Astral Diving 1: Light and the Brain
HYPNAGOGIA: The transition state between wake and sleep often features illuminated geometric patterns. Why?
At a Manhattan consciousness MeetUp, I crossed paths with Joel Murphy, co-founder of OpenBCI. Joel wrote his contact inside the jacket of a proof copy of my novel I was carrying around that night. I liked to copy edit on the train. Amidst the noise and chaos, I could always find a word to exchange for a grander or perhaps grittier word or simply spot a glaring type-o. And so I carried proofs with me, exchanging my commute time for novelist productivity. In that particular novel a lead character was a psychonaut, a detective who would go into a third-eye activation dream state to solve crime. Whereas I was heavily exploring in fiction the fictive use of brainwaves and EEG, Joel was exploring it in reality, making open source brain interfaces affordable for anyone. Soon, however, I ordered an Arduino starter kit from Adafruit, and my fictional exploration of biohacking evolved into real pineal gland biohacking. Eventally in invested in my own OpenBCI EEG kit. But how in the world could I get inside the eye? Or into the part of the brain that produces these geometric illuminations? I emailed Joel Murphy, and he did not know. No one knows. So, I took it upon myself to learn how. At the time I certainly wasn’t thinking about the pineal gland, but I can say today, it was thinking about me…
FICTIVE NEUROTECHNOLOGY: Most of my characters have nanoretinas. In fiction it is easy to get inside the eye. In reality, technology has not gotten there yet. Not even close. Why?
ARDUINO NANO: The open-source software on these circuit boards drives all of my third eye experiments. After I got the basics down on how to program an LED to blink with a board like this, I headed straight for subatomic particle sensing. (Special thanks to Spencer Axani).
We now live in a world where citizen scientists such as myself can buy Arduino boards off Amazon for a few dollars, silicon photomultipliers (SiPM) for sensing single photons for under a hundred dollars, put everything together on our laptop and hack into our neurology. While my original goal had been to establish that photons are emitted in the eye, during my years of experimentation to create technology that could detect these photons, I learned something much more important: the light body is real, the third eye is real, the pineal gland may well be the site of the soul.
OpenBCI EEG DATA: We can dream while we are awake, with our eyes open. The cluster of spikes are simultaneous with strong flashes of light during a hypnagogia, third eye, pineal gland meditation.
Stay tuned.