(02-20-2025, 02:20 PM)Nugget Wrote: The cat my granddaughter and I saw the other night made us think of my white Persain. When he passed away my gr,daughter was not quite two and I had picked her up in another town for a weekend visit.
I didn't tell her there would be no kitty at the house, but as we passed by where I had placed a statue atop Schplatt's grave she said 'Aw...kitty's sleeping".

The kid gets it. 

They do, more than us adults : )

(02-20-2025, 01:12 AM)Ksihkehe Wrote: Good thread and some interesting commenters. When I find a particularly insightful post I like to mine their profile to find more insightful posts they've made.

Carlos Castaneda's method, or his shaman Don Juan's, for seeing energy involved open eye meditation in total darkness along with some physical ritual. I recall the physical stuff as being similar to some of what the Taoists do. There may be some similarities with Hindu ritual, but I'm not versed enough in that to know.

I've used low light conditions and Ganzfeld fields in training certain mental disciplines.

From memory, ol' Don Juan suggested gazing at the shadows in trees, to not focus on the bright leaves, but rather to look at the shadows. My opinion here is our attention focuses on the colours more than the shadows. That would equate with using the cones of the eye, rather than the rods. I think the point was to practice focusing the attention on the shadows.

In a later book, Castenada wrote of one of the sorcerer girls trimming hanging plants of the veranda to cast shadows. That is another practice that shifts the attention from admiring the green plant to admiring the plant's shadow cast on the walls.

From your link on "Ganzfeld fields" :

Quote:The induced state is phenomenologically similar to a transition state between wakefulness and sleep, characterized by alterations in attentiveness, perception, and awareness, as well as by a compressed sense of time.

That suggests to me that the focus there is the transition between being asleep and being awake. Which isn't really the physiological perception of the eyes. I used to write about that back on ATS. Dreaming while awake and interactive shared dreamscapes. But that is different from seeing the shadows using the eyes. (geez that PubMed article uses a lot of big words . . . : )

(02-19-2025, 09:47 PM)NobodySpecial268 Wrote: "From Out of the Corner of Your Eye" -- yep, that is exactly it, and what I want to explore here in the next few days. That is the peripheral vision and the rod cells of the eyes as the physiological receptors.

Your ATS thread opening post explains the rods and cones, an is a part of what I wanted to write about here. Would you like to post your opening ATS post here? I was going to cover that next, and you have done a good job.

I will go through that thread, edit it some, and post it here for you. I wanted to add to it after a while and publish a whole article anyway. There are a number of quotes and links that are important and I only posted the opening paragraphs as a teaser.

There are circumstances when the rods can pick up on the infra-red spectrum and see it as a cyan color. It may be that ghosts radiate in the infra-red light frequency and that we can see them under the right conditions.

(02-21-2025, 06:29 AM)NobodySpecial268 Wrote: (geez that PubMed article uses a lot of big words . . .  : )

I just posted it because the abstract has a decent vanilla description of it. I wasn't even sure the article itself was accessible.

On a sunny day, with the right trees with a nice big open canopy, the patterns of shadow move like water. It's easy to fall in. That sounds like what they were doing sculpting the plants. The Dreamachine was a lamp with a spinning shade, which is viewed with the eyes closed for a sort of strobe effect.
  
Sufficiently chaotic light patterns, thought not exactly like a Ganzfeld effect, can help induce altered states too.

(02-21-2025, 09:31 AM)Michigan Swampbuck Wrote: I will go through that thread, edit it some, and post it here for you. I wanted to add to it after a while and publish a whole article anyway. There are a number of quotes and links that are important and I only posted the opening paragraphs as a teaser.

There are circumstances when the rods can pick up on the infra-red spectrum and see it as a cyan color. It may be that ghosts radiate in the infra-red light frequency and that we can see them under the right conditions.

Cool! I had a read of the thread and I can enlarge on a few points. With the ghosts and infra red, A cold spot is often reported with them.

(02-21-2025, 12:31 PM)Ksihkehe Wrote: I just posted it because the abstract has a decent vanilla description of it. I wasn't even sure the article itself was accessible.

On a sunny day, with the right trees with a nice big open canopy, the patterns of shadow move like water. It's easy to fall in. That sounds like what they were doing sculpting the plants. The Dreamachine was a lamp with a spinning shade, which is viewed with the eyes closed for a sort of strobe effect.
  
Sufficiently chaotic light patterns, thought not exactly like a Ganzfeld effect, can help induce altered states too.

The article abstract was interesting from the point of view of RV'ing. While I can't speak of the methods of Rv'ers such as Joe McMoneagle, because I haven't met him, the so-called "Ganzfeld" technique is familiar to me.

If one learns to dream while awake, a whole new world of exploration opens up with other, often non-human Beings to meet. But that world is certainly not benign, to put it mildly. The technique is one thing, and navigating the shared interactive dreamscapes is quite another.

The article is an interesting find. Perhaps something for a future RV'ing thread.