> This experience can be perceived as the "normal" mind turning off and another mind awakening. This "other mind" does not think serially with words. Instead, it thinks dimensionally, with mental sensations of pure meanings.
An important note is that it is, imo, not the case that the "conscious mind" shuts off and an "unconscious mind" begins operating; rather, the unconscious mind is always the one doing the work, and the conscious overlay is more akin to a debugger pausing, stepping and querying its operation.
A good exercise for verbal thinkers that I've found, is to try and think a thought out loud, then interrupt yourself before actually mentally verbalizing it, but still keep the thought at the forefront of your mind. This allows you to examine the "pre-verbal form" of the thought.
edit: I've also found that a good way to get rid of intrusive visual thoughts is to do the opposite of their planar deconcentration exercise, basically embedding my observing perspective completely in my vision, leaving no "space" for imagination.
edit: POSSIBLY IMPORTANT INSIGHT that I've just had. Why is there a sense of "I exist/I have control" to begin with? Well, with our imagination, we can move our center of perception somewhere or sometime else. When we do that, the center of our perception diverges from our actual current body. In this state, consciousness cannot command actions at the point of perception, so there has to be a sense of "I do not exist here/I cannot perform actions here", in order to differentiate the state of imagining a fictional center of attention from living in the moment. That sense is precisely the quale of existence.