does this count as meditation?

hey i learnt this thing (it first happened without effort while mildly on dxm but ive since managed to do it while sober)

where i concentrate on a point sorta.. in my mind. its very hard to explain. i concentrate on a 'point' (but really its a non-position, caus its not in reality) and slowly my field of vision turns into nothingness.

it works best in night time, because the nothinness starts in dark spots and grows until it covers my whole field of vision.

say ill be in bed, and its dark but i can still see everything. if i do this, i must ignore the outside world and not move my eyes' focus or anything, any movement and i snap out of it. anyway ill do it and parts of my vision will just plain dissapear. like they wont be there, filled by a void of vision. its not linear, splodges of void start covering my field of vision and when it gets more intense, eventually my whole field of vision is a void and im sorta -in- my mind. i cant move my eyes or anything caus then i snap out of it.

i dunno if this counts as meditation or if its a physiological thing. when in this state, i someteims see wierd shapes on a black background.

longest ive stayed in it was like 10 seconds.

once i did it then turned on the light and looked in the mirror and my pupils, instead of being huge from the darkness, were instead tinnnny and grew instantly.

so yeh i dunno if im actually just closing my pupil or if the closing of the pupil is due to the state that i am in.

this state is not like sitting there for half an hour, i can start it by concentrating for like half a minute but to get the whole way might take a minute or two

 

I think that I do something similar to what you are describing. I ususally do it to entertain myself during long boring things like church and math class... It's pretty neat though. I used to do it all the time when I was a little kid. Going a bit cross-eyed helps it work faster, for me at least. Sometimes it happens completely unintentionally when I've been staring (usually out of lack of sleep) for too long. Do you see splotches of color when you first start to "black out" and when your vision is coming back? I don't really think it's a type of meditation, but I suppose it could be useful to lose sight of physical things.

 

hehe yeah ive found that little trick out many times when completely bored...pretty fun i guess, wierdest thing is tryin it by staring into a mirror...your eyes make your face look very wierd and yeah cross-eyed a bot helps for me too..I dont think its meditation, just one of them wierd things like when you close your eyes and put your hands over them pressing reasonably hard, you start to see some mad CEV's, hours of fun

 

I think it's the cells in your eyes getting fatigued, meaning they stop firing. Normally, your eyes move all the time, so the stimulation on each cell keeps changing. But when you focus on a point (that is, when you don't move your eyes), the cells get the same stimulation for a long time. Eventually, they get fatigued (same thing happens when you hear a sudden noise; at first it startles you, but then it happens again, and again, until you eventually ignore it).

I imagine it would be more pronounced in the dark, where there is less light, and only some of the cells in your eyes (the rods) are functioning (cones need high light levels to "see").

 

i've done the exact same thing. it has happened to me during open-eye meditation, but i always thought it was because of the LSD i've taken!

 

hmm yes i hadnt thought of cell fatigue, it generally does require teh gaze to stay perfectly the same more or less

and yeh man, i love the eye pressing ones
since smoking weed, theyre more pronounced when i close my eyes

one time recently, i woke up and jammed my thumb into my eye as i left a dream
anyway i couldnt press my eye or it hurt. i was really pissed off because the eye pressing cev's have been one of my stress releif methods, i do it when im agitated from boredom (which strangely enough produces stress) but for entertainment nowadays i can often just close my eyes and see things, the longer i look the more i can see

 

haha, that's crazy. you're such a stoner.

 

one type of meditation they teach in wicca, is the candle or flame meditation where you stare at a candle flame for a bit, then close your eyes and recreate that flame in you mind (third eye area). Buddhism also teaches of a blue flame meditation where you close your eyes and concentrate on your third eye area until you see a blue flame.