Flicker Drive

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A Note On Flicker Drive

Over aeons of fire-gazing our ancestors used the flickering light of fires and lamps to propel themselves into visionary worlds. In ganzflicker meditation we use Flicker Drive.

Flicker drives the electrical rhythms of the brain into amplified synchrony and synchronicity. Flicker Drive gives the brain’s self-organizing rhythms the welcome opportunity to resynchronise and reset into greater harmony and connection, releasing visions and feelings in the process.

This creative visioning of the human brain has evolved over aeons of sitting around fires in dim flickering light while drifting in and out of dream-like hypnagogic states of deep feeling and emotion. The traumas, triumphs and tribulations of tribal life were played out and resolved in the hallucinatory visions of our ancestors’ fire-gazing. The human brain has evolved to journey into other worlds in an ambience of flickering light. Flicker drives the natural evolution of the human brain on its journey towards enlightenment.

We don the headset, set off on a trip; and when we get back and take the headset off, we are someone different.

Here’s the rest of ‘A Note on Flicker Drive’. It’s all right as far as it goes but it doesn’t tell you what it’s like to flicker: you hit the switch that disappears you and if everything goes all right you reappear somewhere else.

Russell Hoban, Fremder

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Preparation Of Your Phone

Ensure that the screen of your phone is clean.
In Settings have Display / Brightness turned up to 100%.
If the phone has an ‘Adaptive Brightness’ or ‘Auto Brightness’ feature, turn this off.
Start the music playlist or other audio if using it.
Open the Strobonaut app. With many smartphones, Strobonaut only lifts off from a launchpad that is perfectly horizontal in relation to the gravitational field of the planet or space station you are on. Have your smartphone laid flat on a table or hold it horizontally when you open the app. It opens in Eye Movement Mode. Tap the screen once to switch to Flicker Mode.
When putting the phone into the headset, align the central line in the flicker screen to the centre of the headset before you close it.

We’d done the pre-flicker and we were ready to go. I set the frequency. . . . Everybody always tries to look as if it’s nothing special but no matter how many times you do it you can’t help wondering if you’re going to come out of it the same as you went in.

— Fremder

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Foundational Principles

Styles Of Attention

To cultivate ganzflicker visioning, you move from focused attention to immersive absorption through five stages, or styles of attention:

1) Focused Attention
2) Physical and Mental Relaxation
3) Blank Gaze (unfocused attention)
4) Vision Acceptance
5) Immersive Absorption

Transcendent Music

As she sang wordlessly the flickering 1/f music counter-pointed her song and the pixels changed colour and pattern in a visual continuo.

— Fremder

Transcendent music is essential to the art of ganzflicker visioning. The immersive absorption of ganzflicker puts the strobonaut into an altered state of consciousness, a trance state. Transcendent music acts as a powerful positive hypnotic suggestion to ensure that the trance has the positive outcome that, after the flicker run, you are a better person and feel better.

Brain imaging shows that flicker light stimulation enhances the emotional response to music in a manner similar to psychedelic drugs.

Music is the numinosum! It is absolutely of spirit! It is much more important than reading psychology!

Gerhard Adler, The Numinosum in Everyday Life

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Stage 1 Body Position & Focused Attention

Adopt A Comfortable Lying Down Position

‘I’m going to go deeper than before,’ said Pythia. ‘Just let yourself go loose and floaty, think of all the nice flickering we’ve had and all we’re going to have. Are you lying comfortably?’

— Fremder

The traditional meditation posture in both Western (dream incubation) and Eastern (yoga nidra) practices of liminal dreaming is to lie supine in a straight, symmetrical, and slightly spread-eagled position.

Adopting the same position each time helps cultivate a habit of deep stillness in mind and body, an auto-conditioned response.

Psychology research has shown that visual imagery emerges more readily in the lying down position as compared to the sitting position. And a VR headset rests more comfortably when lying back.

Practise ganzflicker meditation in bed, on a couch, or in a recliner. Make the trip into Flickerspace as comfortable and as enjoyable as possible.

Focused Attention On The Strobe Mandala

To the conscious mind the mandala appears first as an unimpressive point or dot, and a great deal of hard and painstaking work as well as the integration of many projections are generally required before the full range of the symbol can be anything like completely understood.

Jung, Aion

Just as you might practise focused meditation (samatha) by fixing your gaze on the flickering flame of a candle, so when using the Strobonaut app in a Virtual Reality headset you practise ganzflicker meditation by fixing your gaze on the centre of the flicker screen WITH YOUR EYES OPEN.

As with the hallucinations induced by any type of psychedelic agent there tends to be a central focus to flicker visions, a dot or central circle of light. The strobe mandala is not present objectively in the flicker field of the phone screen. It is a subjective phenomenon, a phosphene, projected by the brain. It comes about as a result of the concentric arrangement of the retina and visual system, an entoptic phenomenon.

If you cannot find the strobe mandala at first, slowly jiggle your head a little from side to side looking into the distance beyond the centre of the screen. Look for a faint dot or blob, slightly brighter or darker than the rest of screen, and remaining absolutely stationary, a fixed reference point which ignores the movement of your head.

As you move your head, imagine the headset is a set of goggles, like diving goggles. Notice that the Flickerspace around you does not move with your head; it is stationary and fixed, a virtual outer world surrounding you. Right from the start, begin developing a sense of being immersed in Flickerspace. If distracted by the patterning of your phone screen, look beyond it into the distance.

On the screen the circles were widening, growing larger, becoming great eyes of becoming that became vast nodes of possibility and archipelagos of being constantly expanding and mutually annihilating as they slowly faded into blankness.

— Fremder

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Stage 2: Physical and Mental Relaxation

Mike Samuels & Nancy Samuels, Seeing with the Mind’s Eye: The History, Techniques and Uses of Visualization

Physical Relaxation:

Relax completely your mental hold of, or awareness of, all bodily sensation

Repeat silently to yourself body-oriented mantras such as “My arms and legs are heavy“, letting go of them as a dead weight, “Arms and legs warm”, letting them glow

Drop your whole body, a dead weight, from your conscious mind

Allow a state of complete muscular letting-go and profound stillness to develop naturally

If you notice tension in your body, silently recite a mantra suitable to the location — “Chest warm clear and light“, “Heartbeat calm and steady“, “Being breathed deep and slow”, “Abdomen warm clear and light“, “Pelvis warm clear and light“, “Forehead clear cool and light”.

Body boundaries blur and grow fuzzy. Awareness of a definite physical bodily shape expands into an indefinite aura and glow of energy

Mental Relaxation:

Relax all mental interest in the outer world

Let go of all thoughts as they arise

Make your conscious mind a blank

To fade thoughts and achieve blank mind, inwardly recite a mantra and positivize the relationship to Flickerspace, for example — “Bright light (on in-breath) … … Warm glow (on out-breath)”, or “Clear Light … … Warm Love“. Say the words over and over to yourself till the words themselves fade and only their rhythm remains.

Then she left. I liked her going-away view and the sensors put that up on the pixels briefly before they went into a flicker pattern of expanding and contracting shapes and colours, glimmering and occulting: yes/no/here/gone. Except, of course, for the places where the circles of bright emptiness came and went. The 1/f music that always accompanied the flicker pattern meandered faintly through the silence.

— Fremder

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Stage 3: Blank Gaze & Luminous Mist

Please, I said to the mind that had spoken to me of the everything-fear and the all-terror, tell me how to be. To my inner eye came white mist on the ancient waters of time’s beginning but there were no words . . .

— Fremder

Understanding the Two Modes of Attention

AVOID: Focal/Voluntary Attention (Active Mode)

Characterized by feeling of effort
Acts on the muscles and by the muscles
Involves eye muscle activity, convergence, accommodation
Analytical, scrutinizing, controlling
Spatial localization and objectification
Going out to meet and scrutinise stimuli with focused attention

CULTIVATE: Diffuse/Spontaneous Attention (Receptive Mode)

Characterized by letting-go of the muscles around the eyes
Diffuse unfocused gaze fixed on the flicker screen
Becoming absorbed and immersed in Flickerspace
Diffuse AND absorbed simultaneously
Receptive, accepting, empathic
Watching and feeling Flickerspace as a friend
Passive diffuse reception of incoming sense signals as a luminous mist
Attention is drawn and absorbed by the visions and mystic light

I opened myself to her voice, closed my eyes, held the white mist on the water with my inner eye. It was good to see nothing but that, it was restful, I didn’t want to see more. There was music in the Omphalos now, The Art of Fugue.

— Fremder

The Specific Attentional Instructions

Keep your eyes open and your gaze on the flicker screen but unfocused
Fully relax and let go of all the muscles around your eyes
Adopt an attitude of quiet receptivity and interest
Become a passive observer / interested spectator
Practice letting it happen not making it happen
Blank the mind and blank the gaze
Watch for the colour to begin draining from the screen
Less red, more yellow. Less yellow, more grey. Less grey, more white
The screen becomes a greyish white luminous mist
The mist does not flicker — you’ve found the space between the pictures

When I ask people whether they experience being as a smoothly continuous state or a flickering one they all say it’s smooth and continuous for them. For me it’s always been a flickering. Not visually — I’ve never actually seen the black between the pictures in my eyes but I’ve sensed it in my brain and for that reason I don’t make any assumptions about reality. Can it be that the world flickers? Can it be that the chair I sit on is only rhythmically and repetitively but not continuously there? Why don’t I fall to the floor between therenesses? How do I manage to flicker synchronously with the chair?

— Fremder

By meeting Flickerspace with blank unfocused gaze, engaging with it with all of your attention and empathy, free of any distracting thoughts about the outer world, allowing yourself to relax deeply, becoming progressively more immersively absorbed, the red colour of the flicker screen begins to fade. Flickerspace becomes paler and more yellowish, and then as colour continues to drain from it, it goes to a greyish white “luminous mist”.

If unfocused attention to the ganzflicker is sufficiently sustained, and relaxation of mind and body sufficiently deep, the flicker screen mists over into a greyish or whitish mist. This “luminous fog” or “sea of mist” has been consistently described by research studies since the 1930’s as the characteristic first stage of the ganzfeld experience. The augmentation of ganzfeld by flicker leads to ganzflicker-induced visionary progression and a brightening of the mist into the mystic bright light.

The process which is ego actually consists of a flicker of confusion, a flicker of aggression, a flicker of grasping — all of which exist only in the moment. Since we cannot hold on to the present moment, we cannot hold on to me and mine and make them solid things. The experience of oneself relating to other things is actually a momentary discrimination, a fleeting thought. If we generate these fleeting thoughts fast enough, we can create the illusion of continuity and solidity. It is like watching a movie, the individual film frames are played so quickly that they generate the illusion of continual movement. So we build up an idea, a preconception, that self and other are solid and continuous.

Chogyam Trungpa, The Myth of Freedom and the Way of Meditation

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Stage 4: The Experiential Mindset of Vision Acceptance

Introduction To The Visionary Energy Of The DEEP BRAIN

The feelings fuelling the visions of Flickerspace come from the DEEP BRAIN, the primal consciousness of the midbrain, which the human species shares with other animals

The mystic bright light comes from the DEEP BRAIN

Affective neuroscience has elucidated nine EMOTIONAL OPERATING NEUROCIRCUITS (EONs) in the DEEP BRAIN which we share with other animals

The NINE EONs are:— SEEKING, FEAR, PLAY, LUST, RAGE, CARE, PANIC/GRIEF, POWER, DISGUST

During a flicker run the visions in Flickerspace are symbolic dream-like elaborations upon these nine fundamental emotional themes of primal consciousness

The salience and emotional valence of EONic dreaming visions are signalled by their brightness

When the emotionally charge EONs are allowed to play themselves out to extinction in Flickerspace, the visions positivize spontaneously and evolve into the mystic very bright light experience

The mystic very bright light comes from the secondary visual pathway, the ‘second sight’ of the retinotectal pathway to the midbrain

The retinotectal pathway to the superior colliculus of the midbrain is much faster than the primary visual pathway to the visual cortex — 30-50 milliseconds as compared to 100-200 milliseconds

In terms of predictive processing the superior colliculus embodies the highest prior, the greatest salience. It is the emergency warning / basic survival system which takes temporal precedence over all other priors

The mystic bright light is the end of SEEKING

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The Specific Attentional Instructions

Once you have found the luminous mist, look for vague shadowy shapes within it, like seeing castles and dragons in the clouds
Use a mantra like “Bright clouds .. … warm glow“, or “Bright clouds .. … warm love“, looking for shapes and shadows in the clouds and feeling good about them
Stay with the primary experience; don’t go beyond it into thoughts about it
Be happy with your inability to identify what the shapes are or what they mean. Just enjoy watching them with blank gaze and blank mind. You absorb them and their meaning subliminally
Insights emerge spontaneously and naturally after the trip, often quite a time after, e.g. upon awakening the next morning. Stay with the primary experience; don’t interpret
On the Levels of Ganzflicker-Induced Visioning page of this website you will find a map of the different levels of complexity as the visions progress from elementary levels (patterns and shapes) to complex levels ( scenes and filmstrips). Familiarise yourself with its stages. Awareness of them facilitates the progression.
Fully accept and welcome all visions. The more negative they are, the more you are clearing emotional disturbance from the neurocircuits of the DEEP BRAIN
When negative EONs are engaged, the brightness of Flickerspace goes dim and dark
A Strobonaut engages with EONic darkness using two techniques:- A. Closing the eyes for a brief period and descending, then reopening the eyes and waiting for ascent and a brightening (occultation); B.) Rapid horizontal eye movements (eye movement desensitization)
Use A. when flickerspace goes dim and dark; use B. when it goes very dark
Occultation of unfocused gaze is the Strobonaut’s accelerator. Eye Movements and focused attention are the brakes

A. Occultation – Alternating Eyes Shut & Eyes Open, Darkness & Light

It’s the flickering that gives the excitement. Being is not a steady state but an occulting one; we are all of us a succession of stillnesses blurring into motion with the revolving of the wheel of action, and it is in those spaces of black between the pictures that we experience the heart of the mystery in which we are never allowed to rest. The flickering of a film interrupts the intolerable continuity of apparent world; subliminally it gives us those in-between spaces of black that we crave. The eye is hungry for this; eagerly it collaborates with the unwinding strip of celluloid that shows it twenty-four stillnesses per second, making real by an act of retinal retention the here-and-gone, the continual disappearing in which the lovers kiss, the shots are fired, the horses gallop; but below the threshold of conscious thought the eye sees and the mind savours the flickering of the black.

— Fremder

Evolution towards the mystic bright light can be accelerated by occultation of the ganzflicker – closing the eyes for a brief time – whenever the screen goes dim and dark. When your eyes are closed the alpha rhythms in your brain are double the size of when your eyes are open. When reopened onto an unstructured ganzflicker field, there is alpha blocking for 20 or 30 seconds and then alpha rebound occurs, and Flickerspace becomes noticeably brighter.

You use a few minutes of eye closure to promote brightening of the luminous mist.

‘Listen to the flicker pattern, look at the colours: there’s no picture now. Whatever comes up is from you. Close your eyes, I’ll tell you what I see; let yourself go empty as we go down, down, down, down to meet whatever’s coming up. How do you feel?’

— Fremder

Close your eyes for a few minutes and continue meditation with unfocused gaze, perhaps reciting the mantra “My arms and legs are heavy” inwardly to yourself
Cultivate a feeling of letting-go and sinking down deeper, descending a tunnel into darkness
Watch any imagery forming in the darkness
Once the imagery is over, open your eyes and begin counting slowly up to 30, while at the same time watching the Flickerspace with unfocused gaze
Watch the clouds of luminous mist and the shapes emerging within the clouds
Look out for a sudden increase of brightness somewhere between a count of 15 and a count of 30
Maintain and increase the intensity brightness in meditation by keeping a blank mind and a blank gaze
Watch the visions forming in the brightness of the clouds and cultivate feelings of ascending into vastness
Repeat the procedure every time Flickerspace goes dim and dark

Slow counting is very relaxing. We learnt it early in life and are very sure of it. There is no anxiety about what comes next.

B. Eye Movement Desensitization

Concentrate your awareness and focus on the breath.
Through different eye-gazes and concentration practices,
Discipline your mind until it rests naturally.

Oral Instructions on Mahamudra given by Tilopa to Naropa
at the Banks of the Ganges River, circa 1040

If Flickerspace becomes very dark, with negative feelings such as anxiety, or distressing imagery, it means a negative EON is activated. Neutralize EONic negativity disturbance with a stabilisation protocol – either Square Breathing (aka Box Breathing) or Eye Movements.

If negative feelings or imagery become too distressing, frightening or overwhelming, you put the brakes on. A Strobonaut’s brakes are rapid horizontal Eye Movements – Eye Movement Desensitization.

Rapid Eye Movements are a basic Stabilisation Protocol. There are others you can use such as Square Breathing, but REMs keep one in the loop of the DEEP BRAIN’s dreaming.

You do a set of Eye Movements to decrease the power and salience of anything too upsetting you are confronted with on your trip – an intruding memory or image, a topic you keep obsessing and ruminating about, repetitive thoughts about an unfortunate incident, panicky feelings, body sensation spiralling out of control.

Eye Movements switch the brain into real-world “respond and reset mode”. They bring the contemplative inner journey abruptly to a halt, decreasing alpha power, decreasing the vividness of inner thoughts and images. As the focused gaze sweeps back and forth, the DEEP BRAIN starts SEEKING the source of that rustling noise in the shrubbery. Is it a juicy deer or a nasty tiger? Prey or predator? Who’s going to be dinner here? In such a situation the DEEP BRAIN needs to be highly reactive and adaptive, able to do a rapid reset, able to switch immediately between fight or flight. It is a state evolutionarily designed for processing adrenaline.

Switch the Strobonaut app into Eye Movement mode by pressing the touch button on the Destek V5 headset. On other headsets use a bluetooth mini-controller paired to your phone, or voice commands, to switch the app between Flicker mode and Eye Movement mode.

With eyes open, sweep your focused attention horizontally from side to side fixating on the vertical red bars. As you sweep the laser beam of your gaze back and forth you feel calm and in control.

Do this for 20-40 seconds and then switch the app back into Flicker Mode. Observe the brightness of the flicker field. There is a transient darkening following a set of eye movements until you have settled back into meditation.

Sometimes you may find that your body wants to move about as you do the eye movements. Allow that to happen. Let it stretch and flex to offload any accumulated muscle tension. You may also find that sometimes you need to say things repeatedly, curse, swear, mutter, moan, groan or cry to offload FEAR, GRIEF, or ANGER during the Eye Movement phases. Offload random rubbish noise and random rubbish movement as much as you need to, but keep the Eye Movements going so that a part of you stays calm and in control. If it gets too noisy, you may need to keep the dog and the parrot out of the room during a trip.

If strong emotion surfaces during the Eye Movement phase, look for visions related to that EON once you are back in Flicker meditation. The visions may be dark so use occultation to brighten and lighten Flickerspace.

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Stage 5: Immersive Absorption into Mystic Light

The world vibrates like a crystal in the mind; there is a frequency at which terror and ecstasy are the same and any road may be taken.

Russell Hoban, The Medusa Frequency

Before beginning a Strobonaut trip, fix your gaze without blinking on the looping animation below for a few minutes. Keep a blank mind and simply absorb the sequence of images. It has been AI-generated to facilitate progression through the levels of Flickerspace and attainment of the mystic light. It combines mandala / centering themes with themes of ascent, and then a return to planet Earth. The visions you get during the trip will not be exactly the same, but they might be stimulated to emerge as roughly along the same lines.

Recall images from the animation loop

Watch the visions emerging from the luminous mist and cultivate a feeling of ascending into AWE-filled vastness

She glimmered in the redness and seemed to increase, to become great and goddesslike. I was entranced by the mystery and dim red magic of her nakedness, by the numen and the treasure of it, by how precious it was to me even though the picture in my eyes swarmed with circles of bright emptiness.

— Fremder

Cultivate luminosity and numinosity

Use a poetic / symbolic mantra to fade verbal thought and evoke visions of the Numinosum, e.g. “Bright Jewel … … Flower Flames” (Om Mane Padme Hum)

Enjoy the Bright Mists of Unbeing. Let them supplant all thought and feeling

While I am enjoying the spectacle of this light, every sadness and pain vanishes from my memory so that I am again as a simple maid and not as an old woman.

Hildegard of Bingen, 12th century

Thus shall you think of all this fleeting world:
A star at dawn, a bubble in a stream,
A flash of lightning in a summer cloud,
A flickering lamp, a phantom, and a dream

The Diamond Sutra

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Levels of Ganzflicker-Induced Visioning
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