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Fire Kasina with Jane Flowers
173 Plays1 year ago
How can you use fire kasina meditation to develop hyperreal imagery? How does this differ from mind’s eye imagination?
Vynn and Francis interview fashion designer Jane Flowers, who has developed a hyperphantasic ability using fire kasina meditation.
Jane describes how she developed imagery while doing fire kasina meditation. She talks about the progress from seeing visual snow, to the brain pattern matching it as 3D, to forming plants and rich, controlled shapes. She describes ways to prepare your mind and body for these visualisations.
The difference between Jane’s kasina visualisations and normal mind’s eye visualisations is explored in detail, including tactile sensation and comparison to reporting on psychedelics.
Prophantasia / hyperphantasia
Timestamps:
00:36 Mask illusion
02:41 Meditation imagery
05:16 2D to 3D
08:11 Kasina visualisations
11:20 Charging up
13:29 Phases of forming visualisations
16:00 Comparison to mind’s eye
21:59 Temperature
23:37 Therapeutic benefits, psychedelics
28:03 Implications for reality
32:47 Comparison to prophantasia
Show Links:
- Why Are Transgender People Immune To Optical Illusions? - mask illusion blog post by Slate Star Codex
- Kasina Practice, Mastering the Core Teaching of the Buddha - instructions in book by Daniel Ingram
- Commentary on the Vimuttimagga - canon sources on fire kasina visualisations
- Fire Kasina website
- Jane’s Twitter account
Contact Details:
Please follow us, get in touch, tell us about your inner experiences!
Twitter: @imagine_apple @SurenVynn @frabcus
Email: imagine@flourish.org
Theme written, performed and recorded by @MJPiercello
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Transcript
Introduction to Hosts and Guest
00:00:00
Speaker
Hello, hello and welcome to Imagine an Apple podcast with me as your host Vin and Francis.
Guest Introduction: Jane aka Janus Flowers
00:00:06
Speaker
Hello there.
00:00:08
Speaker
Today on our show we have Jane, also known as Janus Flowers on her Twitter handle, here to talk to us about imagining apples, horses and various other visual based stimuli.
00:00:21
Speaker
Hi Jane.
00:00:24
Speaker
Hello.
Unique Visualization Abilities
00:00:35
Speaker
So tell us more about yourself because I saw you wrote a little thread under our mutual friends tour account talking about your ability to imagine things with your mind's eye.
00:00:48
Speaker
But it seems like unlike normal people, you seem to have more of a refined ability with this practice, especially with Casina.
00:00:58
Speaker
Can you tell us a little bit more about how you got into this and what is different about your ability?
Background in Visual Arts
00:01:04
Speaker
Yeah, so I guess, I mean, I've always had, I'm a visual designer by trade.
00:01:09
Speaker
I'm a fashion designer, I used to be user experience designer.
00:01:12
Speaker
So I've always been a visual kind of person.
00:01:15
Speaker
But I've never had the ability to like, you know, close my eyes and literally see what's there.
00:01:20
Speaker
You know, I do like what everyone else kind of does, so I can do the mind's eye kind of thing.
Meditation and Visualization Enhancement
00:01:26
Speaker
But recently I did kind of over the summer, I had a lot of experiences with meditation.
00:01:32
Speaker
that kind of slowly started to, you know, I'd have my eyes closed and everything like usual and stuff would kind of start to coalesce.
00:01:38
Speaker
It would kind of, you'd start to see, it's kind of like looking at, I was kind of looking at an optical illusion and then like all of a sudden you see something just kind of pop into place.
00:01:49
Speaker
Like if you're looking at, if you've ever seen that kind of, there's this kind of mask illusion.
Optical Illusions and Visualization
00:01:55
Speaker
that's this animated mask that I think Slate Star Codex did a post on at one point.
00:02:01
Speaker
And you can kind of see it and it rotates.
00:02:04
Speaker
And the thing is, like half of people see it when it's popped out.
00:02:08
Speaker
Like it's kind of this like 3D statue thing.
00:02:11
Speaker
And half of them see it as if it's like concave.
00:02:13
Speaker
So it's convex or concave, depending on how you're looking at it.
00:02:16
Speaker
Right.
00:02:17
Speaker
Yeah, I'm familiar with that.
00:02:19
Speaker
Do you know what it's called?
00:02:20
Speaker
Because I don't really have a word that I can face.
00:02:22
Speaker
I just heard the mass collision.
00:02:24
Speaker
I have no idea exactly what it's called.
00:02:27
Speaker
It may have a particular name.
00:02:28
Speaker
I have no idea exactly what the thing is.
00:02:31
Speaker
We'll call it the mass collision for now.
00:02:33
Speaker
I can send out the link to the post.
00:02:35
Speaker
I have it somewhere.
00:02:39
Speaker
So meditation you mentioned.
00:02:42
Speaker
I just wanted to ask you what sort of meditation practice this was because I know that there's all these different kinds going about.
00:02:49
Speaker
Was it a particular meditative practice that you did?
00:02:52
Speaker
Yeah.
00:02:53
Speaker
Not really, no.
00:02:55
Speaker
I have a weird experience with meditation in terms of I seem to have a lot of access to a lot of in terms of at least going by kind of like the standard, I guess, kind of Buddhist practice of the jhanas and everything like that.
Altered States and Meditation Stages
00:03:10
Speaker
I never had to really practice for the jhanas.
00:03:13
Speaker
They kind of came to me.
00:03:15
Speaker
I was doing a breathwork course one time and I had never done that sort of thing before.
00:03:23
Speaker
So I just kind of sat down and followed the instructor and everything.
00:03:27
Speaker
It was a class.
00:03:28
Speaker
And then all of a sudden after like 10 minutes or something,
00:03:32
Speaker
I entered this weird altered state and only because I'm on Twitter and see tweets by people who do meditation, seriously, I'm like, I know what state I'm in, this is Echata.
00:03:43
Speaker
And so I ended up going through Jonah 1 and then very quickly after that, Jonah 5, which is when your whole body dissolves and it kind of feels like you just kind of leap over the Grand Canyon and keep falling and falling and falling.
00:03:55
Speaker
And so that just kind of came out of nowhere.
00:03:57
Speaker
So I kind of had been playing around with that
Visual Snow Phenomenon
00:03:59
Speaker
all summer.
00:03:59
Speaker
And so playing around with that experience after having this kind of like being thrown into the deep end is when I started to play around and started to notice these kind of visualizations.
00:04:10
Speaker
And I kind of started to be kind of gravitated towards them.
00:04:13
Speaker
just because they were very interesting.
00:04:14
Speaker
And I've also had a lot of visual snow, which is if you have your eyes open, you generally see kind of a lot of almost kind of a static sort of thing.
00:04:25
Speaker
It's usually a little more colorful than like a black and white TV static.
00:04:29
Speaker
And it's very slight.
00:04:31
Speaker
I know some people who seem to have it much stronger than I do.
00:04:34
Speaker
But I've always been fascinated by that kind of visual phenomenon as well.
00:04:38
Speaker
And I've always tried to kind of like shape it, if that makes sense.
00:04:42
Speaker
And I was never really able to kind of do it.
2D to 3D Imagery Development
00:04:45
Speaker
But with my eyes closed for whatever reason, when I was getting into this kind of Jonna territory, there seemed to be some kind of way that it
00:04:53
Speaker
there's some kind of order kind of collapsed and it never it didn't happen all at once um it was probably probably about a month or so of kind of doing it every couple days for a couple hours each um i started to kind of slowly slowly slowly be able to kind of see um first it was kind of going from 2d to 3d um and it was basically just kind of blobs at that point it wasn't anything fancy or it wasn't like any images or symbols or anything like that um but so what's going from 2d to 3d
00:05:19
Speaker
Basically, kind of like what I was saying with the kind of optical illusion of the mask.
00:05:23
Speaker
It's like you can kind of, it kind of just pops into place all of a sudden.
00:05:27
Speaker
It's kind of like you're kind of like walking by something and then the perspective kind of pops out into place.
00:05:33
Speaker
I guess it's kind of like almost, yeah, it's like you're looking at a painting and it's like, for whatever reason, the leading point or whatever.
00:05:39
Speaker
And my...
00:05:41
Speaker
knowing what I do now about having read a lot about a lot of papers about visual reification and how the brain's processing works in that regard.
Brain Processing and Visualization
00:05:50
Speaker
It has to do with how the rain manufacture shadows.
00:05:54
Speaker
Because what is a shadow?
00:05:56
Speaker
It's basically information you don't have.
00:05:58
Speaker
And so for whatever reason, that part of the visual imagery, or at least this is my kind of like new harebrained theory, for whatever reason, if you keep paying attention long enough to the noise or the static or whatever you see when you have your eyes closed, you can start to run that kind of machinery, that kind of reification.
00:06:18
Speaker
The brain wants to see things in the noise.
00:06:20
Speaker
It wants to see, you know, signal in the static.
00:06:23
Speaker
So it will start to eventually once it can pinpoint enough, you know, things that can latch on to, it will say, ah, there is a shadow that is a 3D like space.
00:06:32
Speaker
And so it kind of looks like I get very early on.
00:06:34
Speaker
It's literally just like blogs and you have to be very and they're almost in my case, they were very monochromatic.
00:06:39
Speaker
So it was very difficult to see at first.
00:06:40
Speaker
So it took a lot of patience.
00:06:43
Speaker
But slowly, slowly, slowly, things you would start to get a handle and it's kind of felt like early 80s or 90s CGI kind of stuff.
00:06:51
Speaker
Right.
00:06:52
Speaker
Like, you know, there's kind of like gray landscapes and things like that.
00:06:55
Speaker
Just very basic, very blobby still.
00:06:58
Speaker
And knowing some stuff about computer vision from having done all of that, knowing some stuff about ray tracing and things was very fascinating to kind of be building this process from the ground up with my
Early Visualization Experiences
00:07:08
Speaker
own brain.
00:07:08
Speaker
But one thing led to another and eventually like, you know, just doing that kind of practice.
00:07:13
Speaker
And then you start to see things that actually look like things.
00:07:16
Speaker
Like in my case, I ended up seeing a lot of, usually my kind of first sign that I was like actually in the kind of space where I could actually start to see images was plants for whatever reason.
00:07:27
Speaker
It'd be trees, like thickets.
00:07:29
Speaker
My interpretation of that is that that's a very good surface symmetry wise because there's a lot of leaves and things.
00:07:37
Speaker
So it's very symmetrical, but it's also very deep and detailed.
00:07:40
Speaker
So where do you imagine these trees and plants?
00:07:43
Speaker
Is it like with your eyes closed or do you open, keep your eyes open and then just project it into the world?
00:07:48
Speaker
They are, right now it's closed.
00:07:50
Speaker
Sometimes if it's in a dark room,
00:07:53
Speaker
And I've been doing this meditation for a little while.
00:07:55
Speaker
I can keep my eyes open and I can kind of see it.
00:07:57
Speaker
It's almost kind of like a split screen almost.
00:07:59
Speaker
I can't imagine it quite yet on my visual field, like in the room with me.
00:08:05
Speaker
I've heard that that's possible.
00:08:07
Speaker
Maybe I'll try that one day.
00:08:09
Speaker
Yeah.
00:08:10
Speaker
Do you think it gets better?
00:08:12
Speaker
So from what it sounds like, pre-meditation, you weren't able
Casina Practice Discovery
00:08:16
Speaker
to do this.
00:08:16
Speaker
And then after meditation, you suddenly were practicing this for a while before you got the ability to then have these visual techniques.
00:08:27
Speaker
visual, I don't know what to call them, hallucinations, I suppose, or like visual practice?
00:08:32
Speaker
Yeah, visual.
00:08:33
Speaker
I mean, yeah, I guess the technical term in meditation I learned after this.
00:08:37
Speaker
So I guess I invented this kind of meditation independently.
00:08:40
Speaker
It's called casino practice.
00:08:41
Speaker
Casino.
00:08:42
Speaker
Like I mentioned in my Twitter thread.
00:08:44
Speaker
But yeah, so that's the, I've just heard it referred to as the casino visualizations.
00:08:49
Speaker
There's not really a name for the particular visualizations, at least that I'm aware of.
00:08:54
Speaker
Right.
00:08:55
Speaker
So it sounds like this is a very recent ability that you've picked up as well, because you mentioned you were playing with this last summer.
00:09:02
Speaker
How long ago did you gain this capacity?
00:09:06
Speaker
Probably like a month ago or so.
00:09:08
Speaker
A month ago?
00:09:09
Speaker
Wow.
00:09:09
Speaker
It has not been all that long.
00:09:13
Speaker
And has it been aided beyond just like the meditative practice?
00:09:19
Speaker
Is there like more training that you had to do or some kind of like altered state of mind that you have to enter before you're able to start visualizing in the way that you're describing?
00:09:29
Speaker
Not
Intensive Visualization Practice
00:09:30
Speaker
really, no.
00:09:30
Speaker
It takes, it sometimes takes a while.
00:09:33
Speaker
And again, I kind of have to build it up from scratch each time.
00:09:36
Speaker
It's not like I can go into it immediately and immediately be able to control what I want to see and immediately see everything super rich.
00:09:43
Speaker
It usually takes a couple minutes at least.
00:09:45
Speaker
To get to the phase where I can even see my tiny little leaf on a plant or something like that.
00:09:51
Speaker
Which again, I have no idea why that's the starting gun for me.
00:09:56
Speaker
That's kind of in the Buddhist terminology, there's the term for how you know you're in a particular jhana as you look for their word for a sign is called a nimitta, I think.
00:10:07
Speaker
I believe I'm pronouncing that correctly.
00:10:10
Speaker
But anyway, so I guess my nimitta is like a tree or something like that, which is weird.
00:10:14
Speaker
And I have no idea if that comes, if that's like, again, for whatever reason, it feels like maybe if it's going off of visual reification and shadows and symmetry, plants seem like a good enough kind of substrate for that.
Ketamine and Visualization Enhancement
00:10:28
Speaker
Otherwise, maybe it's just, I mean, my last name is flowers.
00:10:31
Speaker
Maybe it's a psychological thing that's personal to me.
00:10:33
Speaker
I have no idea.
00:10:34
Speaker
But yeah, it's only been about a month or so.
00:10:37
Speaker
And the only thing I've tried it with other than meditation is ketamine because it seems to be very tied to muscle relaxation.
00:10:48
Speaker
Whenever I'm in the kind of state where I can control them, I notice a whole lot whether I'm sober or I have tried ketamine with it.
00:10:56
Speaker
there is a very intense kind of muscle relaxation.
00:10:59
Speaker
And so ketamine is a muscle relaxant.
00:11:02
Speaker
It's one of its main properties.
00:11:04
Speaker
So playing around with that has helped.
00:11:06
Speaker
It speeds it up at least.
00:11:07
Speaker
So if I'm ever really tired and I really don't want to do the discipline that takes, you know, it usually takes at least 30 minutes to get to full power by myself, sometimes longer, depending on the day, depending on if I've... Can you tell me that process of you getting charged up?
00:11:24
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, it really kind of depends.
00:11:26
Speaker
But like I said, I kind of just, I usually, when I meditate, I usually lay down.
Deep Meditation Process
00:11:31
Speaker
That's another thing that I found really helps is that, again, it seems to be very, despite this being a visualization, despite this seeming like it would be a very kind of heady,
00:11:41
Speaker
like visual kind of process, it is very tied to the body somehow.
00:11:45
Speaker
I'll go into later because it seems to be very tied to both John O4 and a little bit of John O5, just in terms of the body experience.
00:11:55
Speaker
But all that to say, I usually lay down, you know, just totally flat because it helps to feel, you can feel when you're releasing tension, you can feel when the body needs to release tension somewhere.
00:12:06
Speaker
And that generally helps speed up the process a whole lot.
00:12:10
Speaker
So it's not just kind of this disembodied mental thinking phenomenon, which is interesting as well.
00:12:15
Speaker
So I'll lay down, I'll put on a mask usually.
00:12:19
Speaker
It depends.
00:12:20
Speaker
The funny thing is, the more I treat it like a ritual, the faster it comes.
00:12:24
Speaker
So sometimes I'll light some incense or something like that.
00:12:26
Speaker
Sometimes I'll plan my whole day around it in the sense that I'll fast the entire day.
00:12:30
Speaker
But sometimes I won't.
00:12:32
Speaker
It really kind of depends, although fasting does seem to help make it much more intense.
00:12:38
Speaker
And then I'll just kind of lay there.
00:12:40
Speaker
And it usually takes... Usually I do it in silence.
00:12:44
Speaker
Sometimes music is fun.
00:12:46
Speaker
But usually I've found that in the beginning it's a little too distracting to have music and focus on kind of building up the visuals.
00:12:52
Speaker
But once you get going, and the times I have kind of pushed through that, having music is fantastic to go with these things.
00:12:58
Speaker
They don't really mesh together in terms of like, it's not like I'm like seeing a music video for the music.
00:13:06
Speaker
But they, for whatever reason, the kind of sensations complement each other.
00:13:11
Speaker
Even if it's not in a literal symbolic sense, it's just kind of nice to have kind of like a guided kind of music path to kind of go on instead of just kind of doing in total silence.
Expanded Perception States
00:13:21
Speaker
But again, that also makes it very difficult in the early stages to focus on just the visualization.
00:13:25
Speaker
So it's kind of a balance.
00:13:27
Speaker
But again, yeah, usually I just kind of stare into the noise on the back of my eyelids.
00:13:32
Speaker
until usually it doesn't take long at all to at least kind of see some 3D blobs or visualizations or something.
00:13:38
Speaker
And then past a certain point, there's a kind of weird phase after like a minute or two when you're in it a bit more.
00:13:45
Speaker
When it seems like your visual field, when your eyes are closed, it seems like it widens by 30 or 40%.
00:13:51
Speaker
And so, you know, whatever your peripheral vision is, like, increases by a lot.
00:13:55
Speaker
And so it kind of feels like you get much more deeper in it all of a sudden.
00:13:58
Speaker
It's kind of like, I guess that would be similar to axis concentration is kind of what I'd call it.
00:14:03
Speaker
But once you're in there, that's when you feel like you're kind of in that world, for lack of a better term, versus just kind of watching it from a looking glass.
00:14:10
Speaker
So for whatever reason, that step is crucial.
00:14:12
Speaker
I don't know how to describe it other than that.
00:14:15
Speaker
It also usually gets slightly darker.
00:14:17
Speaker
Even if I'm in a room that's pretty light, my vision will get very dark.
00:14:23
Speaker
And usually, especially at this phase, usually the only colors I'm seeing are shades from complete black all the way up to a dark royal blue.
00:14:34
Speaker
And then from there, I just watch it and just try, sometimes I'll concentrate and try to actually build up something symbolic like
00:14:40
Speaker
either a plant or like a statue or something like that.
00:14:43
Speaker
Otherwise, I'll just... What's the most complex thing that you can imagine?
00:14:45
Speaker
I'm sorry, go ahead.
00:14:46
Speaker
What's the most complex or complicated thing that you can imagine
Complex Scene Imagination
00:14:50
Speaker
visually?
00:14:50
Speaker
I mean, it kind of, it's interesting because it's like, what you think is complex is not quite as complex as, you know, because you would think that
00:14:58
Speaker
Oh, it's really difficult to imagine a, for example, one thing I do a lot is detailed rooms or palaces or decor or things like that.
00:15:07
Speaker
For whatever reason, I have this weird kind of British royal country vibe.
00:15:12
Speaker
And you were able to do this before?
00:15:15
Speaker
No, I mean, in my mind's eye, yes.
00:15:17
Speaker
But not in visual, as in feeling like I'm walking through a simulation of all of them like I do.
00:15:23
Speaker
No, I was not able to do that.
00:15:24
Speaker
Although I do have at least some background in interior design as well, so maybe that contributes to it in some regard, but that was not interior designing with my internal casino visualizations back then.
00:15:37
Speaker
Right.
00:15:38
Speaker
But, yeah, so probably the most complex thing is one of my favorite things to do is kind of go into these like very kind of ornate houses, rooms or whatever.
00:15:50
Speaker
And then kind of walk around in all the details or kind of, I don't say walk because I don't really have a sense of a body when I'm doing this.
00:15:57
Speaker
That has been something I've been working on.
00:15:59
Speaker
Right.
00:16:00
Speaker
So do you think there's a difference between, I guess, walking through what you simulate versus walking in your mind's eye?
00:16:10
Speaker
I mean, I really, mind's eye is different.
00:16:12
Speaker
And I've been really thinking about mind's eye recently, just because in contrast to this, because, you know, you never think about, you hear about some people who can visualize things for real like this.
00:16:24
Speaker
But you always assume whenever people say mind's eye, they mean not your actual eye, but your kind of mind's eye.
00:16:31
Speaker
Mind's eye is interesting because it's very tied to abstract reasoning, or at least in my case it is.
00:16:36
Speaker
I don't want to speak for other people's experiences.
00:16:39
Speaker
And I can totally see the apple.
00:16:40
Speaker
I know the test you're talking about, the apple.
00:16:43
Speaker
I can totally see that in my mind's eye totally fine.
00:16:46
Speaker
But comparing it to trying to do the same in Cassina visualizations, it's interesting because then you actually do see the apple.
00:16:53
Speaker
So a lot of it kind of leads me to wonder, what is mind's eye visualization?
00:16:57
Speaker
Is it actually visualization or is it kind of recruiting the kind of thought patterns that you would have in your brain for whatever reason is good enough at making that kind of inference?
00:17:09
Speaker
that it recruits all the thought patterns you would have as if you were to have seen this image, but you're not actually seeing it.
00:17:16
Speaker
So it's kind of interesting to think about, so what is Mind's Eye visualization in regards to Casina visualization and why did we evolve that versus like just actually Casina or something like that?
00:17:26
Speaker
Right, yeah.
00:17:27
Speaker
Cool.
00:17:28
Speaker
That's really fascinating.
00:17:29
Speaker
One thing I've been wanting to ask you is like, so is your advanced imagination ability limited just to visual stimuli?
Experimenting with Tactile Sensations
00:17:36
Speaker
Or can you also do this for sounds and I don't know, smells and touch?
00:17:42
Speaker
No sounds, no smells.
00:17:44
Speaker
Touch is weird.
00:17:45
Speaker
I've been playing around with that some recently, more than the visualizations actually.
00:17:50
Speaker
Every now and then, I can get, if I'm playing around with the visualizations, and for whatever reason, sometimes one will come directly into my eye.
00:18:01
Speaker
Let's say it's a long vine or something like that, or it's some pointy object or something.
00:18:06
Speaker
For whatever reason, it goes exactly where I'm imagining where my eyes would be.
00:18:11
Speaker
For whatever reason, it does have some sort of tactile stimulation.
00:18:17
Speaker
I'm not exactly sure how to describe it.
00:18:19
Speaker
It's very kind of diffuse.
00:18:23
Speaker
It's not like a sharp point at all.
00:18:25
Speaker
There's some sort of... So I'm not sure if it's...
00:18:31
Speaker
kind of like a mind's eye sort of thing where it is just kind of the brain's reacting as if you expecting it as if you would kind of like flinch away from something in the real world or if it is actually the like the tactile stimulation being repurposed in the same way that my visual reification or visual processing abilities are being so I need to play around with that a little more.
00:18:54
Speaker
From the little bit of research on it from traditional practitioners, there's not a whole lot about tactile stimulation in particular.
00:19:02
Speaker
I've heard some people say
00:19:04
Speaker
that they felt things, but not in any great detail.
00:19:09
Speaker
The one, it's kind of, and then you also have to kind of draw a line between, between tactile stimulation in the sense that, you know, all the things you're seeing tie directly into your tactile experience versus things like, you know, having Janna-ish feelings.
00:19:25
Speaker
Like for example, I feel like whenever I'm in kind of the strongest parts of these visualizations,
00:19:31
Speaker
I'm certainly in John 4, and it seems to be kind of touching on John 5 in the sense that I'm not dissolving my entire body yet.
00:19:39
Speaker
But there is this sense, especially when I'm looking at very abstract landscapes, very kind of spacey places,
00:19:46
Speaker
you kind of get this body feeling sense of being space almost.
00:19:51
Speaker
You get the sense that you're kind of constructing your perception of having body, being bounded by a body.
00:19:57
Speaker
But you also get the sense that this could be let go of, this is not a given.
00:20:02
Speaker
So there's interesting kind of like byproducts in the tactile sense that aren't directly linked to what you're simulating, experiencing.
00:20:11
Speaker
And then of course, with John of War, there's also just the great feelings of peace and equanimity and all those kind of things.
00:20:18
Speaker
So there's that.
00:20:20
Speaker
There's a lot of interesting things going on there.
00:20:23
Speaker
And if you've ever read anything about neural annealing, from my felt, kind of folk sense of what neural annealing feels like in me, from having done various psychedelics and having done meditation,
00:20:35
Speaker
That is definitely going on with the casino as well.
Neural Changes and Mental Organization
00:20:37
Speaker
There's some sort of internal moving the furniture around kind of thing is probably the best way I would describe it.
00:20:44
Speaker
So something's going on with that too, tactile.
00:20:46
Speaker
But again, it doesn't seem to be exactly tied to the images.
00:20:50
Speaker
But who knows, maybe it's one of those things where I've heard sometimes that, at least in terms of genre meditation, or sometimes in trips that you see,
00:21:02
Speaker
Versicular ayahuasca.
00:21:04
Speaker
Sometimes people hypothesize that, oh, your brain's showing you whatever your repressed traumatic, whatever memory is, but in a different form than what the actual memory is about, what the subjective content is about.
00:21:18
Speaker
It's not showing you that content.
00:21:20
Speaker
But it's showing you some other kind of isomorphic equivalent representation.
00:21:25
Speaker
So you can deal with it, so you can process it, so you can kind of feel its energy, but also not be triggered by whatever the kind of traumatic symbolic kind of baggage that is tied with the literal kind of one for one representation of what it is.
00:21:40
Speaker
So maybe that's
00:21:41
Speaker
going on to with the visualizations and the feelings.
00:21:43
Speaker
Does that mean you can visualize an emotion and it has an imagistic quality to it?
00:21:52
Speaker
No, it's not that particular synesthesia.
00:21:55
Speaker
That would be cool.
00:21:56
Speaker
Maybe I should play around with that.
00:21:59
Speaker
One thing I will say is that sometimes colors can lead to temperature, which this is something I actually read about first before I tried it myself and I ended up being to confirm it.
00:22:10
Speaker
But, for example, if I do, I'm not sure exactly if it's tied to an emotion that allows me to interpret.
00:22:17
Speaker
I'll have to pay attention closer next time.
00:22:19
Speaker
For whatever reason, sometimes.
00:22:21
Speaker
It seems to be more tied to intensity rather than, say, anger or something like that.
00:22:26
Speaker
But if I can generate a red light or generate a lot of red shading, because in my case, usually I'm seeing my kind of primary color that I end up kind of everything kind of emerging from is this kind of dark
00:22:38
Speaker
blue black um sort of thing so usually it kind of feels like it's um you know most things are kind of coming from that color even if they change in a different color slayer um but if i kind of bathe the whole scene every now and then with this kind of red um my body temperature will rise like dramatically um i usually i'm usually laying down under a blanket or two um but if i do this um sometimes i have to like throw off the blankets um during the middle of the meditation because i'm
00:23:04
Speaker
sweating so much.
00:23:05
Speaker
So it's interesting that you can kind of play around with that kind of visualization.
00:23:09
Speaker
So not emotion per se, but you can create temperature, you can mess around with body temperature, which again, this is something I read about first before I tried it myself.
00:23:20
Speaker
So at least that seems to be a little more confirmed in terms of, and you can probably all find a source of the Sindel or something on that.
00:23:27
Speaker
Cool.
00:23:28
Speaker
Sounds like you have some pretty advanced Bene Gesserit powers being able to control your temperature with nothing but your mere imagination.
00:23:35
Speaker
Yeah, exactly.
00:23:37
Speaker
So do you use it for anything, for therapeutic ends or something like that, or is it just for fun?
00:23:44
Speaker
I mean, I guess you could say they're kind of one in the same to me.
00:23:48
Speaker
But it does seem to be, there is kind of something interesting going on in it.
Sensory Clarity Improvements
00:23:55
Speaker
Like I said, it feels very tied to, even if it's not traditional genre, the genre maps, it seems to be tied to some of whatever kind of neural and neural aspects that the genres have, those kind of very freeing, those kind of very
00:24:13
Speaker
relaxing aspects.
00:24:15
Speaker
So doing it very intensely for a couple hours, it definitely feels great.
00:24:20
Speaker
And it has definitely helped me work through some stuff.
00:24:22
Speaker
And it's very interesting that usually the next day, I'll have a lot more sensory clarity just in general as well.
00:24:31
Speaker
More sensory clarity and then also less
00:24:34
Speaker
Just kind of less in general, I guess, for lack of a better term, symbolic thoughts.
00:24:39
Speaker
I'm still not, I'm not one of those people who's like inner voice totally goes away.
00:24:42
Speaker
But I can definitely notice that in addition to having a lot more sensory clarity, just the general kind of mental loops in general kind of neuroticism goes way down, at least kind of an afterglow for the next day or two.
00:24:56
Speaker
So, yeah, in the mental health regard, I think it would be a very interesting area to explore, especially if more people can get there with psychedelics, which, again, they seem to help.
00:25:07
Speaker
But I'm very hesitant to recommend, oh, go try psychedelics.
00:25:10
Speaker
And this is like a shortcut because it doesn't feel quite like that.
00:25:13
Speaker
It feels like there is a lot more skill involved.
00:25:15
Speaker
Yeah.
00:25:16
Speaker
And that the psychedelics are like, at least a little bit of kinamine I've tried.
00:25:20
Speaker
It's not that, I mean, I've never taken recreational doses of ketamine before, so I have no idea if what I'm seeing is actually a K-hole or something like that.
00:25:27
Speaker
I have no idea.
00:25:29
Speaker
I have no reference for that kind of set of visualizations.
00:25:32
Speaker
All I'm doing is making it, because it seems to be very tight to visual, or sorry,
00:25:37
Speaker
muscle relaxation.
00:25:39
Speaker
I'm mostly using it for that because sometimes just knowing my body and having done it on yoga, I still have a lot of knots and a lot of tightness just kind of everywhere and a lot of tension.
00:25:50
Speaker
They can be very difficult even consciously after hours of body work for me to let go of.
00:25:53
Speaker
So having that kind of always helped.
00:25:56
Speaker
But it would be interesting to do more.
00:26:00
Speaker
Tie in, I've never seen any really
00:26:03
Speaker
and it may be out there, I haven't really looked, any kind of research that ties in casino meditation and those kind of visualizations to, for example, the visualizations you see on LSD.
00:26:13
Speaker
Because again, a lot of psychedelics seem to have different kinds or different phenomenon visually that they, whether it be in the subjective experience, in the content you're seeing, or just if you've ever seen an article from Qualia Computing,
00:26:28
Speaker
where they talk about, here's how to write a rigorous report of a psychedelic trip.
00:26:33
Speaker
And they give you all these kind of like, you know, very kind of scientific research, experimental kind of pathways to say, okay, no, if you're looking at like an alien in whatever you're, you know, I guess some people see aliens if they take like DMT or whatever.
00:26:50
Speaker
Just kind of like what I'm saying, the casino visualizations, it's like that's your brain's, for whatever reason, your brain's visual reification, visual processing algorithms are just going on over time.
00:27:00
Speaker
So whatever you're saying, you can consider it real, but you could also, alternatively, you could kind of do this kind of rational second on approach.
00:27:08
Speaker
where you say, okay, I'm going to look at how fast is this image pulsing?
00:27:13
Speaker
How am I seeing the shadows?
00:27:15
Speaker
How am I seeing trails is another one, because your visual field has a intrinsic frame rate that if things move too fast, that's when you see a blur versus being able to see something very clearly if it's moving slower.
00:27:28
Speaker
So how does that affect my visual refresh rate?
00:27:31
Speaker
So they have all these little...
00:27:33
Speaker
hints and suggestions for breaking it down at kind of the level under content.
00:27:39
Speaker
Like what is generating this content?
00:27:41
Speaker
What in my kind of body perceptual experience could be creating that?
00:27:45
Speaker
So I have no idea if anyone's done that comparing again, say LSD or DMT visualizations to casino visualizations in terms of are they doing the same thing?
00:27:54
Speaker
Are they doing something different?
00:27:56
Speaker
But that would be a very interesting pathway to research, I guess.
00:28:00
Speaker
Maybe I'll try it one day.
00:28:02
Speaker
Cool.
00:28:02
Speaker
So other than visualizations, how does this practice affect your sense of reality?
00:28:09
Speaker
You feel like, oh, this is something that causes you to question certain fundamental assumptions you've had?
00:28:17
Speaker
Or, yeah, how does that affect
Perception Construction vs. Reality
00:28:19
Speaker
reality?
00:28:19
Speaker
I wouldn't say it doesn't make me question like, oh, we're living in a simulation.
00:28:24
Speaker
I would assume for some people it probably would, especially if you haven't had near as much.
00:28:30
Speaker
research as I've had into just how perception works, just partially as part of my work as an artist and visual designer, and then also partially just from sticking a lot of this kind of stuff.
00:28:42
Speaker
Probably the main thing is it reveals just how much your brain is constructing perception.
00:28:51
Speaker
Whenever you see the exact same shadows in Cassina that you're visualizing as you see in real life, you say, okay, you wonder how much, in one of my tweets, I think I mentioned something along the lines of your intuition for how much you're constructing versus how much you're perceiving.
00:29:10
Speaker
And our brains are very good.
00:29:11
Speaker
And studies have shown this long before anything on meditation or Cassina or anything.
00:29:17
Speaker
has a lot of just kind of basic research in the area of visual psychology and things like that, have shown that we take in a very paltry amount of sense data, but our brains are just very good at, I wouldn't say deceiving us is the right word, because it's a very helpful deception.
00:29:35
Speaker
It's very good to be able to have all this data.
00:29:38
Speaker
So you don't want to use it kind of rejordically in the sense that, oh, this is all an illusion.
00:29:42
Speaker
Like, no, it's not.
00:29:43
Speaker
It correlates to the real world enough that it's a very hopeful illusion.
00:29:47
Speaker
But it's constructed.
00:29:49
Speaker
Yes, it's constructed.
00:29:50
Speaker
You can see, you know, it's like, let's say, maybe most people's.
00:29:54
Speaker
intuition for direct realism is the term that's thrown around a lot in this regard.
00:30:00
Speaker
How much of your experience is totally real versus how much are you constructing it after the fact?
00:30:06
Speaker
And I think a lot of people would say, oh, it's at least 50% real, if not more.
00:30:12
Speaker
Forgetting there's a little weirdness on the edge of optical illusions and things like that.
00:30:17
Speaker
So it's an edge case, who cares?
Mind's Eye vs. Hyperreal Experiences
00:30:20
Speaker
So that's, you know, most people would seem to buy direct realism.
00:30:25
Speaker
But when you do things like Asenia and you realize you can kind of recreate the entire world based on just a little bit of the kind of stimuli you're seeing on the back of your eyelids, it makes you wonder, is that about how much information I'm taking in in terms of, you know, like,
00:30:40
Speaker
photons from light and then I'm just reconstructing all this world so instead of your intuition being oh it's like 50 to 80% real world that I'm taking and I'm only processing like maybe 20 or 30% it's like no it feels kind of like there's like 1% stimuli and 99% construction though which again it's like you don't want to go down the line of like oh this isn't that means everything's a simulation or things like that or that means I'm hallucinating all the time it's like no that's
00:31:08
Speaker
It's kind of a confusion in terms if you frame it that way.
00:31:11
Speaker
It's just you become more fascinated by how the world works and that you would have thought, based on everything you know, you would have never thought to step outside your own minds in that regard or realize that you're fabricating that much.
00:31:26
Speaker
Then it makes you wonder what else can you fabricate for your own benefit.
00:31:30
Speaker
So, yeah.
00:31:31
Speaker
Cool.
00:31:32
Speaker
So it just sounds like you're more aware than most people about how much of your visual, of your vision is constructed as in like 99% is construction and only 1% is just photons of light stimuli.
00:31:46
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, and that's my estimate.
00:31:48
Speaker
That is very, just very impressionistic off the cuff.
00:31:51
Speaker
I have no idea if there's an actual stat or if that could even be measured.
00:31:54
Speaker
But do you feel those numbers to be like roughly right for you?
00:31:57
Speaker
Like 1% to 99%?
00:32:00
Speaker
Yeah, I would say somewhere between 1% to 5%.
00:32:01
Speaker
Just because knowing, you know, whenever you close your eyes initially and whenever I start the meditation, there's nothing there.
00:32:07
Speaker
But then being able to reconstruct, you know, basically the whole world.
00:32:12
Speaker
You know, you wonder, it's like, you know, is this just me, you know, recreating it versus usually I'm seeing it?
00:32:18
Speaker
Or again, my argument would be I'm using the same source or I'm using the same processing that I would be using normally day to day.
00:32:28
Speaker
I'm just repurposing that and just changing the 1% that is external stimuli from light photons to whatever I'm seeing on the back of my eyes.
00:32:37
Speaker
So that's kind of my thought experiment.
00:32:39
Speaker
That's kind of how it feels intuitively right now.
00:32:41
Speaker
I have no basis for any of that other than my intuition.
00:32:44
Speaker
But that's my step.
00:32:46
Speaker
Cool.
00:32:48
Speaker
Yeah, I think I've run out of any questions now.
00:32:51
Speaker
Francis, do you want to take over?
Defining Hyperreal Visualization
00:32:54
Speaker
Yeah, I just want to slightly loop back to this distinction between mind's eye.
00:32:59
Speaker
And I think, Jane, you're calling these powers you've gained in the last month or two hyperreal.
00:33:03
Speaker
Is that the word you've been using?
00:33:05
Speaker
Yeah, once they get to the most kind of like the kind of strongest point.
00:33:09
Speaker
Yeah, that's that's how we kind of describe them.
00:33:12
Speaker
It's kind of like if you had a, you know, it's kind of like modern CGI.
00:33:15
Speaker
I mean, it's just like, you know, incredibly hyper realistic to the point where, you know, you really can't tell.
00:33:20
Speaker
And especially because it's happening in front of you in real time.
00:33:23
Speaker
Yeah, it's very the only, you know, the only thing that, you know,
00:33:27
Speaker
helps you stay grounded is the fact that it does have a still, even though it's very hyperreal, it does have a dreamlike quality.
00:33:37
Speaker
I'd be interested, I've never done a whole lot of lucid dreaming.
00:33:41
Speaker
I fall into them every now and then, but that's very rare.
00:33:44
Speaker
And I generally don't remember my dreams a lot.
00:33:46
Speaker
I know I have them, I know I wake up with them a lot, but I don't generally remember them much longer past waking up with them.
00:33:54
Speaker
So I would assume that it's similar, it's all the same kind of visual processing minutes.
00:34:01
Speaker
Dreams are slightly different because again, it's like in this regard, I know exactly what I'm doing.
00:34:05
Speaker
But in dreams, it's like you never really notice like, okay, where did that come from?
00:34:08
Speaker
Where did that come from?
00:34:09
Speaker
You're not paying attention to all the kind of like narrative sequential logic of the dream versus usually I can kind of pay attention to it.
00:34:17
Speaker
In terms of differences from like your normal day-to-day mind's eye, so it sounds like it's in your actual vision, like your eyes are closed usually when you're doing this, but you're seeing it where you would normally see things, like you start doing it by looking at the white noise that you see with closed eyes.
00:34:35
Speaker
Correct, yeah.
00:34:35
Speaker
And then when I do my eyes, I can kind of do the split-screen effect where it's like, it's not, I can't make things 3D, like, you know, on a background of real-life stuff, but I can kind of do this where I can kind of see the kind of, for lack of a better term, kind of like the Merc, the kind of visual field that I see when my eyes are closed, if I'm looking at like a blank wall in a dark room or something like that.
00:34:58
Speaker
So it's definitely, it is definitely the real visual perception and it's not the mind's eye after image.
00:35:04
Speaker
And in your mind's eye, you're a designer, so I'm assuming you get full quality, really realistic lighting and color and shading when you're imagining things.
00:35:13
Speaker
Yeah.
00:35:14
Speaker
I have a tweet somewhere where I talk about, oh yeah, I see the apple.
00:35:16
Speaker
And then I go on to write this whole story about how I can visualize, oh, it's in this one.
00:35:20
Speaker
It's like this American Gothic kind of setting.
00:35:22
Speaker
And the wife watches the Chip and Joanna games, like decor show.
00:35:27
Speaker
She watches that.
00:35:28
Speaker
And that's why your kitchen is decorated that the apple is in.
00:35:30
Speaker
That's why it's decorated.
00:35:31
Speaker
So it's like there's the whole red button.
00:35:34
Speaker
If you visualize that as hyperreal instead, would it be, in terms of the detail of what the colors and textures are, would it be about as complex as the Mind's Eye one, just in your actual vision?
00:35:45
Speaker
Or is there some other difference other than it being in your actual vision?
00:35:47
Speaker
That's a pretty interesting question.
00:35:51
Speaker
I haven't really thought a whole lot about what my Mind's Eye visualization is in regards to Casina, because it seems like in both cases, but it's particularly in Mind's Eye now that I think about it,
00:36:04
Speaker
you wonder how much you're actually seeing versus how much is your brain agreeing, okay, I am seeing this, if that makes sense.
00:36:13
Speaker
It's almost kind of like this subjective negotiation of, okay, I'm seeing enough of an apple to agree that I'm seeing enough of an apple, if that makes sense.
00:36:22
Speaker
And particularly it feels that way in mind's eye because in Messina, that's not always the case.
00:36:27
Speaker
Because, you know, it's very real.
00:36:29
Speaker
So there's this kind of sense that, and again, it's like, I don't want, you know, that somewhat sometimes sounds pejorative in the sense of like, oh, excuse me, oh, I'm tricking myself or oh, I'm like, you know, deceiving myself.
00:36:40
Speaker
It's like, no, that's, you know, as a designer, I can say firsthand, having a mind's eye visualization, you know, really helps.
00:36:48
Speaker
But at the same time, it's not,
00:36:50
Speaker
It's not quite the same thing as, oh, I'm actually perceiving all these kind of new volumetric shadows, or I'm perceiving all those kind of things.
00:36:57
Speaker
If I thought about them, I could go to them.
00:37:00
Speaker
But I'm not getting them for free in the sense that when I imagined Apple, they're like all there, and it's not 100% there.
00:37:06
Speaker
It's like I have to consciously focus on, okay, now let me pay attention to the shadow aspect.
00:37:11
Speaker
So when I imagined Apple, like, yes, I can see all the light and all the everything of that.
00:37:15
Speaker
But it still seems like it's 2% of the detail that would be there in real life just because the nature of that kind of processing, the kind of more abstract serial processing that the kind of abstract reasoning comes with is very computationally intensive in the brain.
00:37:34
Speaker
Just like doing math in your head is very computationally intensive to do that kind of discrete step-by-step logic.
00:37:40
Speaker
So it seems like your brain is very good at saying, we can take it wherever you want it.
00:37:44
Speaker
We can visualize whatever you want to visualize.
00:37:47
Speaker
But for the purpose of imagine an apple, we can reach a very quick agreement on what that is in terms of, okay, I can imagine the very tip the apple versus...
00:37:57
Speaker
With Casina, it seems to be more of a parallel computing phenomenon in the sense that you see it all there and it all happens for free.
00:38:08
Speaker
You see the shadows are just there.
00:38:09
Speaker
I don't have to imagine and say, it's kind of like when you think about, oh, I'm going to think about breathing, I consciously control my breathing.
00:38:17
Speaker
That's kind of the difference, I would say.
00:38:19
Speaker
Usually with Cassina, it's like your breathing's running on autopilot.
00:38:23
Speaker
The visualizations are running on autopilot, unless I kind of very slightly influence them.
00:38:29
Speaker
Versus with mine's eye, it's entirely that very, very manual sense of I am controlling my in-breath and out-breath.
00:38:36
Speaker
If that makes sense.
00:38:37
Speaker
Yeah, that completely makes sense.
00:38:40
Speaker
Have you heard of the word profantasia?
00:38:42
Speaker
So this is in the, like, aphantasia, hyperphantasia, hyperphantasia spectrum.
00:38:47
Speaker
There's a guy called aphantasia meow who invented this word.
00:38:53
Speaker
It means in his definition projecting fantasia.
00:38:58
Speaker
So it's getting imagined imagery into your actual vision.
00:39:03
Speaker
And the kind of
00:39:04
Speaker
I've heard of examples.
00:39:05
Speaker
I've got a friend who does this a bit who talks about seeing dragons come out of the pavement.
00:39:09
Speaker
When he was a child, he was very bored and he would be imagining things a lot.
00:39:13
Speaker
And then eventually he got to the point where he could see them in the real world.
00:39:16
Speaker
And similarly, I've heard of people like at high school, people they hated disappear, like invisible, like they became invisible and things like that.
00:39:24
Speaker
So that feels like a kind of more similar to your hyper real things, like dragging out into your actual vision and being a bit more kind of altering the real world.
00:39:34
Speaker
Maybe, but maybe not, because you could do that in a less intense way, perhaps as well.
00:39:39
Speaker
Do you experience anything like that where you've taken these hyper real things and made them happen with your eyes open?
00:39:46
Speaker
Is that even useful or more useful that you do that?
00:39:50
Speaker
Like I said, I can manage the split-screen thing, where I can kind of, again, if I have my eyes open and I have a blank enough surface somewhere in my visual field, it kind of acts like as if my eyes were closed, in the sense that the same visual snow or whatever.
00:40:06
Speaker
can go on on that surface.
00:40:09
Speaker
It's not quite so busy.
00:40:10
Speaker
So it's essentially like having a big surface is equivalent in some ways to just having my eyes closed.
00:40:17
Speaker
It's anything for my kind of visual snow to kind of play on.
00:40:21
Speaker
I would imagine, given that I can do that, I would imagine that there's not really any limit and that past a certain point, you wouldn't need, your visual snow could get on, you could have it interact on whatever background you want or whatever real life thing you want.
00:40:38
Speaker
I can do some kind of, when you talk about making someone disappear that you don't like, I can't do that constantly as if, okay, erase them, they're gone, I never see them again.
00:40:50
Speaker
But sometimes I'll be staring up at my bed at night at the light fixture in my room and usually it works better when the lights are off.
00:40:59
Speaker
But I can kind of sort of progressively make it smaller or erase it.
00:41:03
Speaker
But it kind of feels like...
00:41:05
Speaker
It doesn't quite feel like the same thing casino-wise, but maybe it does.
00:41:08
Speaker
But it just kind of feels like you're stretching the noise you get already, which again, maybe that goes against what I said earlier, which is like most of the noise you're getting is actually stuff you're constructing anyways.
00:41:19
Speaker
So I can do little effects like that, but not in the same way that it's like, oh, let me create a dragon right in front of me in real life.
00:41:26
Speaker
But again, it's like I've heard of...
00:41:29
Speaker
just within the narrow bounds of casino practice, I've heard of that being possible.
00:41:34
Speaker
Or at least some of the original sources that kind of lay out the practice for this meditation, or at least formalized it in the canon, like say that that kind of stuff is possible.
00:41:43
Speaker
So maybe, again, clearly it's like, maybe a month from now we'll be riding dragons everywhere in my real life.
00:41:50
Speaker
I don't know.
00:41:50
Speaker
Fantastic.
00:41:53
Speaker
Yeah, no, that's super interesting.
00:41:54
Speaker
It does feel like as a society, we've only just begun to
00:41:58
Speaker
explore how we learn to do these things better and the different kinds of them there are.
00:42:02
Speaker
It feels like very, there's a lot of work to do to unpick the different ways of learning it.
00:42:07
Speaker
Super interesting.
00:42:08
Speaker
Fascinating.
00:42:09
Speaker
I feel like you're pro-Fantasia, if we can even call it that, abilities, far outstrain mind, full brain of imagination.
00:42:18
Speaker
Thanks, Shane.
00:42:18
Speaker
That was fantastic.
00:42:19
Speaker
Yeah, thanks for having me.