Flicker Drive

Contents

Introduction: A Note On Flicker Drive
Structured Self-Navigation
(a) The Spacecraft
Observation port (visuals), navigation console (verbals), drive core (viscerals)
The Fingelkurts’ 3 Operational Modules (OMs): OMo frontal Observer, OMn left posterior Narrator, OMe right posterior Embodier
OMo = Captain on bridge, watches and makes decisions
OMn = the Helm, steers by reciting mantras or giving internal running commentary
OMe = the Chief Engineer, propels the craft by channelling the EONic warp drives through felt sense of body into consciousness
The Propulsion Unit — the nine Emotional Operating Networks (EONs) of the deep brain:- Seeking · Rage · Fear · Lust · Care · Panic/Grief · Play · Power · Disgust
(b) The Star Chart
Regions of Flickerspace
Region 0: The Launchpad — Blank Screen
Region I: Ignition — Central Focus / Mandala
Region II: Atmospheric Exit — Patterns / Tunnel
Region III: Orbit — Luminous Mist / Shadowy Shapes
Regions IV and V: Interplanetary Space — Scenes, Settings, and Filmstrips
Region VI: Interstellar Space — Numinosum
Region VII: The Destination Star — Mystic Bright Light
Harmonics of Flickerspace
Transcendent trance music
The Pre-Flicker
Preparation of your phone & positioning it in the headset
The Flicker Run
Mission parameters: navigation, flight duration, frequency, timing of flicker runs, breaks, re-entry;
Adopting a comfortable launch position
The Launch Sequence
The Strobe Mandala — Level I of Flickerspace
The Mandala Deepens into a Tunnel — Level II
Through the Tunnel into the Mist — Level III
Flicker Jumps
Occultation: alternating eyes open & eyes closed — brightening the luminous mist and facilitating the emergence of visions
Interplanetary Space — Levels IV & V
Filmstrips play out the energy of the EONs and neutralize EONic disturbance
Eye Flicking Phases
Flick the gaze from side to side to neutralize negative imagery — Eye Movement Desensitization
Interstellar Space — Level VI
Visions of vastness and the numinosum
Star Fusion — Level VII
Mystic bright light experience; OMs gone

Introduction: A Note On Flicker Drive

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.

Russell Hoban, Fremder

The term ‘Flicker Drive’ comes from Russell Hoban’s visionary science fiction novel Fremder (German for stranger), where flicker is a means of intergalactic space travel — a way to jump through the gaps in flickering space-time and cover vast distances in the twinkling of an eye. I have borrowed Hoban’s concept as a metaphor for the technomystical journey induced by ganzflicker meditation whereby rhythmic light and music propel us through shifts in consciousness toward states of trance and transcendence.

Flicker drives the electrical rhythms of the brain into hypersynchrony and amplified synchronicity. It increases the excitability of the nervous tissue, allowing previously inhibited and blocked homeostatic activity to take place. This homeostatic activity manifests as autogenic discharge, the release of accumulated tension and disturbance from the EONic warp drives of the deep brain. The brain’s self-organizing electrical rhythms get a much needed opportunity to resynchronise to a beat, to reset into greater functional harmony and deeper connection, releasing visions and visceral shifts of the felt-sense as they do so.

We start the music playlist, don the headset, set off on a flicker run; and when we get back and take the headset off, we find we’re somewhere else. The trip has shifted us into a better state of consciousness.

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.

— Fremder

Structured Self-Navigation

Dante’s is a visual imagination. It is a visual imagination in a different sense from that of a modern painter of still life: it is visual in the sense that he lived in an age in which men still saw visions. It was a psychological habit, the trick of which we have forgotten, but as good as any of our own. We have nothing but dreams; and we have forgotten that seeing visions – a practice now relegated to the aberrant and uneducated – was once a more significant, interesting, and disciplined kind of dreaming.

T.S. Eliot. The Varieties of Metaphysical Poetry

I speak only in pictures. With me the image is everything, carrying within it as it does the proto-image, the after-image, and the anti-image.

Russell Hoban, The Medusa Frequency

(a) The Spacecraft

The frontal OM (OMo) supports the Self — the Observer, the Captain on the Bridge: the witnessing agency, watching and making decisions.

The left posterior OM (OMn) supports the I — the Narrator, the Helm: the inner voice that steers the craft by prompting propulsive engagement and changes of direction. OMn repeats launch mantras to promote relaxation and visioning at the start of a trip and enter an altered state. Once in orbit OMo may switch OMn into giving a detailed internal running commentary on the visual imagery to help the visions become clearer. Then later in a flicker run OMn is often switched back into reciting mantras, cosmic mantras, to prompt ascent to the numinosum and the mystic bright light, or it is switched off altogether in the radiant silence of peak immersion.

The right posterior OM (OMe) supports the Me — the Embodier, the Chief Engineer: channels the propulsion drives from the deep brain through the felt-sense of the body into consciousness. The relaxation mantras recited by OMn on the launchpad bring on a sequence of sensations in OMe — heavy, warm, clear, light — which progresses from the experiencing the body as solid matter with a definite shape, to the experience it as a fuzzy field of energy, or aura, with no definite shape.

Once the aura is established, the felt-sense is released from inhibitions and blocks. OMe can then channel the energy of the warp drives from the deep brain to propel the craft forward into visioning.

The Propulsion Unit in the Deep Brain

It is the convention in neuroscience to capitalise the Emotional Operating Networks of the deep brain, in a manner similar to the speech of the Kraken who lies dreaming in the depths of the world mind.

I AM THE KRAKEN, ANCIENT OF THE DEEPS, MONSTROUS CEPHALOPOD, GREAT HEAD AT THE CENTRE OF MY MILES OF WRITHING TENTACLES IN THE BLACKNESS OF THE ULTIMATE DEEP; THE KRAKEN, MY DARK MIND WILD WITH THE TERROR OF ITSELF, SHUDDERING, WRITHING, AFRAID TO SLEEP, AFRAID TO DREAM BUT SLEEPING AGE-LONG AND DREAMING OF IMMENSITIES, OF BURSTINGS AND TRANSITIONS AND UNIMAGINABLE STATES OF BEING, DREAMING A UNIVERSE IN WHICH THERE IS SUCH A THING AS THE KRAKEN, DREAMING THAT I AM THE KRAKEN . . . I WILL SHOW MYSELF TO YOU IN SEVERAL WAYS AND WITH SEVERAL FACES.

— The Medusa Frequency

The nine Emotional Operating Networks (EONs) of the Deep Brain which we share with other animals:

• SEEKING — the universal drive to explore, engage, and find resources. A forward-propulsive, inquisitive energy that underpins all the others. Often felt as enthusiasm, curiosity, craving, as for examplein constant surfing of the internet.
• RAGE — provoked by frustration or restraint; propels the body toward the offending source. Raw anger as an action-impulse rather than a thought.
• FEAR — the urge to escape or freeze. Generates anxiety and tension at low intensity, explosive flight at high intensity.
• LUST — the sexual drive and its characteristic bodily and motivational feelings.
• CARE — the nurturing impulse, most obviously expressed in maternal behaviour; the felt urge to protect and tend to others.
• PANIC/GRIEF — separation distress; the acute anguish of loss, loneliness, or abandonment.
• PLAY — the social joy of rough-and-tumble engagement, games; essential in youth for developing social competence and felt as positive excitement.
• POWER/DOMINANCE — the drive for social dominance, territorial control, and status assertion.
• DISGUST — a visceral rejection response that may have evolved first as a defence against pathogens and toxic substances, and later extended to moral and social domains.

Whichever EON is engaged at the time during a flicker run sets the overall theme for the visions which emerge. So for example the visions contain violence when RAGE and aggression is engaged, and sexual content when LUST is engaged. SEEKING is the default drive fuelling all flicker runs. Many visions engage SEEKING in a journey to find a way out of the FEAR of primal anxiety.

IN THE BEGINNING OF ALL THINGS WAS MY BEGINNING, IN THE BEGINNING WAS THE TERROR . . . THE TERROR WAS ITSELF AND THE TERROR WAS OF ITSELF. THERE WAS NOTHING ELSE, THERE WAS NO ONE TO HOLD THE TERROR, THERE WAS ONLY THE TERROR.

— The Medusa Frequency

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(b) The Star Chart

This place lived in the half-light of its music and in the music of its half-light, it swam in sound like a long-drowned city in a sea of dreams.

— The Medusa Frequency

Regions of Flickerspace

Region 0: The Launchpad — Blank Screen
Region I: Ignition — Central Focus / Mandala
Region II: Atmospheric Exit — Patterns / Tunnel
Region III: Orbit — Luminous Mist / Shadowy Shapes
Regions IV and V: Interplanetary Space — Scenes, Settings, and Filmstrips
Region VI: Interstellar Space — the Numinosum
Region VII: The Destination Star — Mystic Bright Light

A more detailed map is given here:

Harmonics of Flickerspace

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

The human brain has evolved over aeons of fire-gazing around campfires and hearths to ascend to the numinosum for purposes of self-healing and creativity by becoming immersed in the harmonic matrix created by the resonance of music and flickering flames. The playlist of transcendent trance music you choose for a flicker run creates the harmonic matrix of Flickerspace through which you travel. Choose well !

The immersive absorption of ganzflicker puts the strobonaut into an altered state of consciousness, a trance state, but the trajectory of that trance can go in any direction, positive or negative, depending on context. Transcendent music acts as a powerful contextualiser, analogous to a stacked script of powerful positive hypnotic suggestions, ensuring a positive trance trajectory. The right music ensures that after the flicker run you feel better and have become 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

The Pre-Flicker

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 through earphones or headphones 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 Flicking mode. Tap the screen once to switch to Flicker Drive.
• 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

The Flicker Run

Mission Parameters

Navigation
Before starting out on a strobonaut trip set a clear sense of direction. Give yourself a destination. Align your intent, the arrow of your Will, to the cosmic map right at the start by saying to yourself something along the lines of one of the following:

“The visions will flow better this time”
“I’ll do four flicker jumps this trip without distractions”
“My concentration stays on focus much better this time“
“I will clear this depressed feeling”
“The anxiety will shift”
“I will get help making a decision about . . . “
“Good ideas and inspiration will come to me about . . .”
“This trip will help my relationship with . . . “

And imprint that intent firmly into the felt-sense of your solar plexus. Get all three OMs involved in setting your intent.

Flight Duration
Strobonaut trips might initially be short, lasting only 20-30 minutes, with perhaps two or three flicker jumps.
With practice they are built up to somewhere between 40-90 minutes, with perhaps four to six jumps.
The length of a flicker run can be preset by using the duration of a music playlist.

So far there are no known adverse effects of too long a session of ganzflicker meditation using the relatively gentle level of light intensity emitted by the screen of a smartphone.

Frequency
As with learning to play a musical instrument, ideally one practises every day, or almost every day. At about the same time each day. In the same place each day. And in the same body position each day. The three R’s — Ritual, Routine, Repetition — are essential for effective trancework. One builds an altered state of consciousness by regular repetition of an established routine of ritual so that it goes onto automatic by auto-conditioning.

Ritual is merely the conscious and intentional arrangement of set and setting, which are the major determinants of any altered state of consciousness.

Ralph Metzner, 2005, Sacred Mushrooms of Vision

Timing of Flicker Runs
Flicker visioning is a form of liminal dreaming similar to hypnagogic imagery and is most vivid the closer it occurs to nocturnal dreaming. Trips first thing in the morning before fully awake and in bed at night will be found to be most productive of visual imagery.

He closed his eyes … … And in the bloodlit dark behind his eyes, silver phosphenes boiling in from the edge of space, hypnagogic images jerking past like film compiled from random frames. Symbols, figures, faces, a blurred, fragmented mandala of visual information.

William Gibson. Neuromancer

Just as mental and physical relaxation are the two key dimensions of progress for moving from phosphenes into hypnagogic dreaming, so too with flicker visioning — liftoff from the launchpad into Flickerspace is achieved by inner recitation of relaxation mantras.

Alcohol is counter-productive to visioning and generally it is a waste of time to do a flicker run if there is any alcohol in the system. On the other hand during a hangover the visions can be very strong as a result of REM rebound.

Breaks
Taking a break for a cup of tea, or whatever, halfway through a long flicker run is sometimes helpful, perhaps surprisingly, in raising the level of visioning. The visions often become more vivid and flow better after a break.

Re-entry
Take a deep breath and have a long leisurely stretch of your whole body when taking the headset off at the end of a trip. Stretch all your muscles to ground yourself firmly back into your physical body and the external world.

Adopt A Comfortable Launch 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. Study of physiological responses comparing sitting and lying postures for meditation shows that the lying posture elicits stronger relaxation responses, with greater meditation depth and increased parasympathetic activation. 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.

The Launch Sequence

LAUNCH WITH EYES OPEN AND INWARDLY RECITING RELAXATION MANTRAS — you are watching for the appearance of the strobe mandala, a small phosphenic dot, circle or blob appearing in the centre of the flicker screen. It indicates successful ignition.

For the launch sequence mantra script, either use body-oriented relaxation mantras (autogenic mantras) first, and then visioning mantras. Or you might find it more effective to interweave the relaxation and visioning mantras together.

Essential to a successful launch is to begin with relaxation mantras which align you to the gravitational field of the planet or space station you are on at the time, so that you feel your whole body as a solid mass of matter resting down on the launchpad — Heavy.

The sequence of autogenic mantras — Heavy · Warm · Clear · Light — then progressively trance-forms the experience of solid matter into the experience of vibrant energy so that you lift off into trance.

Relaxation Mantras 1 — On the launchpad:

These relaxation mantras are practised over and over again so that they go onto automatic. OMn, the Helm, can then carry them out without any directions from OMo, the Captain on the Bridge.

Once the sensation of heaviness is established in the body and aligns it with the launchpad, then switch to visioning mantras and progress through the sequence as far as you get. If the visioning does not progress and gets stuck, switch back to relaxation mantras.

So for example having found the mandala, you progress on to the tunnel mantra. You keep repeating the tunnel mantra until you get the sense of depth and perspective of a tunnel. If that doesn’t happen you switch back from visioning mantras to the next relaxation mantras.

Relaxation Mantras 2 — Ignition Burn:

By bringing on Warm, the shape and outline of the body begins to go fuzzy and blurred. You begin to experience the body less as physical matter and more as an aura of energy. Once you have begun to get a felt-sense of that, try visioning mantras again to see if you progress further into Flickerspace.

Relaxation 3 — Body Disappears:

By bringing on Clear, you get the aura to go so transparent that it almost feels as if the limbs have disappeared.

Relaxation 4 — To Infinity & Beyond:

The limbs now merge with the Infinite Light & Music of Flickerspace.

Compressed Launch Sequence

Used for re-launching, e.g. after a tea break or changing the playlist:

Universal Relaxation Mantra

Finally use just one single relaxation mantra for any part of the body, synchronsiing it to the breathing rhythm:

Weave the relaxation and visioning mantras together:
Each visioning mantra is recited between the relaxation mantras. Each is repeated as many times as necessary to induce a response. So in this example below the strobonaut gets into orbit and reaches the luminous mist, Level III, but then does not progress on to Level IV, so keeps repeating the same visioning mantra:

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

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.

Extracts from the literature advocating eyes open for accessing complex visual imagery:

As with the hallucinations induced by any type of psychedelic agent there is 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, and is a neuropsychological universal. Everybody can find it if they keep looking.

To move from Level 0 to Level I of Flickerspace, finding the central focus in a blank flicker screen, use visioning mantras such as:

If you have difficulty finding 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.

Level 0–I — still in Earth’s atmosphere. The craft is barely off the ground. The familiar world is still fully visible. The mandala is the first instrument reading that confirms you’ve actually ignited the engine.

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

The Mandala Deepens into a Tunnel

The shaman’s journey starts with the experience of going down a Tunnel …The concentric circles of a mandala often resemble the ribbed aspect that the Tunnel frequently presents, and meditation with the mandala can lead to an experience resembling the entrance into the Tunnel … The concentric motif seems characteristic of the visionary experience itself and stands for the aperture through which the shaman penetrates the Underworld or Sky, by means of which he transcends the physical universe.

Michael Harner. The Way of the Shaman

Level II (Tunnel) — the moment of atmospheric exit, the trance-ition, the boundary crossing. The tunnel is the wormhole between ordinary consciousness and the deep Flickerspace altered state. It’s one of the most universal neuropsychological transition waypoints of altered states, e.g. occurring commonly in psychedelic drug trips, near-death experiences, symbolic rebirth experiences.

Look for the 2-D mandala developing depth and perspective and becoming a 3-D tunnel down which you either look or travel.

Let us consider, for instance, the form constant for which “funnel,” “tunnel,” “cone,” or similar descriptive terms are used. This form occurs again and again in mescaline hallucinations; it also appears in hypnagogic hallucinations, in entoptic phenomena, and in the phenomena arising when flickering fields are viewed under certain conditions.

Heinrich Klüver, 1942, Mechanisms of Hallucination

Through the Tunnel into the 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

Level III (Luminous Mist) — you’ve reached orbit. Weightlessness for the first time. The familiar red world has dissolved into a grey-white medium of a completely different kind. As you become absorbed into the tunnel, the red colour leaches from the flicker screen to leave a greyish white luminous mist.

The mist, also called ‘blank-out’ or ‘fade-out’, is a well recognised feature of the ganzfeld experiment and has been consistently described in neuroscience research studies since the 1950s.

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

Use Flicker Jumps when Flickerspace goes dim and imagery fades.

Flicker Jumps

‘You’re shaking,’ she said as she smeared me all over with electrolytic cream.
‘Don’t take any notice of it – it’s just something I do between flicker jumps.’ She was very thorough and although I was feeling more and more nervous about the Pythia session it was evident that my body was getting interested.
‘See,’ she said with a big smile, ‘you’re feeling better already.’

— Fremder

Occultation: Alternating Eyes-Open & Eyes-Closed Meditation

Use Flicker Jumps to increase the subjective brightness projected onto the screen and facilitate the emergence of visions—close the eyes for a period of deep relaxation of the body core, then re-open them, and wait for a delayed effect.

Development of visioning can be accelerated by using Flicker Jumps—closing the eyes for a few minutes of deep body core relaxation, then re-opening them and observing the illuminance of Flickerspace closely as you wait for a delayed effect. 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.

Flicker jumps have a cumulative effect over the course of a trip. The brightness enhancement of the luminous mist gets progressively greater. As the brightness fades, visions emerge within the mist. A series of flicker jumps therefore advances the level of visioning.

STEP 1:
Close your eyes for a few minutes and practise relaxation of the body core. Work your way up through the chakras:

STEP 2:
Open your eyes and take note of the colour and brightness of the flicker screen. The less red and the more greyish-white it is the better.

STEP 3:
Begin inwardly reciting Relaxation Mantra 4 and wait for a delayed effect:

Watch for an increase of brightness of the screen near when you get to “Both arms are light” depending, of course, on your rate of inner recitation.

Alternatively begin counting slowly when you open your eyes, and look for brightening at a count of about 15 or 20.

STEP 4:
Continue meditation and watch for visions emerging within the brightness.

Repeat the procedure every time Flickerspace goes dim and dark.

Aim to do 4 or more flicker jumps every flicker run.

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.

— Fremder

Interplanetary Space — Levels IV & V

The underworld . . . isn’t what people think it is, it isn’t just a place for the dead. What we call world is only that little bit of each moment that we know about – underworld is everything else that we don’t know but we need it. Underworld is like the good darkness where the olive tree has its roots.

— The Medusa Frequency

Once through the luminous mist the launch has been successful and the journey begins. On the other side of the mist are the scenes, settings and filmstrips of your journey. To get there look first for vague shapes and shadows in the mist.

There may be a confused jumble of vagues forms which are impossible to identify or make sense of. Sometimes one has an intuitive sense of what the scene represents even if it cannot actually be seen. If you begin describing to yourself with an internal running commentary what you intuitively feel to be there in Flickerspace it may manifest as a visual image.

Alternativey use the general prompt of suggesting to yourself that you see yourself setting out on a journey:

You may get something completely different and that is fine. Go along with that. Your deep brain knows better than your conscious ego what you need to be seeing. Much of it may be beyond your understanding. Go with it.

Once the shapes in the mist have become coherent and you can identify scenarios and filmstrips happening, you have reached Level IV of Flickerspace. Switch from reciting mantras to giving an internal running commentary to keep the imagery moving forward:

Implement an Eye Flicking intervention, the emergency restabilization procedure, when Flickerspace goes very dark and distressing visions intrude, or you begin to feel panicky or overwhelmed.

Eye Flicking Phases

Flick flick, flick and fade, John,
flick and fade.
Flick flick, flick and fade, John,
on the planet where you are.

— Fremder

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 the trip turns bad, switch into Eye Flicking Mode for 20-60 seconds and do a set of eye movements.

If you begin experiencing:
(a) strong negative feelings of anxiety or panic during a trip, or
(b) distressing, frightening, or overwhelming images,
switch the Strobonaut app immediately into Eye Flicking 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 Drive and Flicking mode.

If all else fails resort to manual switching—open your headset and switch between modes by tapping the screen of your smartphone.

With eyes open, flick your gaze, your focused attention, horizontally from side to side fixing on the vertical red bars.

As you flick the laser beam of your gaze back and forth with accuracy and extraordinary precision, summon feelings of calmness, power and control. Have the feeling of flicking the bad stuff away, flicking it out of your body. You may find your body, and particularly your spine, wants to straighten up or spontaneously move as you do this.

Carry out eye movements for 20-60 seconds and then switch the app back into Flicker Drive. Observe the brightness of the flicker field. There is a transient darkening following a set of eye flicking 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 Flicking 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 an Eye Flicking phase, look for visions related to it once you are back in Flicker meditation. The visions may be dark so do a few flicker jumps to brighten and lighten up the Flickerspace.

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

Interstellar Space — Level VI

Every man and every woman is a star.

Aleister Crowley, The Book of the Law

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.

— The Medusa Frequency

To ascend from interplanetary space to the numinosum and the mystic bright light strobonauts use a cosmic mantra. For a long time now it has been the policy of Deep Space Command to insist upon all strobonauts singing from the same hymn sheet and all using the standard DSC mantra: “Semper Longius“. But very few actually do this. The only ones I’ve come are the most ultra-conventional and unimaginative members of the Stampfer Squadron, the sort whose brain consists of two neurones held together by a DSC tie. The majority of strobonauts have broken away and become Diamond Sky Dylanists using “An’ we gaze upon the chimes of freedom flashing“ as their mantra for interstellar travel. Adepts of the True Jungian Mandala recite the Axiom of Maria the Prophetess to themselves: “One become two, Two becomes Three, and out of the Third comes the Fourth as the One“. The Degenerates of Nurgle on the other hand use: “One, Two, Three, Five“. Early on in my career I was recruited by Milarepa Revisionists and so use Bright jewel flower flames.

Bright jewel flower flames is a loose poetic translation of Om mani padme hum, evoking the numinosum with themes of translucent radiance, mandalic unfolding and fiery ascent.

Om Mani Padme Hum	Bright Jewel Flower Flames
💎 Mani = Jewel, crystal	💎 Jewel = Inner treasure, clarity
🌷 Padme = Lotus (flower)	🌷 Flower = Organic unfolding, purity
🔥 Hum = Enlightened mind, power	🔥 Flames = Awakening, energy, transformation
☀️ Om = Sacred seed sound, unity	☀️ Bright = Light, source, luminosity

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

Star Fusion — Level VII

LOVE CAN BE LOST AND BEAUTY, BUT NOT THIS FACE OF DARKNESS MADE BRIGHT. THIS IS THE ONE TO WHOM YOU CAN BE FAITHFUL.

— The Medusa Frequency

As you near your destination star, the visions become progressively more condensed and compressed, more intricate and complex, more translucent and radiant, more charged with numinous power. You enter the COEX Nebulae of Hippocampal Condensed Experience. As compression builds to stellar core pressure the visions undergo fusion and become pure light.

Through repetition of mantras the Narrator has faded into silence. By induction of clear light in the felt-sense of the body the Embodier has disappeared. Now comes the time for the Observer to step down from the bridge. All three fuse, bound to the One Ring, and disappear.

The Bright Light Experience is the end, in both senses, of SEEKING.

And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
When the tongues of flame are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one.

Concluding lines of T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets

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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