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But remember the spot that I turned into a square. I think maybe what ever is not a real stimuli of sight, that you see, is imagined; so maybe it's easier to play with it, rather than something that is really out there, or just darkness.
Well, since I started just a few days ago; I'm not suppose to have much of a progress necessarily; so we'll live and see.
Yeah, focusing on an afterimage trains the attention which in any case should be an essential skill though, but I guess it's not really useful after getting past the newbie stage (not sure when that ends though :p)
Old thread I know but I don't CAAAAAAAAAAARE as Pewdiepie would say,
I absolutely love this idea and I am going to start doing this tonight! :woohoo:
This thread has become new, with new ideas, new interest, and hopefully new success. :-)
I've found that after I've focused on the darkness for a while and light appear, I can somehow "push" the light. I've been able to push the light until it forms a line, but not something like a circle yet. It seems to me that a key skill to learn is concentration. The better concentration I get, the more it seems I can do with this stuff.
I'm now using these cards to train concentration. I zoom in on a single card with an image viewer, until it covers almost the entire screen. The idea is you first learn to keep one ball afterimage for five minutes, then two, three and finally you should be able to keep a four ball afterimage stable in your mind for five minutes.
http://tulpa.info/images/guides/cards.png
Currently I have no problems keeping on ball in my mind for more than five minutes, but two balls is still difficult.
From what I've read on other websites and forums, it seems like as your concentration skills improves, it should at one point start to get easy to change the afterimages, for example a circle into a square.
I made images for the individual concentration exercise cards and added a black dot in the middle to keep the focus on.
http://i.imgur.com/DKPx5.gif
http://i.imgur.com/f6r15.gif
http://i.imgur.com/UN5XJ.gif
http://i.imgur.com/PA4tS.gif
Hey good job phasemancer. I don't know how you find all those forums and sites; I guess it's probably because you're not lazy like me.
Anyway great; I'll train on that too. And a good job on the images.
I think you were right that the "pixels" and the images that the mind creates, are not the same thing; the after images are probably something else too.
After reading your posts and the ones you gave in the links, I tried to focus on some brightness that I saw in the darkness, and just on whatever besides the noise. It was probably after some training with the afterimages, and I wanted to sleep. I started to see the noise like when you first just start to see the 3D in a stereogram; and then an image started to appear from the back of the noise, in an odd angle; a flat image that didn't come straight towards me. It disappeared before I really saw it. I was falling asleep a little bit; so it was probably HI; but still an interesting way to bring it. And I don't have a lot of it usually.
If I remember correctly, I was expecting that something will appear, and not from the noise, but somewhere else. So you guys can try this, and see what happens.
I think that all of this is generally good for the imagination. Yesterday I tried to make something like that to appear again; and the imagination started to produce a lot of stuff that was constantly changing; never became vivid though; and at some point there was a bit too much light, and then I noticed that I almost hear sounds that I imagine. So I started to focus on that; and a lot of the sounds I couldn't really distinguish between whether I was really hearing them or it was a really vivid imagination. I think I heard some voices at some point. I hope that's not how you start to hear voices telling you to do stuff... nee... I really don't care. :-)
So this post was basically a mass of random stuff that had something to do with the subject.
I just use google :p For example one of the things I was searching for was "meditation afterimage rotation", because I was wondering whether anyone could rotate afterimages, since for example Sythix's tutorial mentioned rotating images.
I noticed something else that makes it seem like the afterimages, pixels etc are different things also. I was able to move one of the round afterimage, but then after a while the afterimage came back in the original spot, so suddenly I had two "afterimages". It seems like what happened is that the afterimage was somehow still imprinted, but when I tried to move it, my mind made a copy and moved that while the original afterimage appeared again after a while.
Great work on making something appear. I think expectation is important. If you expect something to appear in a lucid dream, it tends to appear, and I think the same principle could be valid here. Was it like a full-colored image, or just an outline? I see mostly outlines, in HI I might for example see the outline of a car driving by.
Haven't tried focusing on sound, should try that. I guess if you get good at this, you might be able to hear your thoughts as if they were from an external voice if you want, but if you can make it appear you should be able to make it disappear also. A few days ago when I was focusing on light and made a lot of colored lines appear, I tried to focus on making them move to the music I was listening to, and after a while they started moving to the music all by themselves. Was pretty cool, looked kinda like those visualization things in winamp.
I didn't have HI for a long time. It's hard to know what is HI, and what is LD. I used to have just pictures appear and disappear pretty quickly. That's what it was; but it came from an odd angle. I started to see a picture; maybe a part of it was still in the dark. I mostly knew it was an image. I usually have a knowing what is not real. For instance, once when I opened my eyes, right after a dream, I saw an illusion, a spider like grey shape; and even though it looked totally real, I knew it was an illusion
I just found that more than a century ago, professor George Trumbull Ladd at Yale University did scientific studies on this. Here are pdf's of the studies
DIRECT CONTROL OF THE 'RETINAL FIELD': REPORT ON THREE CASES
DIRECT CONTROL OF THE RETINAL FIELD
What the hell?! Only 4 subjects out of 16, didn't report success. What are we (And more importantly I'm) doing wrong?
Too bad he didn't write the instructions of the experiment.
Anyway thanks for this material.
It seems like it is supposed to happen quite quickly when you do it correctly and the skill should also improve fast. It's definitely not been improving quickly for me, even though I do have some success, but my control of stuff is still rather limited, so I guess there's something I'm not doing quite right :p
There are some hints in the articles though. One point is that is seems important to focus at the correct distance
It also looks like you should select a single point of light and try to change that into something else, this is similar to what Mylynes writes.Quote:
Miss C. at first had no success at all. But by persistent trying, lines corresponding to the limbs of a cross began to appear in the retinal field; and once she got a complete cross. This experimenter thinks that her failure at first was largely due to looking too near; for several times, after she had tried in vain for some minutes, the limbs of the cross would suddenly start up in the distance, as it were.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Mr. W. P. M., 1897
It seems like the students had problems with the exercises if they were feeling tired and had troubles focusing their attention, but had most success after a day of reading and focused attention, if they were not exhausted.Quote:
The color of the 'Eigenlicht' had (ordinarily on beginning the experiment) the appearance of a dancing mass of vari-colored dust. As soon as attention and will had gained control of the mass, the color seemed to be at their mercy.
I'll continue experimenting with this and I have some new ideas from these articles that hopefully will help me get more useful results faster.
Yeah, it's not like any skill. I could fly a plain within an hour, probably. I can do anything (without bragging :-p). But those things are not like any skill; it's like the success here is at the mercy of the subconscious part of the mind, which sometimes just mercifully gives us a glimpse of what could be done with it; and there's no training method, known to us.
But there probably could be a method; and I'm sure it could be like a skill.
There must be some people out there TODAY, that practice those kind of things; like some Buddhist monks or something. If anyone can find it - it's probably you (a pretty blunt hint).
A few more things I observed; and wonder what you'll think of them:
1) After work, I ride in a car for a while; and usually look straight ahead, most of the time. When I return home, When I close my eyes, I have the sensation of going forward, like in the car; and I kinda see things move towards me - like what I see in the car; including some other things on the rode. It's not vivid; more like the "mind's eye" thing.
2) In the complex shapes, like the circle in your avatar and the similar square, I sometimes see a positive afterimage.
3) Yesterday after looking at white shapes and the white parts of the complex shapes, first I saw them as white or black (don't remember); and then they became a strong blue; and quickly disappear. Couldn't change the color. Actually a few times it was purple.
The papers I linked to previously seems to be some of very few scientific investigations into this, but it seems to be pretty common in spiritual practices.
It looks like similar practices might be used in various types yoga, buddhism, chaos magick etc. and I think that it is possible that what is referred to as "opening the third eye", is basically learning this stuff, to actually "see" what you imagine in a perceptual way. The descriptions I find are always a bit vague on some points though, I guess it's hard to describe and especially to completely describe all the details, like is it good or bad to move or focus your eyes, so I think it's easy to do some small thing wrong.
The exercises I've found all seem to fit in one of these categories:
*Focus the attention on light you can see with your eyes closed, and change these into different shapes and colors
*Visualize an object from memory/imagination and focus the concentration on this while simultaneously watching the darkness behind the closed eyes until the imagined object appear in front of you
*Focus on an afterimage as long as you can, until one day you can see the afterimage without first looking at an image
I've also read (parts of) some books (The Headtrip by Jeff Warren and The Dream Drugstore by Alan Hobbson) that suggest that hypnosis can enable this (at least in some people) by disabling inhibitory systems that stops you from "seeing" object you imagine so you don't get scared of an imaginary tiger or whatever, these systems are disables when you dream, and inputs to consciousness are internal rather than external. Even so, internal inputs seeps through all the time and is still an important part of how we see, it uses your previous experiences and actually generates what you expect to see, which is not always what's there. An example is the optical illusion of a vase and a face, another is the optical illusion where you find your optical blind spot, you see that you don't see a dot on some sheet, but then when it's switched to a pattern, the brain fills in the blind spot with the pattern instead of showing nothing, because it expects the regular pattern to repeat.
Now I've definitely made progress since I started. When I close my eyes I can see colored spots and blobs, can move them around and make them increase in size. What I've not been able to do yet is to perfect shapes that are clear and bright, like the afterimage of a cross or a circle. I'm definitely learning something, and making progress in some direction, but as I haven't found really clear descriptions of how the progress should be and how to know whether you're doing thing correctly, so I can't yet tell with 100% certainty whether or not I'm making progress in the right direction, though I'm quite sure that I am at some level, but I'm also quite sure that I could do stuff much more efficiently if I knew how.
For your questions:
1) Interesting, maybe memory of what you just did show up somehow.
2) Me too. I've noticed that when I close my eyes, for a fraction of a second I see more or less the same picture as I saw with my eyes open, but often just the more light parts, then it changes into a negative afterimage after a second or so. I've been practicing this lately, closing my eyes and trying to keep the image longer and longer, and imagining as many details as I can.
3) I've seen this also, afterimages turning blue or purple after a little while, I think that blue or purple color may have something to do with activation of Koniocellular cells in the Lateral Geniculate Nucleus in the Thalamus. If this is so, then of course another questions is whether that is what you want to do, or if you actually want to active other cells.
It seems that people who have success with these things, do it through influencing the subconscious. And my subconscious is really hard to influence. That whole placebo effect ~ believing in stuff. So it won't be a good method to learn this, for me.
I actually thought of going to a hypnotist, if it's not going to be expensive, then closer to winter, when it's less hot. But like most those kind of things, it'll probably be a waste of time and money.
To an extent that is true, though I think that the Mylynes way of moving "pixels" around should require less of this than methods where you imagine an object and then see it.
You're giving me an idea. We know it's possible and that the more you believe you can do it, the more likely it is that you'll have success, this is what autosuggestion is useful for. Repeating something to yourself makes many times your subconscious believe it, so saying something like "When I close my eyes, I see many pixels that I can manipulate into shapes and change into different colors" out loud or just in your head for maybe 5-10 minutes a day should help. I'm going to try this at least.
I think the main problem with going to a hypnotist is finding someone who has enough knowledge to actually be helpful, but who knows.
This morning I woke up after sleeping maybe 6 hours, and I thought I'd just lie in bed and try to practice this a bit. I put my blanket over my eyes to make sure it was really dark, and then I tried to focus on "selecting" a single "pixel" to try to change it into something else. As I was doing this I noticed a few times that images was flashing by and suddenly I found myself fully immersed in a dream. I was standing on a road outside some tunnel and realized that I had just fallen asleep, so it definitely works for WILDing also.
Now I've made some definite progress. Making stable shapes is still difficult, but I've found that it's quite easy for me to generate colored blobs. I look at the points of light and then I focus on the memory of a color and try to visualize it, I found that I have most success with dark red and blue. I can now focus on red and visualize the color red and how it would look until I get a red cloud of color, I can then expand this cloud to fill my entire field of vision. With blue it's similar, but I find it harder to expand the blue color to fill a large area for some reason.
I found something pretty good. I actually didn't try to find something for the after image, or even related to this topic. I was actually reading about LAB color space in Photoshop; and somehow got eventually to this thing.
It's called Impossible Colors or Forbidden Colors. Here's the Wiki - Impossible colors - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
There's an image there for one of the 2 colors; I searched for the second and found it; and in the comments, someone wrote about a crazy afterimage he got, that lasted for a long time. Only then I closed my eyes and focused on the afterimage, after viewing the picture for a while.
What I saw was purple and lite blue; separately; either or. I can switch between them at will.
I didn't get to experiment with them a lot; so I leave you with this.
I took the picture from Wikipedia and made the second with it; taking the colors from the other picture I found on the web, of a less good quality.
You need to cross your eyes, until you form a third square between the two; and the crosses become one cross; that is what helps keeping focus.
I also give another image that leaves you with a "super green" after effect. Look for a minute or more at the center of the red part of the picture (I made a little dot) and then slowly (I think) move your eyes to the bottom part, and then just continue watching in awe. (Don't know if it can help with the afterimage)
I would like to find more pictures like the "super green" one; if there are others. I don't think that there are other "impossible colors" images.
BTW, I couldn't really see the "Impossible colors"; but at least it can help with our task, maybe.
Anyone still active in this thread? However, about this whole technique thing. I cant seem to see the pixels described in step 1. Any tips on how to see them?
What do you see?!
@MrAccident
Cool stuff. This actually reminds me a bit of something I found a while a called called "Tables of Chartres".
Attachment 3697
You're supposed to cross your eyes and it's a bit similar to that impossible colors, but the main thing here is that the different figures will appear at different depths and should help with depth perception. You're then supposed to switch between the red and blue color at will and this should improve your concentration.
This site has some more description about this.
When I look at the impossible colors, I don't think I really see the impossible color, but I notice the color changes between the two colors, this is also what happens to me when I look at at the Tables of Chartres, with the Tables of Chartres you're not supposed to focus on the afterimage, but I tried and noticed I see an animated afterimage with changing colors.
@binnen
Make sure it's completely dark. Sit in a completely dark room, or put on a blindfold or a blanket over your head.
Look at what you can see, it may look completely dark, but there should be a bit of noisy pixels there.
To increase the number of pixels you should sit for a while. One thing to do is to calm your mind by focusing on the feeling of your breath going in and out of your nose. Try to feel the temperature of the air, you should feel that when you breath in the air is colder than when you breathe out. Your breath works as an anchor to focus your mind, to avoid thinking of other things, try to completely still your inner dialogue.
At the same time as you're doing this, pay attention to the darkness in front of you. Is it changing? After a while you should notice dots or clouds of light, you can also try to imagine that you are seeing a blue or red cloud of light in front of you, and see if it starts to appear after a while. Just be patient, don't give up if you don't see anything for the first few minutes.
Thanks, Ill try that tomorrow when I have time. If I understand this right, what you see is your eyes input and the "pixels" are your minds input? And practising strenghtens that?
Binnen:
Closed-eye hallucination - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
What I see is "Level 1". Only once I saw "Level 2"; recently, after a lucid dream started which I snapped out of, pretty fast.
The image of "Level 1" is really similar to what I see; a bit slower though. You can also enlarge the image, to study it closer.
I wouldn't call that "pixels", because they move. I call that noise; like on TV, when there is no station signal.
You can be in a "totally" dark place; but if there is light behind close eyes - you can see the noise, lighter.
When I close my eyes I see level 1 noise, like MrAccident, also slower than in the animation on Wikipedia. One of the things I try to do sometimes is to capture one of these little dots with my attention, currently it takes me a while, up to half an hour, because they are moving fast and are hard to catch, but then it looks like the afterimage of a light bulb and becomes more stable.
After I have my eyes closed for a couple minutes, I see something like the animation with the caption "CEV pattern simulation". I've found I can change the color of this cloud like pattern, most easily to either red or blue, something greenish if I focus on green for a while, I've tried other colors with less success. If I observe these clouds for a while they become more three dimensional and look more like a moving mesh or clouds with a bit of depth.
Also I had a WILD again this morning. I was just observing the darkness for a little while right after I woke up, and tried to think of a cross to see if it appeared, I was still really sleepy and my thoughts started to drift and I was kinda daydreaming, thinking about running, and suddenly I noticed I would start to see a faint outline of what I was thinking of, so I just continued through with that thought while observing what I saw and the image increasingly became clearer and clearer until I was completely immersed in it and was able to move my dream body inside what had just been an image in front of me. I woke up after a short time and tried to do the same several times more, I started to notice the images becoming clearer again but the first one I focused to much on the actual image, and it seems better to focus on the distance and not details until it appears, afterwards I was too awake.
