In our visual field, our perception is the clearest in the center, corresponding to the highest concentration of photoreceptors in our eyes. The further out into the periphery we go, the less concentrated the receptors are, until we reach the edge of what we can see. The lack of clarity in the periphery sometimes allows projections from our expectations, fears, and desires to be seen. Looking directly at something, we clearly see it for what it is, but that same thing in our periphery could be seized upon by desires or fears more easily and warped into what they’re looking for.

The image below shows an experience I had. Looking directly at someone, I saw them clearly. Upon looking off to the right of them so that they were in my periphery, my perception of them became warped into a scowling face with big teeth and a curling moustache.

The unknown is always an easy place for projections to be seen. That fact is responsible for the fear of the dark.

Even in the periphery, outside your visual focus, eyes looking at you stand out with increased clarity and lights up your attention field. Such a thing is very important to pay attention to.

This image shows an oval representing what’s in front of you. With your eyes looking to the right, someone’s eyes in your left periphery stands out with higher clarity and lights up your attention field. TO DO: redraw this with the focus in the center of the visual field — then drop the explanation here.

I could see or feel the effect of my thoughts above and below my visual field — the way my thoughts affected the experience — the context they provided around the scene.

The depth field is a field of perception closely associated with the visual field. Viewed separately, it’s a wireframe or grid that stretches itself across everything in the visual field, defining the three-dimensional shape, distance from us, and movement of everything we see. Its job is to make sense of our environment. It’s largely determined by our binocular vision — the differences in the angles of perception from our two eyes. It has a logic of its own.

With psilocybin or LSD, we can see and experiment with the depth field separate from the visual field. We can sometimes clearly see the grid-like lines of the depth field, which appear to be substantive. It’s even visible in open space, if one concentrates. It appears as a tightly-mapped grid, in little comprehension-sized squares: each the perfect size. It is colorless and more easy to make out in dim light.

With bright sunlight shining on my closed eyes, I saw wild swirling depth field patterns but not as a grid; as a series of translucent bubbles instead, forming all the same patterns of depth.

When you are afraid of being hurt, visual attention pulls away, dries up, and the depth field becomes easier to see. Then you can see a heavier, blacker grid. It’s like a threatening black fence.

A common experience of the depth field on LSD or psilocybin is the feeling that even though everything you see is staying the same, it also appears to be melting — meaning the visual field is showing no change but the depth field is indicating slow downward movement.

It’s almost as if each tiny zone in the visual field is a globe rotating downwards, yet displaying the same image. We perceive the downward motion even while the image stays the same.

Like the visual field, the depth field is receptive to projections — mainly through imagination and expectations. When we consciously imagine changes in the environment, the depth field will conform to them. As usual, this effect is much more pronounced on LSD or psilocybin. One can imagine forth whatever they want into the depth field, so it seems like the grass is sliding back and forth, or that the sky is lying down directly upon you. We are able to look at empty space between objects and imagine forth shapes or objects made up solely of the depth field (with no visual counterpart).

Once, during a trip, I was laying on a green lawn near the Arb. Looking out across the grass, I imagined that the plane of grass was approaching me at a higher angle, such that in an odd way, it appeared that I must be under the grass. Visually, there was no change (the color of the scene in front of me remained unchanged), but in terms of depth, it had changed dramatically. Releasing my imagination, the depth field returned to its previous (and more accurate) position.

Another time, I imagined a tower-like structure in my left peripheral vision and when I turned toward it, I saw it standing there in the depth field, even though nothing was actually there. The tower’s colors were the colors of the trees and sky behind it, as if it was painted to perfectly match the background. It was totally real to my perception.

While the above looks simply like a wireframe on top of a scene, the following gives a better idea of how it was conceptualized. Imagine this as a painted tower:

We can actually see the differences between what we project and what is actually there. Our projections (expectations, specific searches, imagination) have a perceivable mental structure in the depth field.

The depth field is less objective than other senses. It is a “derived” sense. It follows very quickly after our visual perception of light and color to make sense of it based on what we know about the world. There is not a direct depth sense which our imagination or expectation can disagree with. That’s why it’s more malleable than vision.

To speculate a moment: a bat, who has sonar but weak vision, likely has the reverse situation. Depth would be a direct sense (from sonar) while their weak vision would be more malleable.

In the depth field, one might notice many interference patterns. These are similar to the wave interference patterns of light and those of two grids being laid atop one another. This is probably due to the joining of the separate data coming from each eye.

Outside the periphery of our vision, our memory projects what we think is there, giving us continuing awareness of the surroundings we can’t see from our present perspective. It flashes there, at a lower rate than what’s in our visual field. We can use this memory projection to navigate our surroundings while walking around with our eyes closed. This is a spatial context provided by depth field projection.

This goes hand in hand with proprioception — our perception of the outlines and position of our bodies. These two systems help us to avoid collisions when moving about without constantly checking the position of our feet, arms, head, and so on.

Looking at beach stones on the ground with Deep Attention, I watched the process of “becoming” in detail. As I breathed in deeply, each stone grew, filled in, opened to me. They became brighter, with a sense of another dimension opening up, where I could sense behind them. Where my regular vision was more flat, this was as if my vision were a liquid and it was soaking the objects of my focus in it. It’s not that I visually saw the back of each object, but I knew the back of it because I became it — my attention took its shape.

Our liquid attention surrounds, encompasses things like rising water encompasses a stone.

Our attention flows out more fully when we are in a trusting, open state. We are our attention — we are literally giving ourselves to whatever we focus on, flowing into it, becoming it.

With Deep Attention, the depth field spills out so completely that it wraps around things as if it were immersing them in liquid.

Our liquid attention increases visual acuity, and clarifies the image. The more attention on a thing, the more it reflects the light of attention. It’s as if the image in our minds was projected upon a reflective liquid rather than a dry, dusty screen. The phenomenon is like the letter edging in this Grateful Dead style:

Our attention makes the visual signal more “wet”. A “dry” visual field is unclear, dull, non-reflective. A “wetter” picture is a clearer picture. We can see this ourselves on a day-to-day basis. When our minds are distracted, turned inwards, we can still see, but our attention is not on our visual field. What we see is dry, unclear to our attention. But as our liquid attention focuses outward into the physical world, our visual field becomes saturated with it, becomes more “wet”, reflective, clear. We project our attention into whatever we focus on, become it, and we are reflected back to ourselves through it. This results in thoughts such as “this could be useful” or “this is beautiful”.

When water beads up, that curvature reflects a far wider circle. Each water droplet has a point of reflection — the light of our own attention reflected back at us:

Attention is the laser beam. The grid of neurons are the holographic plate.

Due to the nonlocal aspect of holograms, when a holographic plate is broken into pieces, the whole image still appears in each piece, but is less clear. A smaller focus of our attention is analogous to viewing a broken holographic image, and we perceive a less clear image.

Each neuron is a point on the hologram. As energy pours through from neuron to neuron, as the literal liquid neurotransmitters saturate the brain’s visual neurons due to our attention, the clarity comes into focus as the size of the holographic “plate” grows.

As attention focuses, the neural grid through which that energy pushes becomes saturated. This can be noted visually as attention pushes through and makes the image clear rather than sketchy. Whatever we focus on becomes embodied by liquid attention, living and full of light as opposed to a dimly projected image onto a dusty cave wall.

Liquid comes through a pinprick hole in the image below. This is a recurring image for me. It shows the wetting of a neuron, the expansion of a holographic sphere, thought forms coming into existence. It’s something coming into existence in 3 dimensions.

The visual field is made up with neural tips/bulbs (synapses?). Like a fly’s compound eye, each neuron has the full picture. It’s like hundreds of drops of water, each reflecting the entire scene. Individually, each neuron on its own has very low resolution, producing a hazy image, but attention focused on vision brings numerous other neurons into play, each adding to and clarifying the image.

Through each neuron is the same scene. Each is the view down a neuron.

When water beads up, that curvature reflects a far wider circle, as illustrated by these water droplets. Each has the whole picture from a slightly different perspective:

I’m reminded of the compound eyes of insects and crustaceans. Each smaller visual unit of a compound eye is called a ommatidium. The more there are, the higher the visual resolution.

Apple has had a deeply intuitive design team for decades. Here’s the Apple Watch, looking like the end of a neuron, holding a convex raindrop-like image of a whole scene:

With enough attention, enough sensitivity, we can see the Pure Essence in anything. That deep focus of attention in physical time engages more neurons, more clarity, more context. This brings on further brightness (the light) and the intimate presence of all we’ve known and experienced. We see connections everywhere — through whatever we’re focusing on. We’re lighting up and using more of our brains.

Going into the moment is going deeper into the brain, into more neurons, increasing our energy and sensitivity.

The RESOLUTION of your thinking, your vision, your experience depends on how deep into the neurons you are. They branch like trees. Not far in, seen in cross section, you have (1) a pixelly, blurry (because it’s holographic (?)) EXPERIENCE. But further in, you have: (2) high resolution, clear, brilliant experience. It deals with the energy force coming in.

This is the way in which diving deeper into your neurons increases the resolution and power to make connections.

The holographic nature of the mind is such that when sections of the brain are removed, clarity is reduced rather than losing specific memories. We could conceivably see through ONE neuron, just not very clearly.

Watching the sunlight behind my closed eyes, I see this pattern repeating in different sizes, different depths.

The visual cortex has fractal visual resolution. The deeper the signals go into the neural lobe, the greater the fractal resolution. It fills in the largest areas first, then medium size (further in), then small (further still, higher resolution), then the tiniest details. This is used for the brain’s sensory resolution.

The more attention we focus on something, the higher the resolution or clarity of the image.

The pictures below show attention grids. Areas of little attention are represented by a loose, open grid, and areas of higher attention by a tighter grid. The tighter grid results in higher resolution perception. The areas of tight focus allow the attention to travel out from us to entrain with and become their subject.

TO DO: Redraw the above as one focus.

As we’ve seen, attention enlarges what we focus on. Visually, it increases image clarity. But the concept may be internally represented in this size-exaggerated fashion. This isn’t visually perceived, but our particular focus of attention determines our conception of something.

If we “normalize” this image by resizing it based on the where the weight of our attention is, we bring things into scale based on attention. When normalized in this way, the increased resolution of our areas of focus expands its size. Thus, a strong focus on hair makes the hair expand to great sizes, a focus on eyes expands the eyes to cartoon size, and a focus on teeth makes them seem huge. Caricatures are exaggerations of these departures from average that catch our attention, and rendered in visual terms.

Similarly, the distribution of the sensory and motor neurons in the brain can be normalized in this fashion. The neural man (aka the “sensory cortical homunculus”) represents the sensory distribution of neurons in the cerebral cortex. As you can see, we have many more sensory neurons in our hands and face than the rest of our body.

Psilocybin and LSD alter our perceptions, making our visual experience new and fully enrapturing. This is part of what keeps our focus in the present moment — the world appears brand new to our mind.

When on psilocybin, I can see a mostly-transparent structure everywhere and around everything. I believe it’s the structure of our brains. Remember, our visual field is inside our brains, as is everything we experience. The external world is projected outward from within us.

In order of commonality, here are the structures I’ve seen:

I could see a field of dots and lines underlying everything. It’s like looking at plant parts under a microscope when it’s not focused correctly and the cells are semi-transparent. The patterns are stationary in the visual field rather than related to the objects I’m looking at. This is the background of my visual field.

It seems that I’m looking through a soup, that I can focus on the space in between objects and see it there. Everything is made up of a fibery purple haze but the purple is actually the cumulative effect of many little rainbows. This is most evident when looking at the sky, or any flat surface with a single color. The rainbows are packed together tightly taking up a tenth of the band, maybe, and the rest is transparent. I can see my neurons flashing, and there are little objects moving about, in little patches of lighter space, seemingly dancing with them.

On psilocybin especially, there is a color-flexed threefold color pattern. I’ve described it in several different color modes: pink/orange/green, gold/orange/red, red/green/blue, green/orange/blue, and red/green/clear. The specific color set might be due to the ambient light. Colors are unimaginably bright. Brain static flashes (typically white) were shifted to blue.

The structure of the brain behind the visual field was apparent with my eyes closed — neural tunnels.

Immediately upon waking in the morning, if I open my eyes and look around, I see everything in this very gritty way. I seem to be able to focus on everything with incredible detail and clarity, as the grits are very mathematical and take on the form of whatever is beyond them in the visual field. It’s almost like they’re circles, because they’re unfocused.

Sometimes one can see rivers of motion in fixed patterns. While sitting on the roof, I saw forking rivers of motion in the shingles. The same sort of motion can be seen in the pattern of capillaries in your eyes.

I have found, to my surprise, that I can actually see the flashing of my own neurons as I look up into the sky. These little bright curved pulses flash across my visual field. There are bigger ones, close up, and more distant ones, but there are dozens flashing at once. It is quite a wonderful experience. What I saw was the light flashing out from the breaks in the myelin sheath gaps called the nodes of Ranvier. The lights were moving along the axons of the neurons; flash flash flash flash as the signals moved across my visual field. Each flash was a curved sliver of light like a new moon. The rate is about 3Hz, or three flashes per second.

Image credit to LadyOfHats under this license

The axons are mostly transparent, in the same way as other cellular structures in the visual field. In the dark, they appear deep purple. While looking up into a bright sky, they appear white.

In a state of Deep Attention, I recalled memories from when I was a baby.

I remembered spending a lot of time watching my neurons flashing. It took a while to recognize physical shapes out of this sparkle-zone. I remembered seeing folds in my brain matter.

Over time, we are able to focus out further and further from the phenomena of our own brain into the visual field showing the physical world. As we begin to engage more in the world around us, we stop paying attention to the flashing of neurons, as it doesn’t have any particular meaning to physical life. We adapt to all these neural perceptions and stop seeing them. In the same way, our awareness of everything that seems nonessential to physical life gradually fades as that world becomes our primary focus.

There’s another field at play along with the visual, depth, and attention fields. I call it the “rationalization field” because it rationalizes things that don’t make sense into things that do — instantly visually transforming them into related understandable forms (based on our context) to make sense of them.

This field is of incredible importance in transforming and re-framing experiences and perceptions at higher frequencies of consciousness into comfortable physical terms that our waking self can understand. It can also translate neural and energetic phenomenon into physical imagery.

This is where rationalization in the dream state takes place. For example, when we’re flying through the sky in a dream, the rationalization field will frequently rationalize a car around us and a highway up in the sky. When this field is not in play, we see what’s really happening. This is related to the lucidity of the dreamer.

Some experiencing an OBE see through the rationalization field, some see without it. (see Muldoon for more — TO DO — find this reference!)

The visions in hypnagogia are sometimes shaped by the structure of the neurons behind it, which appear depending on the position and thus point of view of consciousness within the brain. The images that come can be inspired by and laid over actual neural structures.

Neurons seen through the rationalization field take shape based on our context. When looking at a fallen log in the forest, my neurons appeared as leaf-like forms. An octopus in my dreams was a neuron. Neuron-people were the source of many ancient artworks — cave paintings, petroglyphs, etc.

Image credit to Booyabazooka under this license

Another time, I was seeing this techno-organic circuitry overlaying things. Much like the “green leafy life” shape below but continuing on and connecting to other shapes. Like technical neural diagrams.

Falling asleep after a LSD/psilocybin trip, I was seeing the holographic rings (as “holes”) through the rationalization field being transformed into imagery.

With psilocybin, the visions we imagine happen at the speed of desire. Whatever we want to see appears as soon as we feel the desire to see it. When we close our eyes, we get a full-scale multi-sensory presentation of our energy-influenced desires and expectations.

We can experience imagination so clear that they can actually gaze upon it and change it in real-time! Manipulation of these bright and lucid images can actually cause laughter. I once imagined the face of an old man so clearly that when I willed the face to become all scrunched up, the result made me laugh out loud. I was able to break my own expectations and surprise myself.

When recalling something, I could see it as vividly as if it was in front of me.

Psychologists have studied how some people have song recall good enough that they not only sing the song with the right words at the right speed, but in the exact key of the original song. I have this ability, in my waking state. But when high, I could also fully hear the song playing in my head.

Where sensory input is absent, the projections from desires, fears, and other expectations may be experienced as real. This is certainly true in the dream state. In certain psychedelic states, our projection may be strong enough to be clearly observed.

We ACTUALLY see what we look for. We see our projections as fully and clearly as we see REAL things. Projections aren’t any less visually real than what we usually see, they’re just far less bright most of the time.

The strong focus of Deep Attention lights up the visions behind our closed eyes with an inner light. Cartoons are lit the same way. There’s a light behind them, shining through. The unconscious recognition of that inner light is one of the attractive things about cartoons. If they were front-lit paper cut-outs, they would lack something vital.

People in dreams sometimes glow from within in the orange/gold color of The Simpsons.

How we perceive the outer world and what we experience in the inner world is determined by the mental, emotional, and physical state we are in. Stimulation provides energy to the mind, which helps to power the visions. This stimulation may be anything; a head massage, indigestion, or satori waves during rest and sleep. Pleasurable stimulation will fuel positive imagery. If we are sitting in something wet, the visions may be of swampy wetness. If we are feeling ill, the visions may be of a negative quality.

The focus of our attention becomes the building block of everything else that we experience. Everything else becomes built out of that form, in the manner of fractals.

Happy visions can change to scary ones with a change in these sub-patterns. When my attention is firmly enough on a happy sunshine image, everything around it is fundamentally composed of thousands of tiny happy sunshines, and it makes pleasant, happy visions. But when I changes it into little skulls, they all together formed more scary, creepy visions.

When an emotional change occurs, every smallest unit takes on a similar shape. Each one becomes warm and giving or sharp and gray. The object of our focus shines out to everything else in your mind.

I’m having visions, where at higher frequencies, everything seems rounded and has a reflected band of light in it, like the light reflected in bubbles and in people’s eyes. They are windows to the soul. This reflectivity means it’s full of information. It indicates clear communication.

This reflection is a result of the stability of the “mirror of the mind”. When it is still, we can receive communication. When shaken up by the ripples of our own thoughts and emotions, it’s impossible to see this reflection.

See “Reception - Calming the Mirror of the Mind” in communication.php.

Image credit to Brocken Inaglory

The astral is a frequency with more meaning. Every little mote of what we see has within it the whole, and is receiving and becoming from the mood of the whole.

Each sphere is a consciousness, and within it is its dream, its experience. The bigger the sphere, the more open and true it is — the bubble reflects more, just as the larger the hologram, the more clear it is. When we’re very internally focused (in a small sphere), we have little connection with the whole. Keeping a tight focus like the waking self does leads to strong emotions. Bigger spheres of consciousness are more stable emotionally. They are less affected by the ups and downs of life.

Maybe a person within your big sphere has a really tight sphere of his own. His idea of everything outside itself is much more crazy. He might see you, but from inside his sphere you could appear as a fire spirit or alligator or stump. The more open we are, the more everything reflects the greater reality, and the more accurate our perception is. The view inside each sphere is our area of knowing, and outside is our expectations and projections.

As we focus in on something, we get to see the rest of the world reflected in it. That means we’re experiencing its point of view. We‘ve taken on the shape of its experience, and become it.

These spheres are full experiences from one point of view. This includes memories.

See also “Attention Becomes” in attention.php. This also reflects “Visual Attention and Becoming” above.

During potential rocking of the Ecstasy Trance (see “The Ecstasy Trance” in flow-into-us.php), my entire focus rocked slowly back and forth between each brain hemisphere. As it did, I was seeing (projecting) my visions through each hemisphere’s way of seeing. One side sees in distinct black and white imagery with well-defined edges, while the other sees in a wild spectrum of blending rainbow colors with blurry edges. It was the same visual imagery, but shifted between styles with the potential rocking.

To be clear, the entire visual field goes from one perspective to the other, not half and half.

Styles are styles of expression. Consider artistic styles, writing styles, and speaking styles. Each is a unique way of expressing something.

Just as every form we experience can be perfectly reproduced as a projection, each new style we experience is remembered and can be perfectly applied to a projection. I have found the exact styles of things I have barely paid attention to appearing in my dreams and in LSD visions. I’ve found I can dream with full accuracy in old black & white movie style, storybook illustration style, 60s psychedelic style, or Picasso style. If we ever briefly saw and understood a style, the style is remembered and can be applied to new things.

On Marijuana:

There’s a mode of imagination that follows exactly what would impress us the most. I’ve done this when playing guitar, where the moment the tune would start to get repetitive or predictable, I change it to something completely new and engaging to my attention.

Any styles that are in our recent attention are likely to be picked up in our imagination and dreams:

After playing with an application called Kai’s Power Goo that let me stretch and morph images, I went to sleep and everything I saw was getting the same effect. My mind instantly picked up the image-stretching style that was most recently in my focus and was applying it to everything.

A well-known effect of LSD and psilocybin is seeing tracers or motion trails when things move in front of you. As you move your hand in front of your face, you see it blurred out across its former positions. When looking at a tree, I let my eyes roam from branch to branch. As I did this, I saw after-images of each branch on my visual field for a moment longer.

This effect is because your visual neurons stay activated for a longer time before turning off.

In the Deep Attention state from marijuana, the energy of attention is so full that its position can be felt within the brain. When focusing, the energy is felt higher up in the middle of the two hemispheres, while unfocus allows it to rock back and forth between the hemispheres (see “Relaxation and Energy Field Rotation” in nature-of-dreams.php).

I can feel field changes caused by changes in my thinking. It feels like heat.

The area near the ears was warmer when I imagined things beyond the door. Relaxation lit up the area in front of my temples by my eyes. I felt thinking by my ears. The feeling that something is familiar is felt on the sides of my head.

Unknown to me at the time, the region of the brain near the left ear is associated with writing.

Being “baked” is slang for being high. Experiences like the above is why.

The feeling of fear is felt as a cool clarity in the front and sides of the brain. This is the feeling of any kind of focus, regardless of cause.

There’s an energy field alignment when two people in love touch. It forms a soft bond. Then when you move them apart, it feels like stretching, then little popping bubbles as the fields release from each other. I’ve only felt this with my girlfriend.

On psilocybin:

In my mind, I saw a constantly changing field upon which patterns — little condensations of markings — came into and out of focus. Some were small, like a single dark opening, some were larger like a central opening with marks surrounding it, and some were larger still (like the pattern in the second drawing). These patterns pulled at my attention according to their size and complexity. This appears to be an innate language of our mind, as our attention scans thought patterns and decides whether or not to go into them, engage in them.

These may be the “hot spots” seen in hypnagogia that immediately precede dreams (see “Hot Spots (Through the Veil)” in into-dreams.php.

When we engage in a pattern, it opens up, the energy of it “flowers” as we enter into it. We turn sideways to enter into the best physical 3D interpretation of it. We’re being drawn into the experience. We want to see, to be part of it. To look out through it.

Imagine life, simplified into what we turn towards and what we turn away from. The choices we make about where to focus our attention — that’s all there is. Life is a game of what we steer into and away from. What our attention is attracted to and thus FEEDS, according to its level of knowledge.

Inexperienced, we may only be attracted to bright and loud experiences, drama, extremes of sensation. But with more experience, we can avoid those which we’ve found lead to pain and only give our attention to those which lead to long-term happiness.

In both physical and spiritual life, our attention enlarges our experience. In physical life, curiosity about a person or object causes us to physically move ourselves closer, and through our proximity, that experience is enlarged. Outside the physical, the same happens without having to move through physical space. Our curiosity draws us into a 3D scene, which, in a similar way, enlarges around us.