This is going to be one of my more esoteric posts.
Recently I started looking into a peculiar phenomenon I have experienced during states of unusually focused awareness. It began as a fairly straightforward question about perception and neuroscience. Within less than an hour, I had followed the thread through sensory gating, meditation, Vedanta, Neti Neti, A Course in Miracles, the Law of One, chakras, densities of consciousness, and finally back to the original perceptual phenomenon again.
That trajectory is interesting to me in itself.
I spend a lot of time thinking about what happens when we stop forcing scientific, psychological, contemplative, and metaphysical models into mutually exclusive categories. They use very different vocabularies. They make different epistemological assumptions. Some are empirically testable and some clearly are not.
And still, every so often, they seem to gesture toward wonderfully similar territory.
So rather than cleaning up this particular train of thought into a tidy conclusion, I want to preserve something closer to the way the inquiry actually unfolded.
What is happening when my vision seems to flicker?
The phenomenon that started all of this is difficult to describe.
During certain states of deep concentration or expanded awareness, my visual field can develop what feels like a very subtle vibration or flickering quality. It is not dramatic. I am not seeing elaborate visions. It is more as though the ordinarily seamless construction of visual perception becomes slightly perceptible.
One possible place to begin understanding this is with saccades.
Our eyes do not move smoothly through the world. They make rapid, jerky movements called saccades, thousands of times a day. During these movements, the brain engages in something called saccadic suppression. Visual sensitivity is temporarily reduced so that we don’t experience the world as a chaotic blur every time our eyes move.
Then the brain stitches everything together.
We experience continuity.
This is already rather extraordinary when you think about it.
What feels like a stable visual world is partly a construction produced by the nervous system: suppressing information, filling gaps, integrating snapshots and presenting the result to consciousness as seamless reality.
Ordinarily, we don’t notice the editing. Like how we don’t notice that our vision edits out our nose. I recall the first time I wore colored grey contacts, it looked like I was peering through a screen door. But the next time my brain had already adjusted and erased it from my conscious perception.
But could some altered states of attention make aspects of that editing process more perceptible?
Deep concentration changes temporal perception. Tiny shifts that normally disappear beneath the threshold of awareness can become salient. Microsaccades — extremely small involuntary eye movements that occur even while staring at a fixed point — can potentially become more noticeable when attention becomes unusually stable.
Meditative and contemplative practices also sometimes produce reports of visual flickering, pulsation, vibration, light phenomena or changes in the perceived granularity of experience.
There are mundane neurological ways to think about at least some of this. Visual processing depends upon rhythms, oscillations, inhibition, prediction, filtering and attention. We are never simply receiving a pristine video feed of external reality.
The brain is doing something to reality before “I” see it.
That was the first doorway.
What if heightened awareness reveals the brain’s editing process?
The more interesting question for me became less Why do I see flickering? and more:
Why would I notice something like this particularly when consciousness feels unusually expanded or concentrated?
Ordinary waking consciousness involves tremendous filtering.
At any moment, an incomprehensible amount of sensory information is available: visual detail, bodily sensation, sound, proprioception, temperature, pressure, internal sensation, memory, expectation.
Yet consciousness receives only a tiny fraction.
The nervous system is constantly deciding what matters.
When concentration deepens, that relationship may change.
The perceptual threshold can shift. Phenomena normally treated as irrelevant background may become foreground. Instead of attention continually leaping from object to object, the system becomes stable enough to notice smaller variations within experience itself.
That means an experience that feels like “seeing more” may sometimes involve noticing processes that were there all along. One of my favorite operational definitions of mindfulness is seeing new things in the same environment.
This is where meditation becomes fascinating as an empirical practice.
Sit for long enough.
Attend and expand.
Remove enough habitual distraction.
And aspects of the machinery become noticeable.
You begin studying consciousness using consciousness.
And then there is the hum.
The visual phenomenon has an auditory companion.
During these states I can also become aware of a continuous high-frequency hum — something like a very fine electrical tone.
Again, there are plausible neurophysiological explanations.
The brain is never acoustically silent. Neural activity is continuous. The auditory system is continuously processing both external and internally generated information. Sensory gating ordinarily filters much of this from awareness.
Clinical tinnitus provides an obvious comparison, although what I experience doesn’t feel like distressing tinnitus. Tinnitus often becomes caught in an attentional loop: the sound is detected, appraised as threatening or bothersome, attended to more strongly, and consequently experienced as louder and more intrusive.
This is different.
The hum appears during states of stillness and heightened awareness and has a neutral, almost signal-like quality. It doesn’t demand attention. It is simply there.
Various contemplative traditions have descriptions of an “inner sound,” “sound of silence,” or subtle auditory tone used as an object of meditation.
Again, there are multiple possible maps.
From a neurological perspective, perhaps sensory filtering has relaxed enough for spontaneous auditory activity to enter awareness.
From a contemplative perspective, perhaps quieter states of mind make subtler features of experience available.
Those explanations aren’t necessarily mutually exclusive.
Maybe consciousness is stranger than the categories we use to study it.
From neuroscience to Neti Neti
This is where my inquiry began drifting from neuroscience toward philosophy.
If ordinary consciousness depends so heavily on filtering, suppression, integration, prediction and construction, then what exactly do I mean when I say I am perceiving “reality”?
This does not mean the external world is imaginary.
It does mean our experience of that world is mediated.
The thing I experience as reality is already the result of an extraordinary act of biological interpretation.
And this suddenly reminded me of Neti Neti.
Neti Neti: Not this, not that.
Neti Neti is a Sanskrit expression associated with the Upanishadic tradition and later Advaita Vedanta. It is commonly translated as:
Not this. Not that.
It is essentially an exercise in removing identification.
I am aware of my body.
Therefore, perhaps what I ultimately am cannot simply be the body.
I am aware of my thoughts.
Therefore I cannot simply be the thoughts.
I can observe emotions arising and disappearing.
So I am also more than any particular emotional state.
Memory?
Personality?
Roles?
Beliefs?
Perceptions?
One by one, the meditator applies the same inquiry.
Not this.
Not that.
The throwing off of layers of illusion can also be understood in other ways. Such as how one’s personality can change through hormone therapy, brain injury, even simple metabolic dysregulation. So if all of that is not a permanent feature of identity, then who are we?
What remains when every object of awareness is distinguished from the awareness capable of observing it?
In Advaita Vedanta, the inquiry eventually points toward Atman (individual soul) and Brahman (the supreme cosmic reality that underlies all existence) are not separate.
The deepest self and the ground of reality are understood as one.
That is metaphysical territory, of course.
And what fascinates me is that the method is experiential.
You don’t have to begin by believing the conclusion.
You examine experience.
The Upanishads as consciousness laboratory
The Upanishads are among the philosophical culmination of the Vedic tradition, composed over a long historical period beginning roughly in the first millennium BCE.
Imagine my surprise and delight to discover that in the context of spiritual tradition, the Upanishads can be understood as “channeled” wisdom—though Hinduism uses a much older, specific framework to describe this process.
Rather than functioning primarily as collections of ritual instructions, many turn inward.
What is the Self?
What survives changing experience?
What is consciousness?
What is ultimate reality?
The Brihadaranyaka Upanishad is particularly associated with Neti Neti: reality cannot ultimately be captured by saying what it is. Every object, property, form or concept can be negated.
The method strips away identification.
Body.
Sensation.
Thought.
Emotion.
Identity.
And eventually even one’s ideas about God/Overarching Consciousness or ultimate reality.
Whatever can be observed or conceptualized is still, in some sense, an object appearing within awareness.
There is something almost phenomenological about this.
It invites investigation.
I have always been drawn to systems that allow experience itself to remain data.
This is one reason contemplative practice has mattered to me for so long.
It is also why I’m wary of the false choice between:
“There is a biological explanation.”
and
“There is a spiritual meaning.”
Those statements operate at different levels of description.
Finding the neural correlate of an experience tells us something important about how that experience manifests through a human nervous system.
It doesn’t automatically settle every philosophical question about what consciousness is.
A Course in Miracles: another map of the same terrain
A Course in Miracles. Or more accurately, Elizabeth Cronkhite’s modernized translation.
And those who know this resouce might already see it: that ACIM is saying something remarkably similar to Neti Neti.
A Course in Miracles comes from an entirely different cultural and religious vocabulary.
Particular in the original version, its language is Christian.
God. Holy Spirit. Christ. Forgiveness.
Yet its metaphysics are radically nondualistic.
ACIM repeatedly treats the ordinary world of separate bodies, competing selves and individual egos as a perceptual construction.
The ego says:
This body is me.
These thoughts are me.
My history is me.
My grievances are real.
Separation is real.
ACIM asks the practitioner to loosen identification with all of that. It dispels the reality of any categories of separation. In its own version of “not this, not that,” it peels off the illusory layers of perceived difference to reveal the connective unity underneath all phenomena within reality.
In this sense, the resemblance to Neti Neti is striking.
Not this body.
Not this thought.
Not this fear.
Not this grievance.
Not this separate identity.
Not this other. It is all you. It is All That Is.
The mechanisms differ, but both traditions repeatedly move the practitioner away from identification with the contents of consciousness and toward something more fundamental.
Forgiveness as a form of perceptual deconstruction
ACIM’s unusual definition of forgiveness becomes particularly interesting through this lens.
Ordinarily, forgiveness means something like:
You harmed me, but I am choosing to release my grievance.
ACIM goes much further.
Its metaphysical version of forgiveness asks the practitioner to question the perceptual framework through which the injury is being interpreted in the first place.
Fear.
Judgment.
Separation.
Polarity.
Otherness.
Projection.
Identity.
In that sense, forgiveness becomes a way of dismantling illusion.
This fear is not ultimately what I am.
This grievance is not ultimately what I am.
This egoic interpretation is not the totality of reality.
Again:
Neti.
Neti.
Different language. Similar direction.
What particularly interests me is what happens when spiritual teachings move across cultures.
The original language of ACIM is dense and unmistakably Christian. For some readers that language itself becomes a barrier.
I found that I could only connect with the text once I switched to a modernized translation. While it still retained some of the quasi-religious language, overall it was less gendered and archaic—and I was able to accept the vernacular as metaphor.
Modern interpreters often translate its ideas into more psychologically accessible terminology: projection, perception, conditioning, identity, ego, fear.
Something similar happens when Eastern contemplative traditions enter contemporary psychology.
“Mindfulness” can be discussed without karma, rebirth or enlightenment.
Nonattachment can become psychological flexibility.
Witness consciousness can become metacognition.
The vocabulary changes.
The experiential gesture may remain recognizable.
And the convergence becomes difficult for me to ignore.
So what happens if I keep following the thread?
At this point the inquiry took another turn.
Toward material that is considerably further outside conventional psychology:
The Law of One, sometimes called the Ra Material.
I want to be clear about epistemology here.
I do not place a channeled metaphysical text in the same evidentiary category as neuroscience.
That would collapse distinctions I think are useful.
But I also don’t find it intellectually satisfying to refuse to examine a system merely because its ontology is unconventional.
I am interested in maps.
And the Law of One contains a surprisingly elaborate map of consciousness.
The Law of One
The Law of One emerged through channeling sessions conducted by L/L Research in the early 1980s, in which an entity identifying itself as Ra presented a cosmology based upon the fundamental unity of existence.
Its central proposition is radically simple:
All is one.
Individual beings are ultimately expressions of a single infinite consciousness.
That premise immediately resembles aspects of Advaita Vedanta and ACIM, although the surrounding cosmology varies.
The Law of One then constructs an elaborate developmental system involving densities of consciousness, polarity, reincarnation, energy centers and spiritual evolution.
What caught my attention was how readily its internal structure could be compared with much older contemplative frameworks.
Service to Others and Service to Self
One of the central concepts in the Law of One is polarity.
Conscious beings eventually orient themselves primarily toward one of two paths:
Service to Others
or
Service to Self.
Service to Others involves an increasing recognition of shared being — compassion, cooperation, openness, and the understanding that another person’s welfare is inseparable from one’s own at a deeper level.
Service to Self emphasizes control, hierarchy, domination and the consolidation of power around the separate self.
The resemblance to other traditions isn’t exact, but parallels appear.
Karma Yoga emphasizes action performed without attachment to personal reward.
Certain Tantric traditions famously distinguish right-hand and left-hand paths.
Various ethical and mystical systems contrast surrender of egoic self-interest with the intensification of individual power.
Again, different maps.
Similar questions.
What do we do with the experience of being an apparently separate self?
Do we expand identification?
Or contract around it?
Densities and chakras
The Law of One also describes consciousness evolving through seven densities, each representing a progressively different mode of awareness.
And of course, once you have seven developmental levels in a metaphysical system, it becomes difficult not to notice the resemblance to the seven-chakra model most familiar in modern yoga traditions.
The correspondence is striking within the logic of the system.
The lower centers involve survival, sexuality, personal identity and social relationship.
Then consciousness develops toward compassion, communication, insight and increasingly nondual forms of awareness.
In the Law of One, the densities similarly describe movement from basic awareness toward increasingly complex self-awareness, compassion, wisdom and eventual return toward unity.
These systems did not emerge from the same historical context.
They should not simply be collapsed into one another.
Yet they appear to be organizing spiritual development around a similar vertical metaphor:
from survival and individuated identity
toward relationality,
toward compassion,
toward expanded consciousness,
toward unity.
Which brought me all the way back to the flicker
This is where the conversation became wonderfully circular.
I had started with a strange visual phenomenon.
Saccades.
Microsaccades.
Sensory gating.
Perceptual integration.
The possibility that deep concentration allows ordinarily filtered features of sensory processing to become conscious.
Then I wandered through the Upanishads, Vedanta, Neti Neti, ACIM, the Law of One, spiritual polarity, densities and chakras.
And finally I asked:
Within the internal metaphysics of the Law of One, how would this original visual phenomenon be understood?
The answer was completely different from the neuroscientific one.
Within that system, the subtle visual vibration could be interpreted as activity related to the higher energy centers — particularly the indigo or blue-ray centers — during contemplative states.
The saccadic rhythm of the eye could then be imagined as a physical mechanism through which subtler information becomes translated into perceptual form: the nervous system rendering an experience that the metaphysical framework describes as higher-frequency consciousness.
In that account, the flicker isn’t merely noise leaking through sensory gating.
It becomes the physical sensory apparatus struggling to render something outside its ordinary bandwidth.
Do I know that this is what is happening?
Of course not.
But I find the juxtaposition extraordinary.
One phenomenon. Multiple maps.
Here are at least four ways of describing essentially the same experience.
Neuroscience:
Changes in attention reveal ordinarily suppressed visual and auditory processes involving saccades, perceptual integration, neural oscillation and sensory gating.
Contemplative psychology:
As attention stabilizes and habitual filtering quiets, increasingly subtle phenomena become available to awareness.
Nondual traditions:
Close examination of perception reveals that ordinary experience is constructed, impermanent and distinguishable from the awareness in which it appears.
Metaphysical systems such as the Law of One:
Altered perception may reflect increasing sensitivity to subtler levels of consciousness or energy that the physical nervous system translates into sensory form.
These explanations are not epistemologically equivalent.
That matters.
But the fact that they aren’t equivalent doesn’t mean I have to select one immediately and throw the others away.
Sometimes I want to hold several maps on the table.
What if the split itself is part of the problem?
This may be where the inquiry becomes most personally important to me.
Modern Western culture trains us to divide knowledge into categories.
Objective or subjective.
Scientific or spiritual.
Physical or psychological.
Brain or mind.
Real or imaginary.
Rational or mystical.
Those distinctions have tremendous value. Scientific methodology gives us protections against wishful thinking, confirmation bias and the seductive human tendency to mistake conviction for truth.
I don’t want to lose any of that.
At the same time, subjective experience is also where every human being actually lives.
Consciousness is the medium through which science itself is practiced.
Every measurement eventually becomes perception.
Every theory becomes thought.
Every scientific insight arises in awareness.
And consciousness remains extraordinarily difficult to explain.
So I find myself increasingly interested in a different posture.
Instead of deciding immediately which worldview is permitted to speak, I want to ask what each one allows me to notice.
What can neuroscience tell me about this experience?
What can contemplative practice reveal through direct observation?
What happens when I apply Neti Neti?
What does ACIM notice about identification and perception?
What patterns appear when I compare these ideas with stranger metaphysical systems?
Where do they converge?
Where do they contradict one another?
What can actually be tested?
What remains speculation?
And what happens inside my own consciousness while I investigate?
I don’t need the question resolved.
Perhaps that is the piece I find most exciting.
I started by wondering why my visual field sometimes seems to vibrate during particular states of consciousness.
I still don’t know.
Maybe I am becoming conscious of perceptual mechanisms that my nervous system usually edits out.
That would be fascinating.
Maybe contemplative concentration changes sensory gating enough to reveal a finer-grained level of ordinary neural activity.
Also fascinating.
Maybe human beings have capacities for consciousness that our current scientific paradigms do not yet adequately describe.
Highly possible.
Maybe the metaphysical systems are pointing toward something real.
Possible.
Maybe they are extraordinarily sophisticated symbolic maps generated by human minds trying to describe experiences that resist ordinary language.
Also possible.
I can live inside that uncertainty.
In fact, I increasingly think the ability to remain there is part of the practice.
To observe without immediately collapsing ambiguity.
To discriminate without prematurely dividing.
To entertain an idea without surrendering discernment.
To recognize that a biological explanation and an experiential description can coexist.
To recognize that metaphor sometimes notices patterns before mechanism catches up.
To recognize that some metaphysical claims may simply be distortions.
And still keep looking.
Because whether the flicker is a tiny glimpse of the brain constructing perception or something far stranger, it has already done something useful.
It made the machinery of ordinary reality slightly less invisible to me.
And once I noticed that, the question kept opening.
What exactly is doing the noticing?