by Ovidiu Brazdau
These explorations were inspired by the Vibhuti Pada chapter in Patanjali’s ‘Yoga Sutras’[1], and previous entheogenic experiences, which showed me new perceptual ways of connecting with reality[2]. Through practice, I trained the perceptual mechanisms so that entheogenic-induced modifications could become available without the use of powerful entheogens. I used only micro-dosed ganja, from time to time, to enhance specific awareness flows.
Depth perception and the quest for ‘expansion’ mechanisms
Training depth perception was a challenge for me. Since high school, I have been practicing with energy expansion visualizations, using mental visualizations of expansion and then letting the perceptual expansions unfold. And there have also been ecstatic sexual experiences, where boundaries seemed to be melting. But with time, many questions arose: What is happening when the boundaries seem to disappear? Am I really becoming a larger energy body, or is that just the subjective experience? What is the trick with these perceptions? What is arising inside me when I have this inner sense of ‘spaciousness’? There are so many techniques related to ‘expanding’ our energy body, but do we really expand the energy? Which energies? Because subjectively, it feels as if we expand something of ourselves. And what about ‘explosions’ of energy? Or ‘dissolving into infinity’. What infinity? Am I really becoming infinite? How large is the infinite, perceptually? How large is the expansion?
Visualizing the expansion has always been a puzzle because I felt something was missing about how these expansions took place. Could I expand the energy with the mental ‘visualizing techniques’? I felt like I was lying to myself, although something was happening. But what?
After I began my conscious inner evolution in my 30’s, I tried to answer these questions and looked into the processes regulating the expansion experience. I needed a model that would rationally explain these subjective experiences. But I was unable to get any satisfactory answers until I started to explore with LSD and DMT and to build a bridge among different domains of knowledge, including physics, cosmology, and inner experiences of energy expansion.
In my view, depth perception is the crucial element for understanding the subjective qualities of the expansion experiences. I am using ‘depth’ as a physical concept, as it is used in eye-vision studies, meaning the visual ability to perceive distances from an object and to make sense of the three-dimensional positioning[3]. Whatever is expanding, the expansion has a radius, or a length. But, from a subjective perspective, I think that the term ‘depth’ instead of ‘length’ is better. So, in this research, depth means a physical, spatial wideness.
Thinking provides a notable spaciousness, but it is not felt as ‘expansion in cognition’; it is rather interpreted as a ‘bigger picture’ or a larger frame of reference. Using Earth as a frame of reference (akin to ‘one life on a big rock traveling through space’), we can allow our cognitive and emotional world to be filled with informational systems with a larger size. As thinking and emotions are two layers in continuous resonance, a larger cognitive overview brings in ‘expanded’ emotions.
Still, until Yuri Gagarin’s journey, we could imagine Earth as One, but the mental representation was just that, an exercise of imagination, not a connection with a perceptual fact. Life didn’t know what it was like to be on Earth. With time, this perception was shared collectively. Now there are people in the International Space Station, reinforcing this viewpoint and this overview. As a result, our inner sensitivity as a species is adjusting its functioning. Nowadays, it seems quite easy to ‘imagine’ and sense a bit that we are one life on Earth, as the information from the astronauts’ journeys expands into our collective culture. The astronauts share their perceptions with us, all the time, through interviews and live broadcasts. We have books and movies that include facets of the planetary overview. As a result, the new global perceptions are spreading, through resonance, or emotional-perceptual imitation. And, this perception is spreading quite fast, I would say.
In the vibrational energy world, what is important for the subjective experience of expansion seems to be the wavelength and the resonance process. As we have many body layers, there are different types of depths, all happening in space, on various scales. Expansion experiences usually occur in the basic energy layers: vital, sexual, emotional, and within/around the size of our body, as a result of inner physical processes. It seems that the quality of openness (or fluid energy structures), not expansion, is responsible for many inner experiences of being a ‘larger energy body’. But our energy is not expanding anywhere. We just connect more, resonate more with larger systems, allow more, and as a result, we tend to feel that we are more than our local body.
The boundary observer and the Moon’s overview
Infinity was the first clue that something was not right in my understanding of the so-called ‘expanded states of consciousness’. I began to question the ‘perceptual’ infinite after I noticed that the word ‘infinite’ from people’s descriptions of mystical states was rather an emotional label, not a technical one. I’ve had many moments in life when, during yoga, I’ve felt like I was larger or vast, but this never felt like infinity. Yet, some people have talked about their subjective infinity experiences, and it seemed they must sense something I was not sensing. I understood later that they were referring to their no-boundaries flowing style.
In 2013-2014, when the witnessing awareness activated and habituated, I explored a lot with divided attention, to simultaneously access various aspects in me. In 2014, the first LSD experience in nature brought me a new configuration, a felt sense of distances. But it was still a fog in my mind, as I didn’t have the proper concepts to describe the expanded perceptual experiences. Then, I began dividing attention in a new way, allocating a percentage of the attentional resources to the boundaries of my vision. So, I created a ‘boundary observer’ in my attentional structure, placed at the boundary of the personal perceived bubble-field.
Then, I began gazing at the Moon, the night sky, the stars and planets, and the Milky Way structure. I tried to compare my perceptual experience with scientific information about their position and distances. And to try and see if I could adjust the depth perception to sense, and to perceive and feel the distance to them.
I used the Moon, first, and I practiced samyama with it. I put the boundary observer on the Moon, as if I were looking back, from Moon to Earth, to see if I could get an overview perception or not. At that time, I was familiar with these exchanges during samyama. They occurred before with some birds, when spontaneously I was merging with them through my gaze, and I felt as if I could see myself on Earth with a different quality, a quality more like a bird’s gaze. So I thought, Why not? Let’s try it with the Moon. And it worked. Using the Moon as a reflective layer witness, my perspective changed, the inner experience was becoming larger, and I could easily feel the Earth as one. As months passed, I became more aware of the changes that developed when the boundary observer was locked to the Moon, while I was on Earth. The boundary observer provided an excellent overview quality to my perceptions of distances. It was not like, ‘I am expanded to the Moon’ but like, ‘I am here on Earth, with my perspective larger’. The Moon was altering the self-reflection mechanism, embedded in the perspective, which influenced my perceptions.
Sometimes I wondered: If the Moon had not been there in the sky, for us to stare at, throughout our evolution as a species, would the development of self-consciousness in mammals have been slower? The Moon provides an excellent self-reflective framework, and we see the Moon because the sunlight reflects upon the Moon’s surface—and so it already has a ‘physical-witnessing-reflecting’ quality.
The boundary observer begins to travel through expansion
In 2015, when I began to explore using ayahuasca and changa, my practice of dividing attention turned into something unexpected. During the first ayahuasca session at Santo Daime, while in a break, I experienced the entire visual scenery as a high-resolution field (HD), in a way I had never experienced before. The visual field was ultra-mega HD, and inside the focal attention, I had an extra HD area. It was as if visual acuity became 100 times more powerful. So, later I thought: OK, the vision can adapt. Let’s see if I can reproduce it without ayahuasca.
I discovered that if I gazed into a ray of light, coming from a star, and tuned into the HD resolution by re-activating the DMT-sync style configuration, while isolating the attention to the inner part of the ray, I could see-by-sensing through the ray, and I could use the light ray to expand the limits of the perceptual field, step by step, by moving the boundary observer through the light. In this way, the inner experience was similar to an expansion experience. But, as I was adapting to these advances through light and allowing myself to go deeper and deeper into the light-ray, the expansion-perception quality seemed to fade away. I felt more like a traveler with the boundary observer. At this point, after months or practice, the purpose of this boundary observer changed. I was now more interested in providing myself feedback about its spatial position (‘how far is it?’) or improving the larger perspective qualities.
One day, I began to wonder: What if I could expand/send the boundary observer all the way to the emitter-star? Could this be possible? I mean, doing this exercise to connect with the Moon was OK. I felt the finite distance to its position when the boundary observer reached the Moon. But with the stars, there was another scale necessary. I soon noticed that the distances are perceptually immense. Any strategy that I used to speed up the boundary observer to the emitter star was not fast enough to reach the emitter. The only technique that seemed to produce any results was the ayahuasca style of flowing continuously: paying attention to the ‘increase’ of the increase in speed (and not the physical distances). But even so, I was unable to sense that I was making progress. The speed of light was not enough. I needed a higher wavelength, or another way of propagation, to make more significant steps through the light ray. A faster speed was necessary.
At that time, I began to study the size of the Milky Way, how large it is, how far away are the stars in the sky. To my surprise, all the stars I was seeing were in a small bubble of space (small—compared to the size of the Milky Way as a whole). I began to research the distances within the galaxy and between galaxies, up to the limits of the observable universe.[4]
This was the context in 2015 when an experience shifted my overview. I was with a friend, under the sky, on a wooden terrace of a summer house somewhere in a small village near the mountains. We both experienced with changa, one after the other. After the experiences, which lasted half an hour each, we were relaxing and gazing at the night sky. It was a very clear sky, and the Milky Way was beautiful. I was trying to figure out its 3D position in the sky, in relation to the Earth, and the position of the spiral arms. Then I started the exercise by focusing attention inside a ray of light, emanating from a star, and I began to practice the expansion-traveling of the boundary observer. I was practicing with increases of increases in the speed, to see if I could reach the emitter star. So, I had the eyes wide open and focused on a star-light, when something unexpected emerged.
The boundary observer was pulled through the ray. Then, my primary attention moved from the body to the boundary observer, and I jumped to a speed I could not imagine before, and then I reached the emitter star. I know this because the samyama was still active, but somehow, the perspective had been reversed, my sensing center-of-gravity shifted to the boundary observer, and the new center was in the light ray.
Then, after I reached the emitter star, the journey continued, and I was pulled through another ray of light, this time at about a 90-degree angle from the previous journey. But, at a distance, something happened: I began decelerating until I stopped. Then I was rotated, and during rotation, the attention shifted from narrow focus to global vision, and then I saw the Milky Way from above and laterally; it was not exactly as it is represented by graphic descriptions, but rather a clear HD image of white lights and clouds. I stayed like this for a few seconds in awe. Then, the ray of light I came through isolated again in my attentional configuration, and I lost the global view. I was pulled back through the light to the star and then I bounced back to Earth into my physical body, and I rotated again. And there I was, back in the initial attentional setup, with the focus inside the ray of light, but this time the boundary observer was in the body.
I was back! In space. And also, back in the present, because I was back at the exact moment before I had been pulled through the light, maybe just a second later or so. I was perplexed; this took place instantly, while I was gazing with open eyes. Even the breath was in the same position as it had been where I left it. But wait, what? I mean, what? Approximately 50-100,000 light years in less than a second? I was not in a dreaming state, so the visual-thinking mechanisms were not active. I was just perceptual. But how was it generated? How hard had I been ‘hallucinating’ to create this experience? Or rather, could it be that I had not been hallucinating?
I paused the ‘boundary observer through light’ experiment after this experience, as I no longer felt the need to explore this line of research. For me, this had been enough for a while. It seemed an impossible action. This occurred in a state of enhanced perceptual presence, without symbolic visuals or fractals; there was nothing related to the usual retinal DMT images[5]. With time, as the research on DMT experience advanced, I remembered that the boundary observer is just information-on-a-wave, not a wave, not a particle, and in theory, something without mass or energy can travel at any speed, just by switching the wavelength used as a carrier.
A possible explanation: millions of years ago, when a satellite galaxy crossed our galactic plane, it created ripples, and it seems that the entire Orion arm is located in one of these ripples. From a ‘topological information’ perspective, during the crossing, a star from a satellite galaxy could become entangled with our Sun and Earth, or a star nearby; thus, my journey could have been possible due to this energy-information entanglement.
Maybe in the future I will start again these travels with the boundary observer, but for the moment, I am not ready to advance more. I have more questions than answers, related to this topic. But perhaps when my body is almost at the point of losing its synchrony and it is about to die, I can try again, although I would have a 99% chance of failure. When I reflect on the possibilities for life, we look naive, thinking that we are alone while looking for other intelligent life forms that would communicate their messages through electromagnetic waves—these waves are, after all, forms for polluting space. Instead we could be looking for messages and melodies encoded as sequences through light or space.
In the meantime, let’s get back to the here and now and continue my field notes from the experiments with depth perception.
Inside the eye: depth perception and one-eye sensitivity
Once, while I was contemplating the night sky from the balcony, there was a building under construction, approximately 2 km away, and the crane had a very powerful light, with blueish nuances, and I was able to see it clearly. I decided to try a new way of looking into the ray of light by covering one eye and adjusting myself to see the intermediary objects in the visual field, with just one eye. I wanted to see if I could detect the ray as it was touching the retina.
These were the elements that I could see in this micro-macro visual experiment, using the light from the crane:
– On the retina, the most intense was the light center itself. This was not a point of light, or a shape like a circle, such as light from the stars. Instead, it was spread into an irregular shape, with blue, red, and green filaments, grouped in an unusual way, like the rim of a butterfly. This butterfly shape stayed constant whatever I was doing with the eye. It became larger or smaller depending on the eye focus. So, I suppose this is what the retina sees.
– The reflections/refractions around the main shape were fantastic RGB filaments, 30-40% the size of the butterfly, located around the main shape, like a tiny, super HD psychedelic filament.
– Something was acting as a filter—perhaps the cornea, aqueous humor—so that I could see tiny bubbles of liquid moving onto it from time to time. This filter was transparent but had a consistency, like a glass that was not perfectly translucent.
– The crystalline lens was not visible per se; but when I changed the style, it seemed that something was moving; it was producing different results based on my actions upon the eye muscle, as it changed the size of the opening (the iris perhaps). I am not sure that I identified the eye structure correctly, but this was not the point.
– The distance from the retina to the lens and cornea system was perceivable; there was more or less depth, depending on the resolution used to observe the butterfly shape.
– Sometimes, the eyebrow reflections were visible.
– And there were other elements, various things that existed in the environment around me.
What actions were available to me in this type of experience, while doing samyama with the light and observing the effects?
– I could use all types of attention: focused, diffuse, immersed, objective, and combinations of them, through dividing the attention. The combinations are so diverse that in time, I could integrate the depth vision easily within the experience, as a natural part of the mix (e.g., diffuse immersed attention on the butterfly shape, focused-objective attention on the space between the retina and iris).
– Zoom in and zoom out to make the butterfly shape larger or smaller.
– Changing the resolution of the butterfly shape: I could focus on an RGB filament emanating from the butterfly shape, and after a few seconds, it became possible to dive into the filament and get a high-resolution of it (when zooming in, the butterfly shape size of light increased, sometimes to the point that it was 60-70% of the entire visual field). I never reached the maximum resolution, but there seemed to be more to see whenever I zoomed in.
– Control of the micro-movements of the eye: This involved using one-pointedness and locking the size of the image or allowing some micro-movement. As a side fact, micro-movements allowed me to detect the elements and their positions more clearly. During the experiment, when I was discovering a new configuration, I explored it deeply by blocking the eye through one-pointedness. This locks all the micro-movements of the eye and the lensing system (the crystalline system).
In the HD configuration, deep inside the retina image, it is nice to see what happens when I use the finger or an object in very close proximity to the main ray of light. The light bends, and the surrounding filaments of the main butterfly seem to increase in length. I see textures on the object very clearly. When I use the finger, the fingerprints are so HD that the distance between two skin waves seems like 3-4 meters (subjectively speaking).
In the HD position inside the eye, I sometimes like to let the mind play its games and form shapes that have meaning (similar to how it is to gaze at ourselves in the mirror for a while). The brain seems to tend to compensate for the lack of movement by creating perceptual interpretations. It is like a dialogue: ‘Is this a butterfly or a castle?’ Then a buzzing appears inside me, followed by a conclusion. ‘Here it is, a castle’. Then, after some moments, it changes again; ‘Nope, it’s not a castle. Now it seems more like X, maybe. Let’s see, yes, this resembles X’. It is a funny game, to watch the information being processed into a representation, without any reference point except my memory.
What I cannot hack, though, is the main shape of the light. No matter what I do, the brain keeps that image intact. Even if I rotate the head, after the vision locks in a one-pointedness schema on the ray of light, nothing changes. The adaptive processing highways are so large that I cannot detect any visible change in the continuity of the butterfly shape. The continuity of shape perception is perfect.[6]
What I want to add about the experiences inside the eye is that in order to dive deeper into an HD zoom, at a certain point I need a higher vibrational sync. I need the vibrational DMT-like configuration and the carrier wave sound to be active, in a very high-pitched and loud configuration, to be able to zoom in deeper. I noticed that the carrier wave also appears naturally when I try a new attentional setup for the first time. I can try and try, but the attentional styles just won’t ‘lock’ as I want, until a wave of reconfiguration develops in my vibrations. Then, all of a sudden, the carrier wave appears throughout the entire energy body (and static-vibrational kundalini activates, in other words). And voila, the attentional mechanisms adjust, and I get what I want.
Advances in depth perception: exploring the environment and hacking the perceptual mechanisms
The next step was to apply the inside-eye attentional mechanisms to the visual field outside the eye. To do this, I used what I had, the balcony and the balustrade. So, while looking at the sky, with stars, Moon or clouds, I discovered that it is possible to hack into the depth-representational mechanisms, like this: I set narrow attention on a high distance, looking at the sky, and then I use the global-diffuse attention to lock my vision into space in between the arms of the balustrade. In other words, the global field elements are arranged as if each inner rectangle, formed of the space between the arms of the balustrade, is a 2D screen. I will use clouds to describe the effect. It is as if there is a printed banner, with clouds displayed in each rectangle, between the horizontal-vertical arms of the balustrade. To get this, I need to attend, in a diffuse-wide way, to the entire balustrade. When the effect emerges, the balustrade transforms into a 2D wall with crossings, and a 2D sky image is on each rectangle, forming a big picture, similar to a video wall composed of multiple screens.
If I kept this style, the 2D balustrade wall created a nice luminance inside the balcony. I see the balcony as if the air is luminous, with a uniform light available at all points of space. I liked to lock this attention style, watching the diffuse city light inside the balcony. After the global attention locking was set to the balustrade, I could easily move the eyes around to explore the balustrade and the air, without losing the wall schema—2D wall and 3D sky with depth perception at the same time.
An interesting experience unfolded when I moved the focus to the sky, above the temporary 2D balustrade wall. I needed to be very silent and still; otherwise, the 3D depth information from the sky would destabilize the 2D wall schema. But when I managed to keep the 2D wall schema, and the 3D sky, the stars above the balustrade looked to be in their position as in the standard vision, but they had new information available. The visual tends to be HD, clean, with a lovely nuance of tactile resolution. This is hard to say in words.
After months of practice, I figured out a key to induce the 2D wall configuration. I just need to interfere with cognition a bit, when looking through a rectangle of the balustrade as if looking far ahead, and then set a percentage of attention on the close-range distance, where the empty rectangle is located. Then, I need to repeat a few times, ‘This is full’. As a result, the inner configuration buzzes, and the 2D wall appears, and then I expand the focused attention, from one rectangle to 3D global attention to the entire balustrade-wall, without losing the 2D wall quality.
I want to mention that in all these experiences, I am very relaxed, and the eyes are very relaxed. So, when the 2D wall-with-rectangle-cloud is locked, I can look around inside the balcony very easily, using regular 3D vision and depth perception. The 2D locking mechanism is not possible by putting pressure on the attentional mechanisms. I just flow and, from time to time, lock them in a configuration and keep them still in that position. The locking is, in fact, a stillness, as when we go to sleep. We find out the sleep position and then we stay there and relax.
The following experiments have derived naturally from the ones I’ve already presented, as I applied the inside-the-eye and balcony-wall depth sensitivity to the elements in the sky, the Moon, certain constellations, and the Milky Way.
The 3D Moon and the lunar eclipse
At this point in the explorations, I was aware of the following aspects: I could use various combinations of attentional styles to create a representation, including depth perception in the representation. I could cognitively interfere in the information-representation selection process, by prioritizing some information. I could add information-representation from my memory, referring to the actual physical distances to some objects—I mean, simple information, like ‘this X is closer than Y’, ‘this X is farther than this Y’, ‘X is after Y’ etc.; as a result, the visual perception of depths was adjusting itself, and I could perceptually sense the visual field, e.g., that X is in front of Y, or X is closer than Y.
I decided to try and see if I could extend these skills to the elements in the sky. I used the Moon first. I paid attention to its shape, how it reflects through the atmosphere, what happens if I look from inside my room, adding the window as a third layer. I began to study astronomy to understand the position of the Moon, its trajectory, how the Earth moves, where the light comes from, the location of the Sun, what the 3D configuration is (Earth and Moon orbits), how far the visible stars/planets are, how large the atmosphere is. And I tried to translate the abstract distances in km, into perceptual-recognizable information, such as ‘the distance to the Moon is ‘n’ times the width of the Earth’s atmosphere’.
I also tried a direct method by focusing inside the Moon light (actually, the Sun light reflected by the Moon), to see if I could perceive the scale of the distance by diving-expanding the boundary observer through the ray and, after I hit the Moon surface, to see how long the journey would be. This didn’t work. I was only able to estimate in scales, e.g., hundreds/thousands of times the width of the atmosphere.
But what came unexpectedly in these explorations with the Moon was that the Sun light, reflecting on the edges of the Moon, was providing extra information, and I managed to configure my perception to see the Moon like a 3D movie. I also had the chance to witness a total Moon eclipse, which was amazing; the 3D quality of the Moon was impressive. It was as if someone had removed a cloud from perception, and there it was, my own private 3D cinema, running the 3D Moon movie while being at home. I guess this was possible because previously, I was used to compiling the 3D image of the Moon with less information about depths, and when the eclipse took place, I got additional information about the position because of Earth interference.
I understood later that the experiences with the Moon used all my sensitivities, the low-scale inside-the-eye skills, the nearby balcony-wall mechanisms, and the far-away environmental depth sensitivity. When looking at the rim of the Moon, especially when it is full and just arises from below the horizon, in the days when it rises after midnight, the information from the rim is enough to create a 3D representation. I want to mention that this 3D quality is better achieved with one eye. If I use both eyes, there are too many variables, and the depth perception is not so clear.
3D Milky Way
This is the last exploration I want to describe here, and it is the most complex of all. It developed without my intention. So I would say that someone gave me a gift. I was at a psytrance festival, and in one night, I went to the periphery, where I could see the sky perfectly, and I used micro-dosed ganja. I was on a hill, and the last stage/source of light was 200-300 meters away, and some 30 meters above my level. The sky was very clear, and the Milky Way was up above. I could see the center of the Milky Way area and most of the left side. There was a bit of the right side but not too much. I lay down on my back, and the Cygnus constellation was directly in front of me. And lovely music was feeding the vibrational sync.
So that was the setting. I was trying to figure out the 3D position of the elements I saw in the sky. I was aware of the distance scales, e.g., all the stars were in close proximity, as compared to the cloudy light coming from the galaxy arms[7]. I allowed all my perceptual skills to attune themselves for some minutes, to let all the information configure itself in perceptual representation. I didn’t know how to mix them consciously, so I let the automatic patterns do the job if possible. And—bing!—I got the carrier wave, really intensely, a full vibrational buzz, and then I got a new perceptual-attentional configuration. Usually, this carrier wave is just a pulse, but now, something more profound was unfolding, a new re-arrangement that required a higher sync in me. The increase of the synchronizing process lasted a few seconds, and it was as intense as in my first changa experience, but in this experience at the festival, it remained active for many minutes.
As a result, the inner configuration molded in a totally new way, and a perceptual-visual formed. I saw the light from the stage in the atmosphere, and the next layer was with the stars, then far away the Milky Way clouds, in a 3D perceptual shape, with arms. The attentional structure was locked (as in the experiment with the balustrade). So, I started to move around with narrow attention through these layers. And guess what? In the layer with the stars (clearly closer to me than the light from the Milky Way), I was able to sense-feel-know whether a star was closer or farther than other stars. It was as if, all of a sudden, someone had poured in me all the information about their positions. I didn’t have one boundary observer, but instead, I had multiple boundary observers in each point of the depth, and in each star light, and they were all exchanging information about what was in that layer.
That lasted for 10 minutes or so, and during this time, I was able to sense-perceive the depth positioning of all the stars in the star layer. I mean, I could select one star, and the perception was ‘ok, this one is in front of that one’, and ‘that one is in front of that one’. I was able to perceive all their positions without any cognitive-reasoning interference. I was connected to the information about their close or far positions. The difference from my previous experiences was huge. It was as if I were looking at Orion, and suddenly, someone rotated the view[8] and transferred into me all the necessary 3D information[9], about the distances and relative positions between the stars.[10]
It took me half a year to understand the experience. I figured it out, partially, and I was able to reproduce some parts of it by using constellations[11], and it partially works. It seems that to access this configuration, the perception needs to lock into all the elements together. All the micro-HD and macro-HD skills were intermixed to provide the experience. The trick is to have a layer of light in the atmosphere, so that the depth perception may lock onto it as a whole, as a sort of depth regulator, similar to the balustrade wall experiment. Or something like that. This full-depth perception locking in all points provided information about all the positionings.
And for me, it only works perceptually, not cognitively. I can ‘feel’ the distance, I perceive their 3D positions (closer/farther), but I cannot ‘know’ the distance, and if I ask cognitively, ‘How far is this from that?’, cognition interferes, and I lose the global lock. It only works pre-consciously, meaning… when all elements are locked and transmit information about their position, as a whole, and the brain manages to mix this into one representation, similar to the diffuse-wide perception of the body during relaxation.
A possible explanation is that my perception used the luminosity filter only (‘the bright stars are closer’). Still, my subjective experience was more complex: high- and low-luminosity stars seemed spread across the 3D depth field, and stars with the same luminosity were not in the same depth layer.
Or, perhaps my perception has become complex/sensitive enough to feel the differences in amounts of light/energy radiating from stars, and somehow to calculate position (closer/farther), including the star energy (or ‘hot-ness’) and the physical distance (using depth perception).
Afterword
The perceptual explorations were amazing for me, and I felt it would be a good idea to write them down, just in case future scientists may want to advance and develop these experiential experiments. These experiences may also be helpful for advanced psychonauts who wish to dive deeper into human biology. I noticed that ganja can facilitate the relaxation in the eyeball when I am practicing with inside-the-eye perception. She may create agitation in muscles, and micro-movements in the eye, but she can also deepen the one-pointedness. I think it’s a matter of personal choice, and it all depends on the personal relation of the journeyer with the plant.
I like to think of these explorations as a tribute to Patanjali and the wisdom of the ‘Yoga Sutras’. It looks like he was right in these sutras from Vibhuti Pada:
pravritty-aloka-nyasat sukshma-vyavahita-viprakrishta-jnanam
‘Through samyama on the shining, effulgent light, one gains knowledge of the small and subtle, the hidden and veiled, and the remote’.
bhavana-jnanam surye sanyamat
‘Through samyama on the Sun, there comes knowledge of the solar system, cosmic evolution and involution’.
chandre tara-vyuha-jnanam
‘Through samyama on the Moon, there comes knowledge concerning the arrangement of stars’.
dhruve tad-gati-jnanam
‘Through samyama on the Pole-Star comes knowledge of the relative motions and positions of the stars’.[12]
References and notes (updated – January, 2022)
1 Satchidananda, S. S. (2012). The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali (Revised ed.). Integral Yoga Publications.
2 Brazdau, O. (2019, February 27). Entheogenic Insights I: Psychology of DMT/Ayahuasca Experience. Consciousness Quotient Institute. Retrieved January 14, 2022, from https://www.consciousness-quotient.com/psychology-of-dmt-ayahuasca-experience
3 For an overview of mathematical and physics’ infinity, take a tour through PBS Infinity Series:
PBS Infinite Series. (2016, September 6). PBS Infinite Series [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCs4aHmggTfFrpkPcWSaBN9g
4 Additional resources: Butler, D. (2013, February 5). David Butler – Video Channel [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCNwSxyl2KmhdAjHLR6xGR0A; Kurzgesagt – In a Nutshell. (2020, September 22). The Largest Star in the Universe – Size Comparison [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3mnSDifDSxQ
5 Later, I found this image, that resembles the journey through the light ray: Moskowitz, C. (2013, January 15). Warp Speed: What Hyperspace Would Really Look Like. Space.Com. Retrieved January 14, 2022, from https://www.space.com/19268-star-wars-hyperspace-physics-reality.html
6 Further reading: Cherry, K. (2021, May 2). Monocular Cues for Depth Perception. Verywell Mind. Retrieved January 14, 2022, from https://www.verywellmind.com/what-are-monocular-cues-2795829
7 I also knew this information: Fizixfan, F. (2021, October 10). Orientation of the Earth, Sun and Solar System in the Milky Way. Physics Forums | Science Articles, Homework Help, Discussion. Retrieved January 14, 2022, from https://www.physicsforums.com/threads/orientation-of-the-earth-sun-and-solar-system-in-the-milky-way.888643
8 Additional resource: Frank Summers. (2013, January 29). The Orion Constellation in 3D [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lD-5ZOipE48
9 I described some parts of this experience in these posts on a Physics Forum (see from post #87): Fizixfan, F. (2021, October 10). Orientation of the Earth, Sun and Solar System in the Milky Way. Physics Forums | Science Articles, Homework Help, Discussion. Retrieved January 14, 2022, from https://www.physicsforums.com/threads/orientation-of-the-earth-sun-and-solar-system-in-the-milky-way.888643
10 Additional resource: Niffelheim Frya. (2013, October 22). Universe Sandbox – Simulation of the Milky Way in 3D [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kr9JINBXo0o
11 Additional resource: Steven Sanders. (2014, March 17). 3D Tour of Constellations [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bom3jubAaNY
12 Patanjali. (n.d.). Vibhuti Pada: Yoga Sutras Book III. Theosophy Trust. Retrieved January 14, 2022, from https://theosophytrust.org/920-vibhuti-pada-yoga-sutras-book-iii-patanjali