A couple questions!

Hi! I've been using the Kasina a lot and I want to say that I love it and think it is spectacular! :)

After using it awhile, I have some questions about if I'm using it correctly just to be sure. I'm a little paranoid, but things are probably okay.

Firstly, I have the brightness on max, is it bad to press the glasses too close to my eyes? I thought I might've read somewhere that they should be placed on the tip of the nose, but I'm not sure where they should be. It gets quite dark if I move them away, even with the highest brightness.. but I'm happy with that if it is how it should be!

Secondly, does it matter if my eyebrows are not raised? I mean, my eyes are closed, but if I raise my eyebrows I can see more and the colours are brighter/better. Generally, I have droopy eyebrows - probably from fatigue. It seems to affect how the visuals are when my eyes are closed. I'm hoping I am not missing out, because things look better when I widen my eyes!

Oh! and the last thing, I'm sure there's a name for it of some kind, but I wanted to ask if anyone knows about a particular experience I'm getting. It is most prominent with the Paternity session - at certain intervals the upper right corner of my view will flash an image from memory and it is ALWAYS from my local area, just a street. It will look like a memory tearing into the top corner like someone peeled paper to reveal an image. If I'm lucky and it is more prominent, I look at it and then any eye movement I make after looking at it will make me hallucinate flashes of other images rapidly once per eye movement for about 3 seconds and they are always of local streets/places with no significance. This cycles continuously with a 10 second break for the first 35% of the session and then right at the end. It could be certain patterns triggering it.

...What IS that!? I hope it didn't sound strange. The images are VERY vivid I'm guessing there is a word for this, I'm very curious about it. Sometimes this doesn't happen at all.

Kind Regards,
Alan

Hi Alan,
Light sensitivity varies among people. It can be linked with anatomy such as deep set eyes, or association with psychological triggers to flashing lights, etc. There really is no right answer for everyone.

It is good that you are experimenting with different techniques and placement. As you report, you are finding what works well for you. After a suitable adjustment period, which you have completed by now, your body will tell you if it is overstimulated. At periods of session design I have worked with the light glasses for many hours at a time. I find that the most side effect that I experience is dry eyes and at worst a mild headache. This is with the closed eye glasses, where my vision needs to continually shift between night and day vision as I design a session. I also find that when I do long periods with the glasses then my sleep schedule wants to shift. I am a lifelong night person who only over the last few years has taken on a reasonable sleep schedule which I try to maintain. Thus, I alternate design days and regular days and then this effect is muted.

So, I would say to find the happy medium between vividness and comfort. One thing to try is to see if you get a similar effect when you look downward in closed eyes that you get with raised eyebrows. This eye posture encourages relaxation while increasing the perception of blues and greens. Raised eyebrows may slightly hinder full relaxation. Again, each person is different, so maybe not.

Some people would say that images that you are experiencing are small shifts into an out of body experience or a localized remote viewing phenomena. You will want to study the imagery a bit more to see if it coincides in anyway with actual occurrences. Or it could be transitory 'familiarity phantoms' (just made that up). You may cultivate this skill further over time if that is desirable to you.

It may be off benefit to also study the Patternity session making notes of places where this occurs if it is repeatable. If you want to extract and lengthen this points then I could tell you how to do that. I could also reference my source files and pin down the frequencies and such. I am the author of Patternity btw.

Anyway, for interesting reading look at the Wikipedia article on hallucination: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halluc...oldformat=true and also the related article on Palinopsia (nothing to do with Sarah Palin :) ) Others interested in material on general recognized visuals from bright light and flickering sources may want to read up on Phospenes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phosphene?oldformat=true and Photopsia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photopsia?oldformat=true . Eidetic Imagery is also a fascinating study: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eideti...oldformat=true

Now keep in mind that many of these are written from the point of view of neurological disorders or intoxication, as one may expect given the subject.

Hope this helps,
Scott

Hello, Alan--

Thank you for sharing your interesting and unusual Kasina experiences. It's common to slip from 'normal' waking consciousness into hypnagogia, that state in between being awake and sleeping, where images start to spontaneously emerge in your mind's eye. The most common images are usually faces, in part due to our visual cortex having circuits 'tuned' to identifying and reading faces and expressions (in the same sense that our auditory cortex is tuned to listen to human speech, as well as identifying food and threats).

Scott's covered your question about eyebrows, but I also encourage you to experiment with lifting and lowering your eyebrows, and squeezing your eyes more closely shut. All of these movements will affect not just the amount of light entering your closed eyes, but also the variety and nature of imagery you see.

In addition to the links Scott has suggested, I would add Wikipedia's 'hypnogogia' entry: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypnagogia

Best,
Robert