I'm sure I could have spent hours browsing through threads to find my answer to this but I'd rather come at you guys with my perspective and mine only. I tripped on acid for the first time almost 2 months ago. My first trip of any kind actually. I decided to do it because I really felt stuck in my old ways, I felt like I had a mental block and I wanted to kick down the door so to speak. A friend whom I trust had the dose so I decided to take the leap on two days preparation. I've been on a very positive track since my experience, I must say, whether or not the trip had anything to do with it or if I just needed an excuse to make the life changes that I needed to make. Anyway. During my peak we were listening to some music, it began to rain outside and I decided to just close my eyes and vibe. I began to see some highly defined, colorful, and powerful visualizations. I would compare them to the work of Alex Grey, only they were ever moving, changing, morphing into various shapes, colors and depths. It felt like I was falling into it and the further I fell in, the better I felt, the more the butterflies in my stomach flew. After a few seconds I realize what was happening and backed off, opened my eyes. So I closed them again and got the visuals back and I went a little further... Getting happier, looser, giddier, however it can be described as I descended further and further into it. Then I got scared and backed off again, I opened my eyes. As much as I tried later that night, I was never able to get there again. Everyone began laughing about the rain at that point and my concentration was broken. Has anyone had an experience like this? If so, is it typical of someone who is searching for it, does it happen to everyone, can it be reached again? I want to know everything you know about it.
Yes this is half the point of psychedelics is to have the visual experience. You do have to take enough acid for the visuals to come through, the more you take the more they will be prevalent. But it also takes some focus on your part too, depending how far you want to go into it. It pretty much happens every time though as long as you took enough lsd. It can go anywhere from morphing and breathing walls, to complex geometric patterns, to all out 3d and even more then 3d visualizations. You can see your entire reality drop away to another dimension. Just trip again and pay attention to what is happening in front of you. The more you pay attention the more it grows. Sometimes it does it what it wants, and sometimes you can control it or at least direct it. As you trip more and more you'll understand the dynamics of it. There is a point known as the freedom point where everything you desire, will manifest in your visual field. Complete reality mastery!
I felt like the visualizations I was seeing on the walls, the carpet etc were different than what was achieved when I closed my eyes and focused. Maybe I'm wrong. Made me think about what has been described to me with people who experienced with sensory deprivation tanks but I can't say for certain because I've never used a tank before.
Closed eyes visuals and open eyed visuals are related and play off each other. But when you closed your eyes you probably went real deep into it. I have never tried a sensory deprivation tank, but I've meditated with closed eyes in silent darkness and achieved some of the same results. While it might not be completely the same, it most likely is stemming from the same part of the brain. Your mid-brain, meaning your pineal and pitutory gland, are functioning as this point. You can tell as you reach finer and finer circuits in your brain that you get on, that more refined visions appear to you. Just keep following whats there, it can lead you into states of enlightenment, or at least show your what your brain is capable of.
you are talking about closed eye visuals, or CEVs. they are prominent on most psychedelics, more so on certain ones for certain people. i just described my CEVs from another psychedelic, in another thread. i'll link you later and finish this post then too. for now i have to leave to go see a cover band play Dark Side of the Moon try laying down in the dark and listening to music (with eyes closed) or sitting in the sun, listening to the sounds of nature around you. both of those have produced very surreal CEVs for me.
i heard somewhere that if you cut a ping pong ball in half and place one half over each eye that the uniform color/light produces intense cev's a flasher program that flashes the screen at a rate you choose produces intense patterns and 3d geometrical objects as well as different colors and 'feelings' other than one of the two colors the screen flashes between ie flashing between black and white produces shapes and colors as well as words with different colors for different themes, feelings and musical elements i like light blue and light yellow .. 2 colors that combine to give white
This is my theory.. The patterns represent everything we love in life that allows us to devote ourselves completely to Experience.. to centre us in the moment. When we're completely submerged in that experience, we return to our natural state of "Being", "Oneness". I say the patterns represent everything we love, because they are in complete harmony with themselves, from the shapes to the colours. This is why they're so beautifully attractive, because they're motifs of whatever it is that makes us feel at peace. We can't help but devote ourselves to that glorious state of harmony. Blah blah blah, essentially... when we chill the fuck out - we start to notice things. Under the influence of psychedelics, the visuals get more and more intricate. It's like staring at a white wall, when you pay calm attention to it it becomes not so white, but in fact an infinite number of shimmering colours, greys, and coloured greys, from all areas within the spectrum of colour. It then becomes a game of Chicken. "How far do you really wanna go with this?" So when the drug wears off and the curtains are drawn, we think we've lost something and the "panic" begins, and we start frantically searching for the window into that state of being.. but nothing in fact has changed, someone just closed some curtains. So, in answer to your question.. yes, it happens to everyone, but you can't reach that state again because you never really left it.. attention has just been directed towards the sense of self. Cue meditation. Sit, walk, breathe, watch the sunset, paint, rock out like a motherfucker.. whatever you can do to allow yourself dissolve into Experience. Pfft... Can you believe that took over an hour to type? I gave up on trying to make it flow.. fuckin' syntax. Wordsmiths: I salute you.
i saw sometime a long time ago in a youtube video that the form contests are an artifact due to the way neurons are connected in the visual cortex; and the way the visual field is actually broken down and processed by the brain here is an interesting PDF .. it is quite long an involved but its definitely relevant to this topic: http://people.mbi.ohio-state.edu/golubitsky.4/reprintweb-0.5/output/papers/6120261.pdf
Cool bananas, 'tis my pleasure :2thumbsup: And wow, I have absolutely no idea what most of that means
I usually experience vivid Closed Eye Visuals on LSD exceeding about the ~200 ugs dose range. The Cev's tend to be fast moving, constantly shifting, morphing as you alluded to and interactive with other senses as well. I find the closed eye visuals a good example of the interaction of the various structures of the brain. The human brain has features that are basic among mammals as well as more developed structures which are unique to primates and solely us as well. In general, I think many aspects of tripping reveal this evolutionary development of our minds with more clarity. So as far as visuals are concerned, I think that perhaps more primitive parts of the brain are breaking down patterns into form constants with closed eyes to keep the mind kind of aware of pattern recognition as the more primitive aspects of the mind likely feel in a 'threatened state'. Visuals can take on forms and characters more personal and based on memories and/or in correspondence with other senses as well, this may be higher developed areas influencing their part in the CEV's. Those who have a bad trip, likely often have the more highly developed parts of the brain or thinking mind cater to these lower areas of mind. With open eyes, on high doses, I tend to get for lack of a better description a temporary agnosia with LSD. With everything shifting and morphing, people's features can be dramatically transformed, text can become incomprehensible, various objects and my surroundings can become unrecognizable while breaking forms but unlike true agnosia where people cannot identify people and objects, my mind seems to be able to still usually know what it is that I'm looking at in some sense.
our brains process vision in several steps, motion, edge detection, pattern recognition, etc .. dont know too much about neurology but ive read a bit about this before. an image file on a computer is just a grid of pixels .. if you put it into an image editing program you can process the same image different ways and get it to look different. ur starting with the same "input" tho, the same data .. just like you look at something sober then look at the same thing tripping and see it a different way. certain drugs tweak the way our brains process visual information at different levels, changing the sensitivity to patterns and such. the patterns were always there .. it is the same information you were just not sensitive to it before, your brain thought it was irrelevant maybe. now that your on drugs that part of your brains visual processing is now more sensitive to picking up the patterns, and you notice words in the suble variation in the texture of a brick wall or something. theres not actually words there, thats why when ur sober, ur brain has the sensitivity set high enough that it wont register bullshit pattersn as nonsense information..see but when your tripping the sensitivity is lowered, there are patterns in everything and you might think you are seeing words on the wall, or maybe almost words but not quite clear enough to make out... i think those who have tripped a lot will know what i mean its necessary for our survival to be able to recognize patterns and detect the edges/boundaries of objects, but not every pattern. there has to be some type of threshold, difference in contrast or something before the brain recognizes that as the edge of something and not just part of the texture of that object. otherwise that would be detrimental to our survival because being super sensitive to subtle variations in texture would just be a distraction and make us miss important visual cues probably. the "form constants" that you see on psychedelics are something else entirely tho seemingly related. i think they arise from the way the parts of the brain that process visual information are structured.
The other day I was seeing absolutely brilliant open eyed visuals (OEVs). I was staring at a spiritually energized statue of the god Hayagreeva. I began to see crystal domes, crystal dna strands, orbs of heavenly white light, brilliant colored spheres, morphing and evolving constantly. Really out of this world stuff that words do no justice to. Like T. Mckenna said, if you could somehow take one of these objects back to the rest of the humanity, it could change life as we know it. What you can see is beyond what you could even conceive of in your wildest dreams!
DNA strands seem to be a somewhat common visual. I wonder what people related that too when they saw something similar tripping but hundreds or more years ago before anyone knew DNA existed yet ?
I know I've seen some energy structures that may be found even later in physics. So maybe its the same thing. For Dna it could of been just trippy spiral ladder or it could of been the same idea, I know these are important somehow, I just don't know how. Gregg Braden talks about something the tortion field or tension field or something. Anyway I've seen the structures he tries to portray, and there everywhere. In fact I think they spin out of one dimension into our dimension and somehow create free energy enough to perpetuate itself. Perhaps even being powered by the will of the universe.
A lot of this seems to correlate with our other discussion regarding subjective experience of color in a sense. The qualia of the visuals during a trip, as in how we feel, experience, and interpret The visuals during a trip is what makes these experiences profound from this sense, it is beyond capacity of a computer to emulate.
