Meditation: focusing on air temperature

While meditating and practicing breathing, I find it very helpful to visualize the dynamics between the hot air and cold air traveling up and down my nostrils while inhaling and exhaling through my nostrils as a bow and arrow (like below). The bottom of the quiver is where the hot air hits the top of my lip (if I curl my top lip just so). The arrow is pointed at the top of my nose. The top of the bow is where the air is traveling in and out of the skull (the cavity in the nose). I find that if I can't visualize the bow and arrow then I'm not focused on the temperature of the air traveling through my nose air passages.

Ultimately I seek to get to the point in my meditation where I don't need the 'bow and arrow' visual. But when I first sit down, I find air temperature to be a helpful way to orient my mind.




I find that there is a calculus of time. By narrowing our consciousness on every one of the finest breaths of air traveling through the cavity inside our nose we can heighten our awareness of the present. By eliminating any thought or visualization of the the process of awareness of the physical sensation of breath we become more and more acutely tuned to the sensation at that moment. So in that way, there seems to be almost a calculus of time.
So visualize the inner-most concentric circle as the acute present. And then there are concentric circles that keep increasing. This is the greater present. The more we go into the outer concentric circles, the more it represents the past and the future. Through the process of focusing on the breath and only on the sensation of breath, we gradually filter out all thought or visualization that is not breath. So the process of focusing on the air passing through the cavity inside our nose becomes a filter that doesn't allow any thing else in that fine line of present time. This is the way to fine tune consciousness for active precision experiments.
In many ways, the goal is to stay so focused of the position and momentum of the air traveling through the nose so that there is no uncertainty about what both are at every moment. By making your awareness sharper and sharper you can take smaller and smaller measurements in time of the nature of the breath traveling through the cavity of the nose. At every moment you are aware of the texture and nature of the breath traveling through your nasal cavity. This is what you are seeking to measure so that there is no question of uncertainty. By finely tuning your awareness with your state of sensations of the body, you make your awareness into a precision device. Then you can tune into the finest sensations.
Most material experiments don't need such a precise grasp of time where you need to fine tune the present. That is because they are not trying to measure something as fine as consciousness and mind. 

An experiment is only as good as your tool of measurement. So the first job in doing this experiment is to fine tune the tool of measurement: awareness.
The more the awareness is fine tuned to the smallest sensations, the sharper awareness gets. And the sharper it gets, the more subtle sensations it can grasp and be aware of. The subtlest of sensations is the mind and consciousness. The goal is to ultimately make your awareness fine enough so that it can study the nature of mind and consciousness.
So simply by moving from being aware of the grossest of physical sensations in the body and by finely tuning the mind to do that by practicing over and over again, you start to be aware of sensations that are subtler than that.

So this is the nature of the experiment.