this widening/deepening mental map then begins to feel just as real as the physical environment itself and to have an emotional aspect to it.
If, while the picture expands, the relationships between things that are noticed in reality are deliberately re-created in the mind and allowed to stay intact there will be a noticeable increase of feeling you might think of as 'realness of being' and this may stimulate even deeper emotions.
How I explain this is that by having exercised the juxtapositional faculty thus, the natural inclination will be to automatically compare one's previous condition and abilities with what one is accomplishing now, see that one has actually increased his "ableness" and then move if only temporarily or slightly on the emotional spectrum in the direction of newer emotions - maybe even excitement, enthusiasm, exhilaration or something. All this - the activity involved in making a mental map that is isomorphic to the physical environment and the increasing sense of realness or realness of being - happens simultaneously as a growth of self-reinforcing feed-backs, OSIT. Results of these feed-backs may stimulate, not only a deeper understanding or sense of the reality surrounding us, but, by association, maybe real emotional cognition.
At any rate, I would say that as long as whatever you do is not the habitual or the stereotypical, (G says there is no self-observation without going against habit) this exercise at least should be good for something! :)
