Flicker Drive

Contents

Introduction: A Note On Flicker Drive
Structured Self-Navigation
Overview
(a) The Spacecraft
Observation port (visuals), drive core (viscerals), navigation console (verbals)
The Fingelkurts’ 3 Operational Modules (OMs): Frontal Observer, Right posterior Embodier, Left posterior Narrator
Observer = Captain on bridge, watches and makes decisions
Embodier = the Chief Engineer, propels the craft by channelling the EONic warp drives through the felt sense of the body into consciousness
Narrator = the Helm, steers by reciting mantras or giving internal running commentary
The Propulsion Unit — the nine Emotional Operating Networks (EONs) of the deep brain:- Seeking · Rage · Fear · Lust · Care · Panic/Grief · Play · Power · Disgust
Boosting the Alpha Carrier-Wave
(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 visionary progression
1. Seven-Breath Engine Priming — 2. Countdown — 3. Blaze of Brightness — 4. Visions come as Brightness fades
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 condensed hypercomplexity, the numinosum
Star Fusion — Level VII
Mystic bright light experience; posterior OMs shrink, frontal witnessing OM expands

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 amplified synchrony. 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

Overview

Carry out a launch sequence (induction) at the start of the session and then do 4-6 flicker jumps

The discipline of ganzflicker meditation is the cultivation of a passive effortlessly-sustained awareness of the Visuals (Observer — watches the flicker screen), the Viscerals (Embodier — stays in touch with the felt sense of the body), and the Verbals (Narrator — inwardly recites a mantra script). That is our craft.

(a) The Spacecraft

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

The left posterior OM supports the ‘I’ — the Narrator, the Helm: the inner voice that steers the craft by prompting propulsive engagement and changes of direction. The Narrator repeats launch mantras to promote relaxation and visioning at the start of a trip and enter an altered state. Once in orbit the Narrator may switch into giving a detailed internal running commentary on the visual imagery to help the visions become clearer. Then later in a flicker run it may switch 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 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 the Narrator on the launchpad prompt the embodier to bring in a sequence of sensations — heavy, warm, clear, light — which progresses from experiencing the body as solid matter with a definite shape, to the experience of it as a fuzzy field of energy, or aura, with no definite shape. This sequence of elemental sensations (corresponding to the four elements of the imagination — Earth, Fire, Water, Air) of REM Autogenics involves a progressive trance-formation experientially of matter into energy.

Once the aura is established, the felt-sense is released from inhibitions and blocks. The Embodier can then channel the energy of the warp drives from the deep brain to propel the craft forward into visioning. Propulsion comes from the primary-process Emotional Operating Networks (EONs) situated within the deep ancient part of the brain.

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 / collective unconscious.

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 example in 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. Fusion with the destination star is the end of SEEKING.

In a normotypical craft the EONs tend to be misaligned and out of balance until sufficient visioning with EONic engagement brings them into true. A normotypical Engineer is in a constant state of anxiety trying to cope with warp drives which are forever misfiring. The Captains of such craft become so distracted trying to calm their Engineers that they can only robotically carry out instructions from the Helm. The Fingelkurts chain of command — Observer, then Embodier, then Narrator — becomes inverted. The Helm never shuts up. A ceaseless self-important commentary fills the bridge at all times; protocols are read aloud, regulations cited, star chart small print annotated in triplicate. The Captain wears the star and nominally commands, but in practice executes the Helm’s instructions on auto-pilot while simultaneously trying to calm an Engineer in permanent crisis as the EONic warp drives misfire and refuse to run clean. Deep Space Command regards all this as normal. Following the beat revolution the Diamond Sky Dylanists — who glimpsed, in the silence after the Helm did spice and finally fell quiet, what an Observer’s pure radiant awareness actually looks like — regarded craft not busy being born as busy dying, and broke away to found Altered Space Command whose signature tune is harmony on the bridge and autogenic neutralization of primal terror.

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

Boosting the Alpha Carrier-Wave

Helen Gorn then calculated the scaling fractal of the electrical output of the amygdala and plotted the Schulz-Moreno curve that gave her the voltage necessary to boost the carrier-wave frequency and extend the alternating intervals of non-being to the maximum at which the zoetic current could be maintained, so creating the reserve that would make flicker drive possible.

— Fremder

By boosting the alpha carrier-wave, the Observer expands, while the Embodier and Narrator shrink.

(1) The Observer

You may have had a glimpse at passive concentration watching the sea or the forest, or perhaps a campfire or even a work of art. I fancy that prehistoric men discovered passive concentration while gazing at a campfire and that the first meditation techniques evolved from there. In fact, one of the oldest yoga practices involves concentration on the flame of a lamp or candle.

Luis de Rivera, 2017, Autogenics 3.0: The new way to mindfulness and meditation

Focused Attention (Thinking)

Give the flicker screen all of your attention and energy. Focus the spotlight of your attention on the centre of the flicker screen and keep it there, bringing it back every time your mind wanders. You might see only an unimpressive blob of colour at the centre of the screen (the mandala) but adopt an attitude of great interest, thinking of it as of supreme value to you, a precious jewel.

Passive Awareness (Meditation)

Your awareness needs to be passive and receptive, not active. There should be no sense of trying to make the visions appear, and no sense of trying to control or change them. The visions of Flickerspace are not under voluntary control. Any attempt by the conscious ego to actively control will only tend to make them fade. The trajectory of the visions can however be influenced by the prompts and suggestions of your mantra script.

Imaginative Absorption (Contemplation)

Move from focused attention to passive awareness to immersive absorption. Lose yourself in Flickerspace. When reading a textbook at school one has to make an effort to focus attention on the text, but when reading an exciting novel one is caught up into the narrative and carried along.

By means of inconstant and slow feet, thinking wanders here and there in all directions without any regard for arriving. Meditation presses forward with great activity of soul, often through arduous and rough places, to the end of the way it is going. Contemplation, in free flight, circles around with marvelous quickness where ever impulse moves it.

Thinking crawls; meditation marches and often runs; contemplation flies around everywhere and when it wishes suspends itself in the heights.

Thinking is without labour and fruit; in meditation there is labour with fruit; contemplation continues without labour but with fruit.

In thinking there is wandering; in meditation, investigation; in contemplation, wonder.

Richard of Saint Victor, The Grace of Contemplation, 12^th century

(2) The Embodier

• Profound stillness of the body: Any intention to move suppresses alpha. Let go of the limbs as though dropping all concern with them. The heaviness mantra does this directly and effectively. Say it to yourself like a magic spell; let the words do it for you.
• Lose awareness of body shape: Allow the felt-sense of the body to become very heavy and warm — with complete diffusion of the body boundaries which become so blurred, vague and fuzzy that it is almost as if the body has disappeared.
• Relax and unfocus the eyes: The muscles around the eyes need to be fully released. Let them go out of focus, as though looking into the distance, to infinity and beyond.
• During eyes-closed phases use upward gaze behind closed lids — the traditional “third eye” direction directing the gaze to the back of the forehead. When priming the EONic warp drives before a Flicker Jump, let the eyes roll up under the closed lids to look at the back of the forehead.
• Relax the jaw, tongue, and throat: These are the most reliably alpha-suppressing residual tension points. The tongue is particularly important — if it is pressed against the palate or tense, it signals cognitive engagement. Let the tongue fall free from the roof of the mouth.
• Diaphragmatic breathing, uncontrolled: Slow deep natural breathing correlates with alpha, but the key word is uncontrolled. Actively regulating the breath is effortful and suppresses alpha. Notice the breath and allow it to slow without controlling it — let the body breathe itself. Do not initiate the in-breath with your conscious ego — pause at the end of the out-breath and wait for the next breath to arise naturally from the air hunger of your body. Let the Embodier breathe you, not the Observer.

If these instructions are carried out adequately while using the body-oriented mantras of REM Autogenics, awareness of the body shifts out of its usual exteroceptive / epicritic mode and becomes predominantly interoceptive / protopathic, diffuse and vague, without exact position sense. In such a condition localization and spatial discirimination are lost. It is as though the body has disappeared.

Among the many curious facts elicited by this inquiry, none are more remarkable than those bearing on localization . . . . Throughout the whole period of protopathic recovery, localization was profoundly changed . . . all spatial discrimination was absent, including all recognition of relative size.

Head & Rivers, 1908, A human experiment in nerve division.
Brain, 31(3), 323–450

(3) The Narrator

Active verbal generation — inner speech production — engages left-hemisphere language networks and frontally-driven executive systems, both of which disrupt and decrease alpha. Any mantra practice that involves effortful production of the inner sound is therefore partially self-defeating from an alpha standpoint.

Shift from sub-vocalisation (generating the mantra via inner speech) to auditory imagining (passively hearing the mantra as an inner sound).

Use the Inhalation as an alpha window. Enjoy every in-breath as a silence — a mantra-free and thought-free interval of pure awareness. Let the in-breath be empty and peaceful. The mantra will arise when the out-breath begins.

Let the words do it for you. By repeated practice of autogenic relaxation mantras such as “My arms and legs are heavy” and “My arms and legs are warm” a process of auto-conditioning has occurred by which the adjectives heavy and warm become key power words. They have built up automatic associations which bring about relaxation effects without the need for any intervention from the conscious ego. The mantras are said like magic spells, letting the sound of the words do it for you without any sense of effortful meaning.

The in-breath is active — a little muscular work is required to contract the muscles of the chest wall and diaphragm in order to draw air into the lungs. But in the quiet resting state, the out-breath is passive; no muscular work is required. The elastic recoil of the chest wall, like a balloon deflating, does the out-breath for you. Inwardly recite the mantra on each out-breath and let the out-breath make it audible to you. Let the Embodier prompt the Narrator to whisper the mantra.

The optimal state is one where the mantra is just — barely — present: a quiet hum of awareness with each out-breath, a subliminal sigh, surrounded by spacious, formless contemplative backdrop. This is the edge where alpha amplitude is greatest.

The felt phenomenology is: the mantra is almost not there, a faint vibration. That almost-not-there quality is the target. Even though the mantra may be a phrase or sentence consisting of many words, it is experienced as one single continuous vibrational exhalation, one single phantasm of thought, one single word.

As a session deepens, the mantra eventually fades into pure content-free awareness of oneness.

. . . on one thought securely pinned
Still every whisper of the wind !
So like a flame straight and unstirred
Burn up thy being in one word !

Aleister Crowley, Aha !

---

(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

Flickerspace is the medium through which we travel.
Flickerspace = light + music, a vibrational matrix.
We attune to one current through that matrix, the alpha carrier wave.
By quietening the two posterior OMs the carrier wave builds in amplitude and we are taken forward to our destination.

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 cloud-gazing 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

There was a drowsiness, a droning in the golden afternoon, a vibration in my mind or in the air, an ineffably sweet, honeyed sound that was seductive and demanding, a music not of any instrument. It enveloped and overwhelmed me, I felt myself surrendering to it . . .

— The Medusa Frequency

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.
• 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 improve 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, 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.

Psychedelic Drugs

Stroboscopic stimulation is strongly synergistic with psychedelics. A subperceptual mini-dose of a psychedelic drug gives a full-blown peak experience when combined with ganzflicker. A trip becomes fully controllable. The combination gives the facility to switch a trip off, and back on, at will.

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

Subliming was an accepted if still somewhat mysterious part of galactic life; it meant leaving the normal matter-based life of the universe behind and ascending to a higher state of existence based on pure energy. In theory, any individual — biological or machine — could Sublime, given the right technology . . .

Iain M. Banks, Look to Windward

LAUNCH WITH EYES OPEN — 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.

The Standard Launch Protocol, as authorised by Deep Space Command, is to use Relaxation Mantras first, followed by Visioning Mantras. For many years this was the procedure carried out by all Strobonauts at the start of each flicker run in their exploration of interplanetary space.

Autogenic Relaxation Mantras:

The sequence of relaxation mantras trains the imagination to leave the physical body and float free as an energy body.

A comprehensive course of training in Relaxation Mantras for Strobonautical Excursions is given at:

Visioning Mantras:

Relaxation followed by Visioning was standard for all grades of Strobonaut. But then, following the beat revolution and the emergence of Altered Space Command, some Diamond Sky Dylanists high on spice began interweaving Relaxation Mantras and Visioning Mantras together and so achieved extraordinary heights of visionary velocity. They were blown away into interstellar space and started encountering the numinosum. The practice soon caught on. Deep Space Command immediately set up an investigative committee but has never published its findings and we are still awaiting their guidance in this matter.

Some things remain a mystery.

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

The Strobe Mandala — Level I of Flickerspace

Level 0–I — the craft is still on the launchpad. The screen is still a red colour. The mandala is the first instrument reading that confirms you’ve actually ignited the engine, the first projection by the brain.

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.

C.G. 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 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.

Though it may appear unimpressive, the mandala is highly significant. Your brain has begun projecting subjective illumination into the screen. Ignition has been successful.

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.

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 — Level II

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. Repeated practice of this imagery over time builds the solidity of the tunnel.

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, Mechanisms of Hallucination

Through the Tunnel into the Mist — Level III

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, floaitng and flying. Weightlessness for the first time. The familiar red world has dissolved into a grey-white medium of a completely different kind. As you float through 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. It is the brain’s response to sufficiently prolonged exposure to an unstructured visual field. There is massive release of alpha waves which suppress sensory input from the outer world to the primary visual cortex. The allows for the release of visions from the inner world of deep space and their emergence in the mist.

Initially half-formed shapes of Chaos loom in the mist:

Nothing lay beyond World’s Edge — nothing save the swirling stuff of unformed Chaos which stretched away from the Cliffs of Kaneloon for eternity, roiling and broiling, multicoloured, full of monstrous half-shapes — for Earth alone was Lawful and constituted of ordered matter, drifting in the sea of Chaos-stuff as it had done for aeons.

Michael Moorcock, The Dream of Earl Aubec

But become ordered as the music carries one into deeper states:

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

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 is 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.

The Flicker Jump Cycle:

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: Seven-Breath Engine Priming
CLOSE YOUR EYES for a few minutes and practise relaxation of the body core. Work your way up through the chakras, the centres of subjective feeling in the body.

Remember to make mental contact with inner sensation from both the front and the back of the body in each region, merging them together:

This phase of priming is like drawing back a bow. It builds propulsion for the trajectory of the flicker jump. The more you build the alpha carrier-wave during engine priming, the further back you draw the bow and the further flies the arrow of your craft on the alpha carrier wave to the mystic light when you open your eyes and do the countdown. The section on Boosting the Alpha Carrier-Wave gives the essentials of technique for doing this.

STEP 2: Countdown
OPEN YOUR EYES and take note of the colour and brightness of the flicker screen, an important instrument readout on your state of your ego level. The less red, and the more bright and whitish the screen is, the better has been your clearing of the warp drive propulsion units of the deep brain during engine priming.

Begin hearing a Countdown and await the Jump with high expectation.

STEP 3: Surf the Blaze of Brightness

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

Bathe in the luminosity and numinosity of the blazing burst of light. Absorb the light into every pore and fibre of your being. Let the blaze vibrate, clear and positivise every pore and fibre of your being. Feel the heat of the blaze at your body core.

The main interest of my work is not concerned with the treatment of neurosis but rather with the approach to the numinous. But the fact is that the approach to the numinous is the real therapy and inasmuch as you attain to the numinous experiences you are released from the curse of pathology.

C.G. Jung, Letters

Surf the brightness onwards and upwards, brighter and brighter, by sustaining an empty mind and pure awareness.

STEP 4: Visions Come As Brightness Fades

As the brightness fades continue flicker travel and watch for visions emerging in the mist. Begin using Cosmic Mantras again to keep the visions flowing.

Dry the pool, dry concrete, brown edged,
And the pool was filled with water out of sunlight,
And the lotos rose, quietly, quietly,
The surface glittered out of heart of light,
And they were behind us, reflected in the pool.
Then a cloud passed, and the pool was empty.

T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets

Do another Flicker Jump when the visions fade and Flickerspace dims and nothing much happens.

Aim to do 4 or more Flicker Jumps every trip, priming the chakras with eyes closed before each jump.

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

To ascend to higher levels of the vibrational matrix which is Flickerspace, one needs to constantly clear disturbance from the EONic warp drives of the deep brain. The disturbed energy of the EONic drives needs to play itself out in visionary space and work off the emotional charge. This happens at the Interplanetary Level, the psychodynamic heartland, at which you get an aerial view of small scenes and filmstrips happening down below on the surface of a planet. The settings and locations for dreamlike sequences of action mixing fantasy and memory are immensely varied — indoors, outdoors, underground, underwater, and so on — yet, however surreal and bizarre they may be, they all carry the unmistakable feeling tone of this world, of happening on the surface of the planet. They come from the mist and fade back into it.

Once you are successfully launched and in orbit in the luminous mist, wait for for visions to begin to emerge. Wait for the scenes, settings and filmstrips of your journey to start. They begin first as vague shapes and shadows morphing and shifting about 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 become clearer as a visual image.

Or you may find that intentionally engaging a positive EONic warp drive works well for initiating identifiable visual imagery. You may get a sequence of positive imagery before it pendulates into the negative and goes dark:

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

You may get something completely different to what you suggest 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 the visionary experience may be beyond your conscious understanding but it is till changing the feeling state of your body and clearing EONic disturbance. Go with unconditional acceptance of the visions as they emerge into Flickerspace.

Once the shapes in the mist have become coherent and you can identify scenarios and filmstrips happening, you have reached Level IV of Flickerspace. Try switching from repeating mantras to giving an internal running commentary describing what you are seeing. Use whichever works best to improve visionary clarity and vividness.

Sometimes visionary intensity and velocity may increase to such a pitch that it is impossible to describe the images. They morph and change too rapidly. Or the images are of a nature which human words cannot describe. Instead of describing in detail, switch to mantra labelling of the EONic warp drive currently engaged, e.g. “I see PLAY . . . I see PLAY . . “, “I see ANGER . . . I see ANGER . . . “, “I see LUST . . . I see SEX . . .”

Implement an Eye Flicking intervention, the emergency restabilization procedure, whenever 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

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

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 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 implacable 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 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

More and more I find that life is a series of disappearances followed usually but not always by reappearances; you disappear from your morning self and reappear as your afternoon self; you disappear from feeling good and reappear feeling bad. And people, even face to face and clasped in each other’s arms, disappear from each other.

— Fremder

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

Themes of ascent enter into the interplanetary sequences — climbing immense trees, pillars or mountains, objects or figures levitating and floating upwards. At the same time the brightness of the flicker screen increases. The images become both brighter and larger, and more translucent, as though becoming compressed and condensed together into pure light. One meets beings of immense size and brightness. The feeling tone becomes more numinous, evoking awe, and is no longer characteristic of this planet. One feels the visionary setting is out in space, or in another dimension, or in the Void, or in spirit worlds. One is encountering the numinosum.

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“. (Official translation: “Always Further.” The Secretary-General of Deep Space Command, when pressed before the Sub-Committee on Transpersonal Navigation, conceded that this was “not, in itself, a destination.” The Sub-Committee’s report has been awaiting peer review for over a decade now.) But very few actually do this. The only ones I’ve come across are the most stoutly ultra-conventional and unimaginative members of the Stampfer Squadron, the sort whose brain consists of two neurones held together by a DSC tie. They do, it must be said, reach Level II with admirable reliability and have a very solid view of the tunnel. (They’re very proud of their tunnel which has impressively large ribs. There’s a framed photo of it in the mess.) Many of the more skinny strobonauts have done a lot of spice, have become Diamond Sky Dylanists, and use “An’ we gaze upon the chimes of freedom flashing“ as their mantra for interstellar travel, vocalizing the 1964 Newport phonetics. A splinter faction insists that the 1966 Manchester Free Trade phonetics improve navigational accuracy. Adepts of the True Mandala rather primly recite the Axiom of Maria the Prophetess to themselves: “One becomes Two, Two becomes Three, and out of the Third comes the Fourth as the One“. The Degenerates of Nurgle take the mickey and use: “One, Two, Three, Five“. A group known as the Deep Thought Navigators use the single-syllable mantra “Forty-Two“ on the grounds that it is definitively the answer to life, the universe and everything. They travel vast distances very quickly but have no idea where they end up and find this entirely satisfying. Deep Space Command has formally requested that they stop. Cadres of Cthulhu try to recite the mantra “Ph-nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn” (“In his house at R’lyeh dead Cthulhu waits dreaming“) and failing to articulate it correctly have been known to end up wildly off course. They arrive, with impressive consistency, at the wrong numinosum entirely and consider this an achievement and very deep. Early on in my career I was covertly recruited by Milarepa Recividists, advanced quickly through their ranks, and became Saboteur Elect of the unit of Trungpa Tigers who infiltrated the Imirate of Cognitive Consciousness and brought about its self-immolation. I therefore murmur inwardly the cosmic mantra Bright jewel flower flames on each out-breath for interstellar travel.

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. It evokes both the beauty and the power of the numinosum.

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

The WorldGod! Might he see it? Look upon it? Dear God, converse with it? Just be addressed by it? Never had he thought to witness it in any way. No one did. You knew it was there, knew it was in some sense another being, another inhabitant of the vast and bounteous galaxy, but that did not reduce its manifest divinity, its mystery, its worth of reverence.
Something flickered high above in the darkness . . .

Iain M. Banks, Matter

As with children in a well run Victorian household, God is best seen but not heard.

Solomon E. Entwhistle, Professor of Neuroscientific Illuminism,
Miskatonic University

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 Hippocampally 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 enjoy pure awareness on the bridge.

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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