Hallucinating at the Park
10:12 AM: Wow. Through a visual meditation in the park, I experienced a full erasure of perspective, and my perception was only this massive flat 2D panel of color, patterns, and light (abstracted from the 3D perspective of the park). Will write more on this later.
11:18 AM: After I drop my wife off at the train, I take a half-mile walk in the nearby park. This was day 3, and also, my third attempt to try to naturally hallucinate (see older logs). Day 1 was something like a mystical experience; Day 2 was a dud—possibly because I tried a different spot; and so Day 3 I’ve returned to the original location. An open question: can you do some [ perceptual-hacks / visual-meditations / (not sure what to call this) ] in any location, or is it that certain vantage points have a perception that can mess with your consciousness if you look at it right?
To summarize in one sentence, two days ago I found myself in “flat land,” meaning that while staring into a park, for about five minutes, my entire perspective collapse into a flat, complex, oscillating 2D texture.
Today, from the same spot, I only got halfway there, but far enough to form a better thesis: the location matters, and there’s a particular way of looking. First, I need to step off the path and into the grass, because otherwise the path will be in my peripherals and it will be harder to unlatch from my default frame (I really need to work on my vocabulary around this). Anyways, I’d describe what I was doing with my eyes as a kind of “parallel processing”: I’d fixate my gaze at a point in the background, while simultaneously trying to expand my peripherals, horizontally and vertically.
It takes several attempts, with subtle approaches on how to focus, refocus, and break focus. In the process there are some neat effects, such as changes in color and brightness, as well as wave-like oscillations (that I imagine are normal on a mushroom trip). But the particular effect of interest has something to do with contrast.
Maybe my working theory is this: by adjusting the contrast to extreme degrees, it actually alters your depth perception. For example, from this vantage point, with a normal gaze, you’d see a bunch of trees cascading from foreground to background. But when I tap into some focusing drill that seems to adjust contrast, if I follow it down, it’s almost like the leaves and their patterns (with shadow & light), come into such focus, that the trees (the main “object” creating depth perception) seem to disappear.
And this is I think the “secret” of this location. The foreground, the field, is full of leaves, but also, the background has trees still in the canopy. So basically, by adjusting the contrast, and creating a new gestalt that’s optimizing for leaf patterns, it can become so strong and overpowering, that the trees diminish in their hierarchy, until they practically evaporate, overpowered by pattern. The fact that this pattern was both in my foreground and background, paired with the trees losing all hierarchy, might explain why it felt like I was suspended in a 2D plane.