Alteration of Perception: Seeking Pure Understanding
By Eugene Raphael · Essay & Practice Report · Liminal Light Lab
Practice: inner silence, not-doing, and particle clustering. Theme: how my perception changed over decades, what the biology of vision might say about it, and how it now shapes my dreaming.
The lived path
Very early on, I saw what many people see when gazing at snow, a bright sky, or a blank wall: eye floaters, whorls, and bubbles of light. That's a common and completely normal occurrence.
Maybe 40 years ago, in 7th grade, I practiced not-doings after school. I would merge two coasters into one until I could focus on the one in the center with great visual clarity. I used to do this for hours.
After doing this for quite a while, I learned to "blur" my vision during normal tasks, and I began noticing subtle cues in that blurred space: bursts of light around people focused on an activity. Gazing this way at someone leaning down to pick up an object, I'd see a tiny burst of white light precede that flow of intent toward the object.
Over time I saw more hues of these sparks around people. Some tended toward a reddish hue, and rarer still, some emitted amber. There were quite a few more sparks and more flow around someone who was emotionally charged. People who practice martial arts seemed to carry balls of whitish energy stored around them, at the ends of their practiced movements.
This was very different from how I understood "seeing," so I went down a rabbit hole, searching other belief systems for a similar description. Buddhism (Dzogchen) and Hinduism (the Upanishads) were dead ends for me. The best correlation I found was in Barbara Brennan's Hands of Light, which had some helpful passages but overall went in a different direction from where I was.
My conclusion was that this was a deconstruction of my cognition. Something had begun to break down in my view of the world; my foundational perception was altering. Over time and with continued practice, it evolved into an overwhelming perceptual view I couldn't shut off. Everywhere I looked, in daylight or darkness, I began to see an unfathomable number of tiny particles of light flowing within and without literally everything.
The bursts of light I now understand to be energy, because they're different around a living being than around a stationary object. In my experience this is a slow process of opening from within on the journey to seeing, and it is slowly developing into a more cohesive view as time goes on.
The biology, and visual snow
Recently I wanted to understand, from a biological perspective, how perception might change if the brain handled incoming data differently. I am no scientist, but here's what I found.
Our eyes receive photons that bounce off objects. They land on the retina as a two-dimensional image, and when they hit the rods and cones an electrical cascade starts. Wavelength is interpreted as color, and ganglion cells add things like edges and contrast. Then a whole bunch of other processes provide structure, object recognition, depth, and gestalt.
The part that set me on a deeper path: at this stage, attention filters out "irrelevant" light. That light is corrected, or filled in, to meet expectations.
So what would happen if the attention filtering stopped? You'd get a somewhat chaotic view of reality, but the unfiltered light might carry additional data. Looking at an apple beginning to rot on the inside, all those unfiltered photons might let you see that, if you knew what to look for.
What fascinated me is that there's an almost exact description of what that perception would be like: visual snow syndrome. I developed visual snow at some point, and following this logic, I concluded that learning to stop the internal dialogue is the key that lets this unfiltered, chaotic perception happen. In its early stages, it's a kind of self-induced visual snow.
The next question was what would happen if I took that chaotic, unfiltered perception and refined it into a new cognition, one that uses all the data.
Clustering particles into dreaming
In a state of quiet, holding my body completely still, blocking out all light, and halting the internal dialogue, I've been able to cluster groups of particles, or phosphenes, into increasingly cohesive views. These are the same particles I see everywhere, all the time, eyes open or shut. My filtering system is broken, because I broke it, I guess. Or maybe what's happening is an attempt to correct it.
I've practiced this for roughly the past five years, and it has evolved. In the beginning I focused on a single particle, or the dreaming color, or random imagery. It has come full circle to where I perceive the particles with my eyes open, and scenes can even be created this way. I haven't tried it in broad daylight yet; I typically use a mask.
Now I grab a handful of these ever-moving particles with my eyes, cluster them together, and scenery appears. Mask on, eyes open or closed (it doesn't matter if you don't fall asleep), I transition somewhere else without ever losing awareness of the process.
This has redefined dreaming for me into something closer to what Castaneda describes in The Active Side of Infinity: traveling from inner silence, detaching from and reattaching to the dark sea of awareness. It doesn't require visualization, imagination, or desire. It's a process of intending cohesiveness and silence, and letting an unknown impulse carry me forward. I submit to intent.
Like don Juan, I like the immensity of thought.
Share your perception
If this resonates with peculiarities in how you perceive the world, please share. I'd be fascinated to learn more. There are very few places where I can get feedback on this oddity.
Related
Community: Do you see the particles too, eyes open or shut? Tell us what yours look like.
Liminal Light shares personal practice, not medical advice. Read About & Safety first.
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