I think LeeAnn's example is a good one.

As for what happens at those points, all those things you've mentioned happen. But, in my experience, you do not always sense something happening. It depends on your previous thoughts on the topic (allowing or resisting), how much energy you have previously flowed towards the thought, how sensitive you are to your emotions, your mood in the moment and probably many other factors.

I can sometimes sense a slight lifting if I have resistance to a topic and I, say, cross the 68 second mark. But I've been doing this for years now and have become rather sensitive to these tiny emotional signs. I'm not sure if someone new to this approach would sense much at those combustion points.

One thing I used to do (probably about a decade ago), and which I think a lot of people do when they first discover this idea, is to sit with a stopwatch or timer and try to reach 17, 34, 51, 68 seconds on a particular thought.

But, over a period of time, I found it was actually causing more resistance to do this because you were continually breaking away from the thought to see if the time had expired yet. Even if you have some kind of alarm or timer, the same effect still happens when it goes off. Very early approaches to what eventually became my manifesting spreadsheet had things like timers and time tracking.

But I have found over time that it is much better to just get purely into a topic and just stay there as long as it feels good even if that means as little as 17 seconds (or less) or as long as many minutes.

I have some random features built into the spreadsheet so that as soon as I can feel I've gone far enough with a particular thought and my vibration feels like it is about to dip or contradict, I hit a button and get randomly taken to another topic.

Because your vibration on any topic is always where you last leave it, it locks in the progress on that thought by immediately distracting me with another one.

You could think of it as being a similar concept to cut your losses short, and let your profits run if you do any stockmarket trading.

This quick dancing around from subject to subject to keep your vibrational level up lies behind Abraham's Virtual Reality process in Ask & It Is Given. And, if I remember correctly, I think this is what gave me the idea to implement the random features in the spreadsheet approach.

I believe they mean a thought without a contradictory tail-ending to it, such as thinking:

"I really want and can achieve a university master's degree. How wonderful. Doors will open for me and it will be an achievement"

Instead of:

"I really want and can achieve a university master's degree. How wonderful. Doors will open for me and it will be an achievement" BUT "I don't know if I can afford it, and I probably don't have the time. And no one in my family has ever gotten a master's degree. And maybe I don't need it......."

I find that what I used to do for focus building was to pick an object and stare at it for 5 minutes without distraction. If random thoughts pop up you release them and return back to the object, you do this until 5 minutes are up. This could be a candle if you wish.

This is a good exercise, you need to start out small 5 minutes, then you can go to 10 and 15 unil you can go for an hour without distraction.

When you can do this, holding an non-distracted thought becomes much easier.

An uncontradicted thought is a thought free from doubt/unbelief (pure). This can be a positive or negative thought.

At the combustion points the thought is growing and evolving with clarity. I'll give you an example of a thought I had recently, I was thinking of writing a book which grew in to, writing a book and having an audio of the book with it which grew in to, writing a book, having an audio of the book with it and producing a study course with it.

Hope this helps.