Out-of-Body, Bufo, Dmt
Psychedelic States Using Meditation
I stumbled across the blog post: Advanced Meditation Techniques.
In it, the author talks about the Fire Kasina meditation technique, which Daniel Ingram has used to achieve some pretty wild states of consciousness (for example, see this video for more discussion).
Before describing the technique, and my small modification to it, I would suggest reading the safety page (mirror) on the Fire Kasina website. Basically, this technique is the real deal, and it is dangerous! If you are curious to attempt this technique yourself, then read the safety page first!
The Fire Kasina technique is amazingly simple: the idea is to stare at a bright light (candle, LED light, etc) in order to produce an after-image. This should only take a couple seconds.
Then, close your eyes, and watch the after-image change and morph.
Once you get bored, open your eyes, and repeat.
Daniel Ingram describes doing this over and over again, opening his eyes, getting the after-image, closing his eyes, watching it morph, over, over, over, etc. He has done this on “retreats” for upwards of 16 hours a day, 17 days in a row, which sounds insane to me.
I personally didn’t enjoy the technique, even after a few minutes. I don’t like staring at bright lights 🙂.
My modification is to have a bright room (ceiling light on, sunlight coming in), and stare at the back of my closed eyelids. No constant opening and closing of the eyes.
When you close your eyes, you assume you’re just staring at blackness. But that’s not actually true. There is a lot of little detail behind your eyelids.
By having a bright room, the light bleeds through your eyelids slightly too, making the baseline color more of a dark red or orange color.
The key ingredient in the original technique and my modified one is to pay attention to what you actually see.
If I don’t pay attention, I will drift around in my own mind, and ignore the blobs of dark shades behind my eyelids.
Instead, I force myself to really look. I mean really.
It’s sort of like Where’s Waldo. You can’t gloss over or assume you understand what is there. You have to look closely. Take in the raw sensor data coming from your eyes.
At first there won’t be much detail, but in my experience, it doesn’t take long to start seeing some smaller details. Little squiggles, or pinpoint dots. They’re very faint, like black hairs on black cardboard. I force myself to look very closely and try to accurately perceive what is coming in from my eyes.
After doing this for a short period, I may get distracted by some thoughts. In those instances, I will open my eyes to sort of reconnect with my physical senses, and remind myself the data stream I should be focused on – the data stream from my physical eyes – and ignore the mental chatter.
This doesn’t take staring into bright light to create an after-image – just peeking out of my eyes for a split second is enough to redirect my focus back to my physical perception.
And that’s it! It sounds stupid, really.
But I’ve done this meditation for two days in a row now, and after around an hour, I start to see some psychedelic patterns.
Yesterday, I saw faint fractal yellow spirals coming in from the outside of my vision, after around 45 minutes. I thought it was a cool effect, but wasn’t totally impressed.
Today though, I had a full psychedelic vision of multicolored rectangles. And this was only after 90 minutes of meditation!
This really reminds me of DMT, to the point where I’m starting to think that this sort of Where’s Waldo concentration with closed eyelids actually causes DMT to be synthesized in the brain naturally.
It’s actually a bit scary! And I’ve only done this two days in a row!