Kirsle.net
One of the many things I get really interested in is the nature of "reality" or at least the conscious parts of it (e.g. my perception of reality). The mind is such a curious and powerful thing -- like how none of us has ever actually 'seen' Objective Reality, because our brains are trapped in our dark skulls and all we really get are electrical signals sent by our eyes and other sensors. The brain then makes up all the stuff you see and call reality: a multimedia simulation based on what your brain thinks is going on out there in the world. We've all heard questions like "is my green, your red?" and how you'll never know for sure what somebody else sees in their reality.
In recent years I have been getting into meditation and really paying attention, really studying the way my mind works and I have found a few interesting things that I haven't seen talked about much online. I am currently suspicious that there is a connection between lucid dreaming, closed-eye visuals during wakeful consciousness, and the place in between the two: psychedelic visuals, which you can apparently just meditate your way into seeing, no entheogens required.
Let's start with the easy one. When I close my eyes and look into the darkness of my eyelids, I frequently will see some shapes and colors. From what I've heard from other people, this seems fairly common - you might see these too.
My regular closed-eye visuals tend to just be vague, formless blobs of color, maybe a blue blob here and a green one there. All kind of meandering around on their own, but very low resolution. Maybe they might vaguely form a face or some recognizable shape, but just loosely -- like seeing shapes in the clouds -- nothing very exciting.
But spoiler alert: they can get much more exciting.
One night, I woke up from dreaming at maybe 3:00 in the morning (who knows), to get up and use the bathroom as one does. When I got back in bed I closed my eyes and I decided to look for my closed eye visuals (often if I'm not deliberately trying to see them, they go unnoticed by me and I think I just "see" blackness with my eyes closed).
I was expecting to see the usual amorphous blobs, but what I instead saw blew me away: my closed eye visuals (henceforth called CEVs) were breathtakingly sharp, vivid, colorful and crisp. I was seeing a colleidoscope of random images flashing before my eyes. It reminded me a lot of the Marvel movie opening logo. But every image I saw was just so crystal clear, with sharp lines and edges and vivid colors -- a far cry from the usual vague shapes my CEVs take on during the daytime.
I attribute this to the fact I had woken up from dreaming (REM sleep) and my brain was still close to that dream state. I have a suspicion that CEVs have a whole spectrum of forms they take: the vague blobbies is on one end of the spectrum, and full-color life-like hallucinations that we call "dreams" are at the opposite end.
And in between those two poles are other states that some people are familiar with.
A couple of years ago, quite by accident, I managed to meditate my way into seeing psychedelic visuals over top of reality. And you can probably learn to do this, too. I will save you the long story (I had written about it before if curious) and cut straight to the chase -- here is how I've been able to consistently pull this off on command.
The trick is to just lock your eyes onto as fine a point as you can manage, and resist the urge to twitch your eyes even as your vision begins to play tricks on you. Many of you have probably experienced this much already: you know if you stare at a thing for too long, your vision plays tricks and things start disappearing or acting weird because of the sensory satiation, and darting your eyes will "reset" your vision to normal. But try and resist the urge to dart your eyes and just let your visuals do what they shall.
What happens next for me is: I will begin to see my closed eye visuals project themselves over top of reality, with my eyes open. The blobby, amorphous shapes I see with my eyes closed appear while they're open. But then my CEVs will begin to "play off of" or interact with my reality: where the border of one of the blobs touched a ridge on my ceiling that I was staring at, the ridge would wiggle or bounce back, as if my CEVs are interacting with it.
These visuals slowly ramp up and I'll begin seeing geometric patterns, fractals, lots of colors, and as these fractals interact with the scene I am staring at, they get everything to start wiggling and dancing. It can take me about 30 minutes into my meditation before I am seeing fully, 100% authentic, height of the strongest acid or mushroom trip I'd ever been on, visuals projected out onto whatever I was staring at during my meditation.
And when I've decided I had enough: I just look somewhere else and snap! everything is back in its place, in much the same way that darting your eyes during the earliest part of all of that "resets" your vision to normal.
Tell me if this sounds familiar: when I was a kid I would sometimes be woken up from a really good dream and wished I could have stayed in my dream a little bit longer to see how it ended. I could try and "make up" the ending myself, daydream how I think it might have gone, but it never felt right -- when you're in a dream, it's like your subconscious is telling you a story, and you can't quite predict what's going to come next. There's something magical about dreams that when I try and make up the ending myself, it doesn't come out right.
Well -- and I don't know exactly when this started, but it was in recent months at least -- I have somehow gained the ability to let my imagination wander freely and I can actually let my dreams finish themselves out, autonomously, after I wake up and I'll be fully aware I'm awake (and feel my body in bed, be able to hear my surroundings) but still visually see and hear the dream at the same time.
I attribute this to my practice with meditation -- I don't know of concrete steps that someone could try (not like my previous section) but I suspect the ability to "let go" of your mind, or to just watch it and not mess with it, was a feature here. I'll give you an example of what I mean.
A couple years ago I was reading some of Carl Jung and he talked about "active imagination" where he was able to visualize a scene in his head with characters in it, and then set his imagination free, and he could interrogate the characters and ask them questions and he would get responses from them that he couldn't predict (in very much the same way as dream characters). It's different to regular conscious daydreaming where you are controlling the dialogue of all the characters. It's more like when you are dreaming, and your dream characters talk to you and you can't quite predict what they're going to say because it's a different part of your mind that controls them: your subconscious.
After reading this I was trying, and failing, to do active imagination myself. I could set up the scene, and ask my characters a question, but I always felt like it was I who was dictating their responses -- I was just daydreaming consciously with myself. I haven't yet tried active imagination again, but this ability to let my subconscious wander and finish my dreams out seems to be very close to what I was thinking here.
There's already a lot of literature out there about lucid dreaming so I won't go too deep here.
Lucid dreaming is basically when you become aware that you're dreaming. You may be having some crazy dream about something nonsensical happening and have the epiphany: "oh shit, this is a dream!" and you can have a lot of fun with it. You can decide to change anything you want about the dream, or fly through the air like Superman, or summon specific dream characters that you want to talk to. I've had a good handful of lucid dreams in my life, but never very consistently. In many cases I'll realize I'm dreaming, and then just let my dream tell its story without meddling with it too much. I've found that if I meddle too much, my dream "gives up" on its story and just gives me all the controls, and it becomes a little bit less fun for me. I have "god mode" control but much less of the dream is unpredictable or surprising then (though my dream characters are still unpredictable in what they say).
From talking to my dream characters and asking them deep and personal questions about myself, and getting surprising answers back from them, I am suspicious that talking to a dream character is the same as talking directly to my inner subconscious, in plain English.
Just thought I'd jot down some of my latest findings. I have told some friends about these and some of them have experienced similar things, if not to the same extent I have yet. I hope this may have sparked your curiosity and if others may be able to reproduce some of my findings themselves.
I have more posts like this on my #42 blog tag where I write about life, the universe, and everything. It's a lot of stuff about consciousness and occasionally spiritual stuff (the two have many likes alike, and all the characters and archetypes that Jung says are in our consciousness have mirrors in religious figures from all cultures which I also find very fascinating!)
Among my many diverse interests, one thing that fascinates me is to contemplate the nature of the universe and what Reality is made of, or at least, what my perception of Reality is made of and how the inner mind works.
To that end, topics such as quantum physics, simulation theory, and esoteric writings from the world's oldest religions like Hinduism and Gnosticism are interesting to me, and I like to talk crazy about that sort of thing from time to time.
In this post, though, I'm going to write strictly about visual perceptions that I've experienced at different times in my life. Many are related to psychotropic compounds, including cannabis, but now I'm able to experience some crazy things just by meditating while sober too.
The other day, quite by accident, I learned how to enter a fully "tripping balls" state of mind, while completely sober, purely by meditating and staring blankly out into space.
All I was trying to do was meditate, and keep my mind shushed and quiet, for as long as I could manage to, and push to set a new personal record for myself. I'd been practicing meditation for a couple of years, since my spiritual awakening in 2018. So I was just focused on keeping my mind still, but kept my eyes open, and was staring blankly out at the walls of my apartment, which had a complex surface to them.
Complex surface? By this I mean, my walls had a sort of "sprayed on" finish to them, similar to ceilings in many homes, so instead of a smooth finish or tiles or w/e, the wall is 'chaotic' and messy, with ridges and dents and lines and complexity. Any complex surface will do.
So I was just staring, focused on a single point on the wall, mind still, and I kept this up even while my visual perception began to fall apart (as it does due to the sensory tolerance of staring at the same image for so long -- this much I knew would happen even from my early childhood when I'd zone out and daydream while staring at trees or things). It is a bit hard to pull off, I get a strong urge to blink or move my eyes when my perception begins to fall apart, but with some practice you can power through this part.
What happened next is where it started to get interesting.
You know those "closed eye" visuals you get when your eyes are shut? Random colors and blobby shapes and so on. Well, I began to see these same sorts of visuals while my eyes were open. They were overlaid on top of the image of the wall I was staring at. Only then, instead of the colorful blobs doing their own thing, they started to "play off of" the patterns on the wall; they'd cling to the ridges and edges, and make the details on the wall begin to wiggle a bit, interacting with it instead of the blobs simply doing their own (usual) thing over top.
Eventually from the colored visuals emerged some fractal-like patterns, and before too much longer, the visuals came to reach full-on 'tripping balls' territory, like the peak of a psychedelic trip on mushrooms or similar. Rainbow colors washing over the wall, every little detail is wiggling and dancing around, fractal patterns, and even these tiny details I didn't even notice were there emerged and those were wiggling and moving around too. If you've dabbled in psychedelics, you know what I'm talking about, only no such substances were necessary: I meditated my way into seeing this stuff. I didn't even expect this was possible!
And as soon as I'd look away? Gone. Back to normal, nothing wiggling around anymore, Reality is back in its place.
Now, the first time I pulled this off, I had smoked a single hit of cannabis, as I do many days of the week (it's legal for adults in Oregon). But when I pulled this off, nothing about the experience felt related to the weed in particular, and that I should be able to do this while completely sober, and can bring on these visualizations at will any time I choose.
The next day I tested exactly this: no weed, no nothing, just laid on my bed and stared at my ceiling while meditating and waited for the visuals to come on.
Try it yourself, I'm curious if others can turn up the same results.
- Meditate, trying to keep your mind quiet, turn off noisy chatter. This may take some practice. If you're a beginner, just meditate by focusing on your breath, and breathe in and out; don't control your breath, just watch it, and if your mind wanders, and you realize you've wandered, just come back to your breath and keep trying, don't beat yourself up for it.
- Do this while staring at a fixed point in the room, preferably on a complex surface. Don't blink or look away even while your visuals begin to do weird things; power through it.
- Don't focus on seeing trippy visuals as a goal; when I thought too much about seeing visuals, they wouldn't come on, I'd have to just focus on keeping my mind quiet, and the visuals happen naturally.
While I was "meditation tripping," I thought to myself, "is this what people mean when they talk about 'flashbacks' where you get psychedelic visuals later in life after you've used these substances once before?" -- it fully, 100% looked like height-of-the-trip visuals. But, they were completely under control, in that I willed myself into it, and they were gone like *snap* as soon as I looked away.
The visuals were always my favorite part of psychedelics, anyway, and I can do without the "ego death" and the "impressionable mind" aspects of a trip. As I continue my meditation practice, now I know how I can give myself a laser light show to watch while at the same time extending my tolerance for keeping my mind still and quieted.
This story is related to the above which will become clear after a while.
So, I'd been using cannabis since about 2016 and all was normal and fine for a while, but in the last couple of years especially, very often after I'd smoke I would start to see a sort of "hexogonal pattern" emerge over my view of Reality.
It was like a 2D honeycomb texture overlaid on top of all the 3D things I was seeing in my space; sort of like the pixels you see if you look really closely at a computer screen. Or like, it was as though 3D reality was actually a projection onto a flat 2D surface and that this hexogonal honeycomb pattern were the "pixels" that make Reality function.
They were especially noticeable when I'd look at a bright white computer screen, like the background of most web pages, because the solid white color removes all visual distraction and I could see the honeycomb pattern the most clearly.
I can't really say what color the hexagon pattern is, as the whole thing seems to flash colors like red and blue, like TV static, but the static is structured and organized into a clear pattern.
If I was reading some text on my screen, the letters would wiggle and interact with the hexagons where the letter touched a border between two cells. It's pretty reliable for me to see this pattern pretty much any time I smoke weed now.
One of the first times I noticed this pattern, I was curious about it and tried to focus and see it more clearly and figure out what it was. I was staring at my white computer screen as it was the easiest to distinguish the pattern on, and as I focused on it, it was like the veil of Reality began to disintegrate and fall apart, like "holes" appeared in my monitor and I could see "through" reality to get a better look at what was behind it.
What I began to see, though, frightened me and I stopped. I had seen it, in all its terrifying glory, once before in my life - story below.
How it relates to meditating myself into tripping? The earlier parts of the visuals I was seeing started out much the same as this hexogonal pattern, before it changed and became fractals and making the wall dance around. I feel the two are the same phenomenon in different forms.
So, going all the way back to my very first time smoking weed, in 2013 or 2014 or so. I tried it the first time, and I fully tripped balls and left reality all together, with full-visual hallucinations and I was gone from Earth.
This is not a usual reaction people have to weed. I haven't tried DMT or other hard psychedelics like that, but this story is the closest I've come to something similar.
This guy I was seeing at the time got me to try weed, and he had just a small bong (water pipe) and I took a few hits, wasn't really feeling much yet from it. But then his friend comes over, and he brings this huge bong, one of the 2-foot tall kinds and they had ice cubes in it and everything, and we started passing that around.
I didn't even take a full drag off this thing, I just cleared the smoke in it left by the other guy. Instantly I felt nauseous, and then after that, I was just gone.
What I was seeing in front of my eyes was an infinite 3D grid of colorful spheres, tiled out as far as I could see. I didn't have a body. I could see, but I couldn't move my "head", my vision was locked and staring at this grid of spheres. I could feel my eyes and knew the difference between opening and closing them, but it didn't matter, I was seeing these spheres all the same whether my eyes were opened or not. The real world was just gone, I was in this place now.
I immediately got some crazy ideas in my head, like: the simulation has ended, the Earth has been destroyed, and what I was seeing now were a bunch of other simulations, each sphere being its own separate universe. And that the people who were running these simulations were now studying the end results of ours that had just ended.
Occasionally I'd see a "screen" appear, a window where I could look through and see the real world, and I saw my friends looking in at me and asking "Are you okay? Do you need some water?", again and again on a loop. I interpreted this to be like video clips being pulled from the simulation for study by whoever it is that was running the simulation; that it wasn't "real" anymore, just a video clip, and it was repetitive with my friends asking me over and over again.
I could not speak out loud.
I could think to myself, and I could hear my thoughts just fine, but I just could not talk out loud. At least not on purpose. Occasionally I would manage to say something, and I could feel my throat vibrate and hear my voice, but I never knew when it would happen, and what I'd say would be just whatever random train of thought I was currently on in my head.
Sometimes I could manage to scream, and this would finally get a reaction out of my friends, who would finally say or do something different instead of just repeating the same questions over and over again.
When I'd struggle to get out of that place, I'd get to see the real world, only it was spinning in front of my eyes quickly as though I were shitfaced drunk on alcohol, and when I'd give up and relax I'd be back in colorful land seeing this grid of spheres once again.
It felt like I was there for an eternity.
I would've eventually just given up, relaxed, accepted my fate, etc., except there was a constant auditory tone that was ringing in my ears the entire time which kept me on edge and I couldn't fully just relax into it.
Eventually, I started to come down. I saw the spinning world again, only this time it was sticking around longer than before, and I started to remember how I had gotten myself into this situation. At this point I realized I was now standing on my feet and twirling in circles to keep up with my spinning world. I still could not speak, but I raised a finger in the air as if to signal "ah ha!" and that I realized my situation and that I'm on my way back down to Earth. Earlier in this 'trip', my friends had me pinned on the ground for my own safety and I scratched one of their arms for not believing they were even real during the trip.
Crazy stuff! The closest visual to this I've seen on the Internet is Indra's Net but really I've never seen anything else quite like it since.
I've never had such a reaction from weed since then, and tbh it kinda scared me off trying it again for another couple of years. By that stage all I'd ever tried was alcohol and I never contemplated such crazy ideas of simulations or things before this.
So when I studied the hexogonal patterns I see on weed now, what started to emerge from "behind the veil" looked an awful lot like the infinite grid of spheres and I noped right back to reality instead.
Unrelated to the above stories, but an interesting story nonetheless.
One day I was in a car driving down the highway, and I was chiefing on a weed vape pen, when suddenly I lost my depth perception to a certain degree.
The other cars on the road ahead of me started to appear as flat, 2D cardboard cut-outs, like those you might find at a shooting gallery. The cars still had reflections, highlights and shadows, to convey the illusion of 3D depth, only the car as a whole looked like a flat 2D sprite.
The 2D cards did still have relative depth compared to others, like, I could tell the difference between a car further ahead on the road compared to one closer to me; just each individual car, itself, was a flat sprite to my eyes with no localized depth to it.
I found it rather interesting and studied the rest of my visual perception to understand how it all worked. Like, way way off in the distance, there were some mountains covered in trees, only the whole mountain looked like a flat painting. It was so far away, that there was no panoramic effect as the car drove closer, it all just looked flat, like it was painted on, like the skybox of a videogame.
The cars nearby had relative depth, but far away, the horizon was flat. I thought, "where is the dividing line at? How far out do things stop having depth to them and it all looks flat on the horizon?" I estimated the line to be about 60 feet in front of me. Cars closer by than 60 feet, I could tell how far each car was from me and from the other cars; further out than that, everything may as well just be a flat matte painting on a wall, there's no more depth perception to be had at that distance.
I continued to study my perception in this state of mind and came up with the following ways to describe it:
And then imagine you have never left this room your entire life. You've never moved from that location, you've never turned your head. Instead, the paintings on the walls change and the actors come and go and change shape and form to make up your immediate environment. This was more or less what it "seemed" like in this moment.
I've written a lot of crazy stuff above, but don't worry, I don't take any of it too seriously! In my normal daily life I'm still a skeptical, science-minded kind of guy, and I even considered myself an Atheist for a good 10 years of my life, in between being raised a Christian from childhood and then re-discovering God in my own way in 2018.
All I know about the Universe is that I don't know anything about the Universe.
I like to dabble and explore my mind, and I fully acknowledge that this may be all it is, is my brain chemistry playing tricks. I can't make any claims that we're in a simulated universe or that gods or angels exist, or any kind of external magick like that.
Even from a material science perspective: our brains never see the Real Reality. We have eyes and ears and senses which feed electrical signals to our brain, and our brain does its best to simulate what might be going on in the external world. In that regard, we all do live in our own tiny little realities, and our own brains simulate our universes and no two people could ever know, for sure, whether what they call "red" is the same color as the other person.
There are surely some real dangers for your mental health if you delve into this kind of thing unprepared, or without the mental framework to handle it. Personally, I've always handled psychotropic drugs well, even during a "bad trip" where my external reality gets scary and out of control, I never lost sight of how I got there and I knew it was all mental and it too would pass and I'd be back to normal.
If there's interest I can talk about some psychedelic trip reports, too, though the above blog post is not really the same as "trip reports" and proper trip reports tend to be so random and chaotic, they don't even make sense to the reader, much like when somebody tells you about the crazy dream they had last night. Hopefully the above stories make some sense, though, and I explained some of it well.
Disclaimers: don't do drugs, etc., but if you do do them anyway, do your research and partake safely. Erowid is a good resource for that.
They say, of all drugs, that all they do is activate features in your brain that it's already capable of, oftentimes playing with your dopamine, serotonin or cannibinoid receptors, and that seasoned Buddhist monks (for example) can play in that space purely through meditation, just that it takes a while to master and drugs are a fast shortcut. A psychedelic trip can give you a peek through the veil and give you a glimpse at the nature of your perception of reality, but beware of unearned wisdom, and it's much safer to take the slower path there so you don't risk turning yourself completely crazy.
“The psychotic drowns in the same waters in which the mystic swims with delight.”
-Joseph Campbell.
or: 6 tangible ways that my personality suddenly shifted in 2018.
When people hear the words "spiritual awakening" they think of woo-woo magical things like Buddhism and enlightenment. But really a spiritual awakening can be explained in practical, ordinary terms as a moment in your life where you suddenly get a new outlook on the world.
In a spiritual awakening, you may suddenly realize that life is inherently meaningless, but that this is somehow a very freeing insight because it means you can create your own meaning. You don't have to be who you're expected to be but are free to be who you want, and you don't care what others think because you're also not even thinking about them. Or maybe a near-death experience, or grappling with your own mortality can trigger an awakening. It's really the same stuff: you'll be gone and all of your accomplishments forgotten, so what really matters in the world, what are we doing?
I had my spiritual awakening in early 2018, and in very practical terms, a lot of things changed in my personality quite suddenly:
But a BIG one is that I feel free to just not take the whole Human Game too seriously. What's the Human Game? It's all of the traditions and social norms we humans have come up with. The life plan of birth, marriage, kids, retirement; gender norms; the "9 to 5" work week; the scourge of social media on society; basically everything we do to distract ourselves from the fact that nobody knows what the fuck is going on or why the universe even exists at all.
It's all optional. You don't need any of it. You play along with the game because you find it fun for now. But it's just a ride. Some choose to go sit on top of a mountain for the rest of their days.
Since 2018 I've been more consciously choosing which parts of the game I play, and not worrying about the rest of it. I've been "de-googling" and don't, or can't, use many popular social networks or messaging apps. Not as many people can message me anymore, but that's just fine for me as an introvert. I can only manage so many relationships anyway, and the people who put in the effort to keep in touch are the ones worth keeping around.
Having 500 friends on Facebook never meant I had 500 friends.
Now, when somebody goes through a spiritual awakening, a common side effect is that they get some crazy thoughts in their head. They may then go down rabbit holes of woo-woo magical nonsense, which all suddenly takes on a lot more meaning, in search of answers, but I think there are no answers. Just people who've experienced something ineffable that escapes language, and they came up with lots of symbols and stories to try and communicate the feeling. None of it makes any sense until it does.
I can't describe what it feels like, just the practical effects it had on me in real life. And I'm not really out to 'convert' anybody, either, as I know that everybody is already where they need to be right now and everybody wakes up at their own pace. Maybe your spirit wants to experience what it's like to be you for a while before you can wake up and take the wheel. There's no words anybody could write that would 'pop your bubble', and when people try, that's how you get religions and spiritual woo-woo nonsense.
So be nice, have fun, and don't sweat the small stuff.
And it's all small stuff.
Earlier this year, I had a sort of existential curiosity and started researching and thinking a lot about the nature of reality, what all this stuff is made of, and so on.
Thinking too much about it started leading me to a mild case of depersonalization/derealization syndrome ("living in the Matrix", or, as some people on the subreddit put it: it's like seeing a spot on the window and suddenly becoming aware of the window, instead of just looking through it). You know, when real life starts to feel a bit "fake" like a dream and it's hard to un-see that once you've seen it.
So I've reeled in my curiosity for a while and gotten back to normal, but before I forget about all the crazy things I learned, I decided to write it all down in my blog. I'll try and fill this post with links to resources I found interesting along the way.
This post discusses topics of spirituality, philosophy, and maybe some metaphysics. For background, I was born and raised Baptist, turned atheist in my teenage years when the religion conflicted with my sexuality, and have come half a circle again and would call myself "spiritual." All man-made ideas of God are probably utterly wrong, but there's gotta be something to it all. This blog post therefore also sums up my personal beliefs, from the core idea that I'm most confident about and getting less and less sure as it goes.
A lot of this stuff may draw parallels from Buddhism or such. I don't know about any of that, but I have noticed a lot of parallels to all the religions. We're all talking about some of the same basic stuff here, in our own ways.
To summarize, short and sweet:
Consciousness Is Everything. All that exists in the universe is consciousness. Matter comes from consciousness, and we are all experiencing reality as though it were a dream. The brain does not create consciousness; consciousness creates the brain.
In the following sections I'll describe the first few resources that got my curiosity going.
0.0015s.
