Magic

You may recall an earlier post about eidetic images and how we can use the process of infusing imagined scenes with all our senses and an emotional force to 'magically' change things in the outside world. I was trying to link that idea with the process of memory-building taught in the ancient Ars Memoria, which I tried to describe--by example- in part II of this post, by introducing the scientist Charles Tart and an experiment he ran at Stanford University. One process appears to go backwards while the other goes forward, but really, both are attempts to better grasp the world you are experiencing and better direct your place in it.
In the post on eidetic images, I quoted from an autobiography of Nikolai Tesla in which he described his strong abilities in eidetic imaging and how they helped him with his inventions. The amaaaazing magician, Marco Tempest starts out with that ability of Tesla's and then describes some more of his history, using a magical technique that he's developed which merges image and books and artwork and photos and sound in unexpected ways. It's really a treat...Enjoy!!



On the TedTalks Blog, there's another video which explains how they worked their projection mapping with a physical pop-up book:



The magician himself, without Tesla:



where he shows amazing 'deceptions'.

Eidetic Image III, Ars Memoria, and Cats

This is my little prince, Haruki, named after the author Haruki Murakami:

(Laughter is the Best Medicine, photo by Gabriel)

He has also modeled for me often.

And this is my first attempt at a lino print:

Cat in Blue Moonlight

And while I'm posting about excellent medicine, I would like to share an interview I stumbled across from Ode Magazine between Jurrian Kamp and Biologist Bruce Lipton. The discussion centers around the change in Lipton's studies from being centered around a belief in the power of genetics to shape our lives (fate in terms of behavior and physical health) to being centered around the idea that not just our environment, but more how we perceive our environment shapes our lives (again: both physical health and behavior) Kamp explains Lipton's studies:

Lipton’s discoveries are part of an emerging new biological paradigm that presents a radically different view of the evolution of life: epigenetics. Epi means “above” in Greek, so epigenetics means control above the genes. 'It turns out that as we move from one environment to another environment, we change our genetic readout,' Lipton says. 'Or if we perceive that our environment is not supporting us, then that perception also changes our genetics.' 

So, following the ideas in posts I and II on this topic, he's defining the underlying 'image' we carry around in our deep subconscious which explains what we can see of this world, what we will miss, our health, our happiness, wars, famine, and violence (yes!) as DNA. His "picture" is, in fact, a coded sequence. That coded sequence may have a gene in it that practically guarantees cancer. So that's the fated outcome of that picture. Then it becomes sort of an emergency to change the picture, yes?

We are masters of our genetics rather than victims of our hereditary traits. Our fate is really based on how we see the world or on how we have been programmed to experience it.

Again, his science supports the idea we have seen in other belief systems that for some reason, you tend to produce your underlying image before the age of five: 

...neuroscience reveals a startling fact: We only run our lives with our creative, conscious mind about 5 percent of the time. Ninety-five percent of the time, our life is controlled by the beliefs and habits that are programmed in the subconscious mind. You may hold some positive thoughts but that has very little influence on your life because of the limited amount of time you actually run with your conscious mind.”
Kamp says: "Lipton explains that there is a good reason for the automatic “playback” function of the subconscious mind. As children, we learn to walk. While we do so, our lives are determined by the process. It takes all our energy and attention. The same happens when we learn to drive later in life. But once we have acquired these new habits, the subconscious mind automates the procedure. Whatever seemed almost overwhelmingly difficult at one point now is simple. We don’t even think about it anymore when we put one foot in front of the other or drive home from work.
However, we don’t just record simple motor functions like walking or driving. In the same way, we also record perceptions and behaviors. And we do most of this recording in the womb, during the second trimester of pregnancy, and during the first six years of our lives. “The fundamental programs in your subconscious mind are not your own wishes and desires,” Lipton points out. “They are behaviors you copied from other people, primarily your parents and your family and community. Your beliefs are actually their beliefs, their wishes and desires. You are ‘playing’ behaviors that were downloaded into you when you were a small child. And it is not very likely that these behaviors are what you are looking for today. You are sabotaging yourself!

He explains that this automatic behavior is not something you can talk to or reason with; we have all, I'm sure noticed that we can make the same 'realizations' about how we should feel or behave in a certain circumstance over and over without it ever actually happening. That's because those beliefs are recorded well below logic, in an emotive memory--I believe a more symbolic memory. We have to speak to those symbols, find them and move them around, in order to have the impact we want. 

Mr. Lipton suggests that there have been good results in this sort of thing using hypnosis or subliminal tapes; in his own book (Biology of Belief), he outlines a simple technique he calls PSYCH-K which he claims has profound results.

He also makes another interesting point about health that matches what dream theory tells us. That point is about the cohesiveness of reality. He explains that what we perceive as an individual, a person, our 'self', is really a community of some 50 trillion or so cells. And the extension of that is that really, each of us is a cell in one "giant collaborative superorganism." He calls what we are doing to each other with crime, terrorism, violence, and theft, is nothing more than an autoimmune disease: the body fighting itself in a senseless act.

But most interesting about his article was that, just like in the example used in the Second Post on this topic, Dr. Lipton uses love as the re-creator of the 'universe' as you know it.

Kamp (the interviewer) explains: "When we fall in love, our conscious minds, with our wishes and desires, are running almost full-time--not 5 percent of the time, but 95 percent. That condition can be life-changing." This is what Lipton calls the honeymoon effect--those moments when the universe is heaven, because we are creating it from desire, instead of passively watching it from the cage created by the disempowering beliefs of an utterly dependent child subconsciously soaking in the fears and angers of the adults around him in an attempt to stay safe.

Mariiiiiiiia!!!!

Another excellent discovery which continues in this vein and links it to another topic I've explored here, Ars Memoria (here, here, here and here ...not exhaustive :P) is this TEDtalks video of Joshua Foer on memory. He reminds us that memories (like the one of Maria) make us who we are. They build upon that basic, defining image you have and solidify it (because you're perceiving your experience of living through the holograph of that image), give it new symbols to work with--basically each memory becomes an extension of visual vocabulary.

Here's the thing: by 'outsourcing' our memory skills to devices, we make ourselves even more passive 'participants' in our own lives.  I think here about how a cat finds his way home without GPS or Google Maps, even when you've accidentally let him out of your car somewhere halfway across the country when you got out to get gas, somewhere he/she had never been before.  Why can't we find our way out of a small forest if we stumble off the beaten path? 

When you're active about your memory making, especially when you're using this 'memory palace' technique Foer describes (an ancient technique, outlined also in earlier posts under Ars Memoria), you are actively placing symbols in the structure that symbolizes your 'self' to your mind: the palace, your home. Now, to some extent, those symbols, and what you are inclined to do with them, are going to be led by your genetic code, your childhood-created, subconscious image defining the world and the relationships and movements that can be made within it. A trick that memory champions use to subvert that--a trick that goes way back past the ancient Greek practitioners--is to posit ridiculous, senseless objects, characters, and relationships to undercut your natural tendency to adhere to your previously defined, underlying logic.  The ancients felt that if you perfected these memory techniques, you would have something akin to magical powers; you would be able to magically alter the world around you. I would posit that you would be altering your perception of what is possible--you would be altering what you could see. When Einstein labeled certain events 'spooky action at a distance,' he was talking about actions which had results that could not be explained, mainly because we are not able to see all the teeming, shivering atoms that make up the universe. Everything is touching. If you could see those atoms, the action wouldn't seem so spooky. In this video, Joshua Foer talks about 'elaborative encoding,' and tells us that the distinctions noted in brain studies of memory champions were not in size or structure but rather in the fact that they were using spacial recognition areas of the brain when memorizing information (for example, lists of numbers)--meaning, again, image and also spatial relationship between images: just like that secret, subconscious, not fully-understood, explored, or even recognized Palace your mind created before you turned five. In the video, he walks you through some techniques to do some heavy remodeling in that memory palace, and therefore, if all this follows, some heavy remodeling of the planet.

Enjoy!

Santa Caterina and her Violetta

"Every disease is a musical problem; every cure is a musical solution."--Novalis

Santa Caterina de Vigri and her Violetta

In the Church of Corpus Domini, Bologna, Santa Caterina de Vigri sits upright on view, her flesh-color ranging from a brick-red to black and still cleaving to her bones though she died in 1463. She is the only such saint to sit upright, and her shrine miraculously survived the same bombing raids of 1943 which destroyed all the surrounding decorations and building. Next to her sits her violetta, created by Andrea Amati (1413-63), which is the oldest known surviving stringed instrument. So, the saint, uncorrupted, and her instrument, also able to out-survive its contemporaries.

According to Marina Warner, in her well-packed and fascinating book Phantasmagoria, "The word 'galvanize' has at least two meanings: applied to metals, it means coating iron or steel with zinc through an electrolytic process in order to protect it from corrosion [italics mine]; figuratively, it means something closer to [Luigi] Galvani's work, the revitalization of a moribund or torpid organism: 'I was galvanized into action.'" These two meanings, both relating quite well to the hope presented by the incorrupt body of a saint that waits its resurrection with its bones still holding it together, and also both relating to her violetta in a manner we will attend to momentarily, are especially interesting here because Mr. Luigi Galvani himself is entombed right across the nave from her.

Luigi Galvani (1737-98) was a physiologist and professor of medicine, the one who first introduced an electric shock into a frog’s corpse and beheld that it caused the animal to kick its legs. This opened up a variety of excited questions about a possibly attainable source of life-force, leading to all sorts of other experiments, and tales like Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Luigi’s nephew, Giovanni Aldini, tried this same electrification on human corpses, bringing their limbs to jump and their faces to become quite expressive, and then moved the process to the living via the mentally-ill, thus beginning electroshock therapy in an attempt to bring life back to a frozen (terrified, confused, overwhelmed) mind.

Christopher Turner gives a fantastic description of the famous hypnotist Franz Mesmer’s ‘galvanizing’ use of electricity in the Spring 2006 Issue of Cabinet Magazine:

“In a medical museum in Lyon there is a strange tub-like object constructed of oak and decorated with lengths of ornately woven rope. About six inches in from the rim, eight evenly spaced iron rods sprout up from a highly polished lid. In the eighteenth century, a group of patients would sit or stand around this device in such a way as to press the afflicted areas of their bodies against these moveable metal wishbones and, bound to the instrument by the ropes, would link fingers to complete an "electric" circuit. The atmosphere in which these sessions took place was heavy with incense and séance-like; the music of a glass harmonica (invented by Benjamin Franklin) provided a haunting soundtrack, and thick drapes, mirrors, and astrological symbols decorated the opulent, half-lit room.

Franz Anton Mesmer, the legendary Viennese healer, hypnotist, and showman, would enter this baroque salon of his own invention wearing flamboyant gold slippers and a lilac silk robe. He would prowl around the expectant, highly charged circle, sending clients into trances with his enthralling brown-eyed stare. By slowly passing his hands over patients' bodies, or with a simple flick of his magnetized wand, Mesmer would provoke screams, fits of contagious hysterical laughter, vomiting, and dramatic convulsions. These effects were considered cathartic and curative. When a patient's seizures became so exaggerated as to be dangerous or disruptive, Mesmer's valet, Antoine, would carry him or her to the sanctuary of a mattress-lined "crisis room" where the screams would be muffled.

The baquet, as Mesmer named his vessel, parodied the contemporary craze for medical electricity. Pharmacists and apothecaries frequently prescribed shock treatment, especially in attempts to cure paralysis, and often exposed the sick to a more general "electrical aura" as a healing agent. Benjamin Franklin, then American ambassador to France, was fond of demonstrating the power that could be harnessed in a Leyden jar, the prototype of the modern battery, by using one to send a bolt of electricity through a chain of people. (One medical electrician claimed not only to have shot a charge through 150 guardsmen, but to have made a kilometer-long line of monks simultaneously jump into the air.)”

Mesmer’s baquet was much like Franklin’s battery, a huge reservoir to take in and save Mesmer’s own magnetic-electric inner fire and spread it amongst the members of his rather large groups of patients, all at once.

“In England, such [medical] applications were encouraged by Newton’s suggestions, thrown out in a number of queries at the end of the 1713 edition of his Optics, that the animal spirits or nervous fluid which communicated impulses from the brain to the muscles might be related to a subtle ethereal or electrical fluid that constituted a kind of universal medium in the universe. Hints such as these, combined with the strong inherited tendency to think of electricity as a vapor or effluvium, made it easy to see electricity as a mediator between microcosm and macrocosm, and as the principle of life itself. In America, where electrotherapies formed a strong field of what has been called “electrical humanitarianism,” Dr. T. Gale wrote in his Electricity, Or Etherial Fire, Considered (1802) that electricity was a kind of universal atmosphere, which all living creatures inhabited and respired.” --Steven Connor

Now, it is still true that we use electric paddles to try to revive a (very recently deceased) corpse even today, and very often with success. The question is mainly how to navigate that shadowy, sometimes grisly space between life-saving techniques and Frankenstein, while also somehow sidestepping the messier areas of mass-hysteria and public fainting-spells. But inside that space is a fascinating realm involving the electric impulses that communicate information between synapses in your brain and, again, music. Oliver Sacks thoroughly explores this realm in his book Musicophilia.  

He describes, for example, a man who discovered his first interest and immense talent in his late forties, directly after being struck by lightning.  But there are less far-flung examples of the intense connection between electricity, life, and music in the stories of some epileptic patients:

-"Jon S., a robust man of forty-five, had been in perfect health until January of 2006. His working week had just started; he was in the office on a Monday morning, and went to get something from the closet. Once he entered the closet, he suddenly heard music--'classical, melodic, quite nice, soothing...vaguely familiar...It was a string instrument, a solo violin.'
He immediately thought, 'Where the hell is that music coming from?' There was an old, discarded electronic device in the closet, but this, though it had knobs, had no speakers. Confusedly, in a state of what he later called 'suspended animation,' he groped for the controls of the device to turn the music off. 'Then,' he says, 'I went out.' A colleague in the office who saw all this described Mr. S. as 'slumped over, unresponsive,' in the closet, though not convulsing.
Mr.S's next memory was of an emergency medical technician leaning over him, questioning him."
Sacks asked him about this music, but he could not sing it himself and didn't know what it was, though he felt it familiar.
"I told him that if he ever did hear this music--on the radio, perhaps--he should note what it was and let me know. Mr. S. Said that he would keep his ears open, but as we talked about it, he could not help wondering whether there was just a feeling, perhaps an illusion, of familiarity attached to the music, rather than an actual recollection of something he had once heard. There was something evocative about it, but elusive, like the music heard in dreams."

And then, as I was saving the information I’m working on about the saint, I came across the quote from Hugh Jackson via Oliver Sacks about a ‘doubling of consciousness’ that occurs during the seizures such as the one her violin is creating. What was once her and some paper dolls is now her and dancers--real, alive--, her as part of the show, the musician for the dancers, the one giving them their rhythm, storyline, electricity. She is part of something, something that matters. That’s the other consciousness, the one outside of the four sides of her box.

So, electricity is everywhere. Trees make a little bit, running it through their bark. Your heart works via electricity it generates from potassium, sodium and calcium. Communication is run between the synapses in your brain via electricity. There’s of course lightning. And humans are making more and more electricity even outside of their bodies using a variety of tools. And all of this has a music to it.

Christina Kubisch is an artist who explores this connection between electricity and music from a completely different direction than Galvani, Sacks, Shelley, or even Santa Caterina. She has had a certain type of headphones created which a user takes along with a map of an area (meant only as an inspiration and a guide, but in no way a limiting force) in order to hear the music created by all the electric fields surrounding us every day. She explained how she taps into these ‘Invisible Cities’ of sound in an interview with Cabinet Magazine:

“--How do the headphones actually work?
--Every current in an electrical conductor—for example a wire or a cable—generates an electromagnetic field. These currents can be “musical,” like the signals running through loudspeaker cables; or they can come from electrical activity in the infrastructures of buildings or cities. The magnetic component of these fields is picked up by the sensor coils in the headphones. And, after amplification, these signals are made audible by the little speaker systems in the headphones. So if there’s an electromagnetic field (say, an underground cable) and another one nearby (say, the headphones), the fields pick up each other. The sound jumps through the air from one to the other.”

“--I’m struck by the similarity between some of these sounds and minimalist techno: PanSonic or Alva Noto, for example.
--Yes. There are some sounds that, when I listen to them for half an hour, sound to me like LaMonte Young. The tram in Bratislava, for example, is almost like a choir: a chord, three sounds together that are changing, but each at a different level... Subways, buses, and trains are especially musical, maybe because they depend upon a constant flow of electricity. There’s a wonderful subway in China that sounds to me like electronic music of the 70s... Airplanes, though, sound really ugly: very high, thin, and noisy.”
...
This summer I put on my headphones during a very strong thunderstorm. There was no electricity, because all the power had gone out. But, when I recorded, I got the sounds of natural electricity, which was wonderful. The recording is so strange: very low, but very clear... At two points, you hear voices. You can’t understand the words, but you can tell that they are voices. I knew that electricity could transport voices, but I had never heard it before. It’s quite breathtaking when you hear things like that. This is nature, too—electrical nature!”



Somehow, electricity is there in the force of life, and somehow, music is involved. Think about shamanic, hypnotic drumming, about the heights of ecstasy some reach at jam sessions of their favorite bands--such heights that they are willing to drop everything and follow the band around. Think about the chanters in ancient masses, about techno-music, about binaural beats. And that makes the quote at the top of the post make more sense: problems occur when the rhythm of your life gets out of whack--somehow, the vibrations are off, the energy isn’t there, the organs falter and the synapses sleep late because the alarm never went off.

In an interview with Steve Silberman of Wired Magazine about the studies that went into Musicophilia, Oliver Sacks stated : "The therapeutic power of music hit me dramatically in 1966, when I started working with the Awakenings patients at Beth Abraham in the Bronx. I saw post-encephalitics who seemed frozen, transfixed, unable to take a step. But with music to give them a flow, they could sing, dance, and be active again. For Parkinsonian patients, the ability to perform actions in sequence is impaired. They need temporal structure and organization, and the rhythm of music can be crucial. For people with Alzheimer's, music incites recall, bringing the past back like nothing else."

There it is again, that image of re-infusing a corpse with life, and this time the electricity is created with music--its flow (like electricity) and its rhythmic pulse. It is the first step those post-encephalitics were unable to take; once the music gave them that first step and a current to follow, they were able to ride it.

There was another thought I was chewing on here, with the saint and her violin:
There is a difference between skill and possession. And what you want (even, I would argue, as a doctor) is possession, because if a person is ill, it is from not following the logic (rites, rituals, rules, rhythms) of the reigning forces or melodies (‘gods’) of existence. Only that force understands its own logic, or those in choreography with it. And everything you see is a symbolic aspect of that logic (recall the post on Eidetic Images), including illness. Music historically has much to do with trance, both as a result of possession or not. That trance is the opportunity for something higher and more general than your ego to take over your body. That is the electricity created. In the painting above, St. Catherine is possessed. She is an electric force, radiating. And she is bringing that electricity into the forms, making them alive through her music, infusing the air and their limbs with the tango of their love, that “fire that consumes without leaving ashes” (Vannoccio Biringuccio, 1540).

[Please note: the skirt was inspired by the one worn by the model in this Ryan Muirhead photo. The idea of a chaotic waters filled with spirits that she brought to the surface and to life appealed to me.]

Uncharted Territory: Gina Litherland, Nikola Tesla, and the Eidetic Image

Queen of Uncharted Territory by Gina Litherland

This post is really an extension of the last post (on the paintings of Madeline von Foerster and the magic that brings animals and plants back from the brink of extinction). One idea explored (again) was that our perception of the world could be defined by a latent image of sorts that we then proceeded to animate in endlessly similar variations throughout our lives; this part is more an exploration of the possibilities of changing that image, which, so, so unfairly, is pretty much cemented into place by your fifth year of life.

In recognizing that image and its power we can alter it, though it takes a lot more effort once we're past those tender years of constant play and imagination and we’re fully immersed--and invested-- in an image. One powerful method is to work with your dreams, lucidly re-entering them and changing  aspects, much like moving the furniture around your house to create a more open mood or room for knocking down a wall and putting in widows, etc.

Not good at recalling your dreams? Haven't been successful at achieving lucidity? There are other ways...

The Surrealists tried all types of automatic techniques to allow their subconscious to speak over their egos. There were Exquisite Corpses, which were sentences, poems, stories, or even images put together piece by piece by different players, none of whom could see more than a sliver of what the person before him/her had wrought.  Thus your subconscious is directing communication--both how you try to communicate with others and how they respond to you is a result of the way you are perceiving the universe, and it’s interesting to take part in an activity that reminds you that what’s outside your body is affected by this ‘latent image’. You think you just happen to live in the neighborhood where all the jerks are, but tomorrow they could all be different--if you’re able to change that image.

IMAGE: Exquisitely created new mythological creature by Paul Compton and Priscilla Ambrosini
The second half was created with only a sliver of the first half uncovered to aid in the completion.


IMAGE: Lilly-Putians, by Immy and Mark Tattam. Again, this was divided into a top-half and a bottom-half, with only a sliver of the first part exposed to guide the second artist.

Lillyputians were very tiny people created by writer Jonathan Swift in his novel Gulliver’s Travels. Their name became synonymous with being not just tiny in size, but trivial or petty, due to the satirical nature of his work.  In the above work, they have surfaced as a result of a top/bottom collaborations: what was a stamen becomes a neck, or the flamboyant hair of a person on a television screen.  To me, this image is the evolution of the Lilliputians to something higher. The people are tiny, and their heads are blooms, and the mechanical bits of the bottom merge seamlessly into the flora of the top. Which, when I think about it, is the opposite of how humanity tends to work, at least in the West: we tend to be a bit machine-like with our brains, wanting rules and repeatable experiments and evidence, but a little more animalistic with the body. Here, these beings seem to float—they are not rooted, as plants would be—, and they are further “raised up” by the size of the lovely blooms. Their transition is a transcendence.

If all this seems very professional to you (as it does to me), and therefore difficult to pull off with the necessary sense of ‘play,’ you can try it the way the Surrealists did: by cutting out pieces from magazines and old texts. Someone starts at the top of the page, puts his/her “head”, covers all but a sliver and passes it to the next person.

Or:

Try it with words. Give each a part of speech, in this order: Article, adjective, noun, verb, article, adjective, noun. Everyone writes down his/her word without peeking at the others', then they are put down in order to make a sentence.

From this process, of course, one could take one’s favorite parts of various of these sentences and let his consciousness have a go at continuing on with it, using the so-created surprising metaphors and connections to develop something quite grand. Or…leave it as is.


Another way to let the subconscious speak was/is through the technique of Decalcomania. This is done by slopping paint onto a paper or some other surface and then pressing that paper with another and peeling it off. Or folding the paper in half and pressing to create a mirror image. Or pressing that paper onto your canvas and peeling it off. The result leaves chance impressions that can then be developed into whatever images seem to be wanting to emerge.

IMAGE: lion bicycle created via decalcomania by Oscar Dominguez





Queen of Uncharted Territory by Gina Litherland

For example, Gina Litherland says of her painting process:

"While some of my paintings begin with an idea that I have been ruminating over for some time, or are inspired by a particularly compelling book or folktale, others occur quite spontaneously, beginning with a decalcomania underpainting which suggests forms that emerge and develop into a personal narrative. The act of painting becomes a complete process of revelation. A mysterious narrative emerges, Rorschach-like, from a turbulent, chaotic ground of color and texture. Myths, dreams, memories, and phantoms of pigment suspended in medium are in continuous dialogue with one another. Dormant images ignite slowly, as our eyes adjust to their dark submerged brilliance."


SCHOLAR OF THE DARK ARMCHAIR, by Gina Litherland

"The imagination is a wilderness--liberating, ecstatic, waiting to grow and fly and howl. From a brush dipped in verdigris or terre verte, wilderness waits to creep vinelike over canvases and panels, curling and flowing, collecting on the edges of forms like frost, and sleeping in deep pools of viridian and ultramarine. It grows from poetic associations, unfolding its leaves to reveal shadows and phrases momentarily obscured from view." (Litherland)

It grows from poetic associations.





DON JUAN OF THE WILDERNESS, by Gina Litherland


So once you have an image, revel in it. Make it eidetic. This is key; this is what makes it like a dream, a lucid dream.

Eidetic:  adjective: “relating to or denoting mental images having unusual vividness and detail, as if actually visible.” noun: “a person able to form or recall eidetic images.” This word was a German term coined in the 1920s from the Greek eidētikos , which is from eidos, ‘form.’

Those who can see eidetic images claim that they are so real, they can be inspected for newly-discovered detail, as if the object were actually present, and not simply remembered. The object seems to take physical space, to exist again in front of them, but only for them and not those around them--this is an escape from the limits of consensual reality, in a sense; it is a crack in the wall. The eidetic viewer can see what you can’t, and what he/she sees is as much a physical reality, for him/her, as it would be if you could also see it.

You can try to understand this through over-stimulation of your retina. A blinding flash will often leave a thickly present image on the back of your lids of whatever was in the flash--however, the image jumps and leaves too quickly, and you cannot really inspect it. That type of image is only useful to suggest the thickness, the difference in fullness, of what an eidetic sees. A holograph is another way to think about it. The object, not touchable/tangible or physically present, is nevertheless available for true inspection; more detail than you recall about the object, even more than you actually saw (for example, you can go around the object and see its back-side) is present. Another aspect of this image is that the attendant sound and emotive effects are present; if the image (which can be even a lengthy memory of an event) is present, the entire feeling of the experience of that image is present. This is like what happens under hypnosis or a hallucination: you sink into the image, you exist there, where it “was”--that is how you are able to go around the object, or notice new details about the event. It’s how you re-enter a dream lucidly. It is also (I would posit) how one really manages time travel--because remember that what we’re in right now is an eidetic image; no ‘present’ is any more real than another.

In Sinister Yogis, David Gordon White explains the Buddhist meditation concept of anusmrti as a type of remembering; not just any remembering, it is 'remembrance subsequent to,' or 'methodical remembrance': "Here the core of the practice was to so concentrate one's vision on an image of Buddha or a deity as to be able to subsequently and methodically envision the same image without the need for [a] meditation support."

He calls the technique eidetic imaging, and quotes a fifth-century Buddhist text in which a similar type of meditation, kasina meditation, is described: "The meditator then concentrates on the meditation object until an eidetic image of it can be recalled at will whether or not the external object is present. Briefly, this is a means by which external stimuli can be interiorized, a psychotropic technique by means of which all mental activity can be brought to a single point and concentrated there..."

Then White suggests something interesting: that at the time of these writings, the meditators might have been using oil lamps to contemplate religious cave paintings in this manner:

"The walls of a fifth- to seventh-century Buddhist cave shrine at Simsim, in Chinese Turkestan, for example, are painted with representations of the world of humans on its lower walls, with fabulous mountains above these and the firmament with its supernatural powers at the summit of the vault. The Buddha image inside the cave, half enclosed by the stone into which it is cut, is surrounded by a great, flaming halo, a sunburst of light..."

Staring at this recessed image in the light of an oil lamp against the deep black of the darkness of the cave would make the image against your eyelids very strong once you closed your eyes, and it would stay for some time. Practicing like this, one would then hope to be able to call the image up in its completeness at any time, day or night, in any place and in any situation. The image would then become central to the meditator, almost the effect of carrying a saint within oneself.

"...according to Nyaya-Vaisesika philosophy, all memories are exact transpositions of the past onto the present: if one is but capable of remembering, the content of that memory of the past is wholly actualized in the present and is therefore as true and real as other valid cognitions, such as eyewitness perception, and so on."

In Lucid Waking: Mindfulness and the Spiritual Potential of Humanity, Georg Feuerstein also talks about Buddhist masters of this technique:

"We can witness the same kind of astonishing visualization in some meditation masters of the Tibetan Buddhist tradition, who are able to construct complex and extraordinarily vivid inner images of various deities and their divine environments...Also, they are able to maintain these visualizations for hours at a time, during which they move deeper and deeper into the mysterious multilevel world of consciousness."

He shows how this type of imaging will then carry over into physical reality:

"Other Tibetan yogis are able to create so much body heat through visualization that they can sit naked at the top of Himalayan mountain peaks and dry wet cloths on their bare skin, melting the snow around them to boot. Since this extraordinary accomplishment has been captured on film, we know that this is not mere legend or wishful thinking."

But it's not just Buddhists; Feuerstein also talks about Nikola Tesla, who (More than Thomas Edison!) created ways to transmit power over long distances without the use of wires.


Feuerstein says: "Tesla was apparently capable of such vivid visualization, or internal imaging, that he could test his electrical machines without having to build or even draw them. He allowed them to run in his imagination, checked in with them regularly, and determined the wear and tear after so many hours of purely imaginary running. He improved his hypothetical machines by making the appropriate adjustments in his mental imagery. When he was satisfied that an invention was running at optimal performance, he would finally set about building it. His mental simulations invariably proved accurate."

Is it even possible that he made them real before they existed? That they worked because first he imagined them working? And what did he create but light and heat and sound via electricity, this magical power (recall Galvini's experiments attempting to re-inject life in corpses via electrical stimulus, and the later stories of Frankenstein) from the universe brought into our homes. He changed the world, through his imaging.

(Publicity photo of Tesla in his Colorado Springs Lab in 1899 by Dickenson V. Alley)

According to Wikipedia:
At the 1893 World's Fair, the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago, an international exposition was held which, for the first time, devoted a building to electrical exhibits. It was a historic event as Tesla and George Westinghouse introduced visitors to AC power by using it to illuminate the Exposition. On display were fluorescent lamps developed by Westinghouse[59] and single node bulbs. An observer noted:

‘Within the room was suspended two hard-rubber plates covered with tin foil. These were about fifteen feet apart, and served as terminals of the wires leading from the transformers. When the current was turned on, the lamps or tubes, which had no wires connected to them, but lay on a table between the suspended plates, or which might be held in the hand in almost any part of the room, were made luminous. These were the same experiments and the same apparatus shown by Tesla in London about two years previous, "where they produced so much wonder and astonishment".”

At the same fair, Tesla demonstrated the first neon light tubes, and he powered the Exposition itself with AC electricity, which was then proven to be a huge improvement over Thomas Edison’s DC Power. Out of anger, Edison used AC currents to create the first electric chair for New York, in order to show that the type of current Tesla was using was deadly.

It is the type of current we still use, however, and hugely more efficient than DC power; Edison eventually had to concede to that fact, and his company switched over to AC power. Tesla also created the first remote-control devices, and demonstrated the first such radio-controlled boat.

The thing about Tesla is this: he was making , basically, spooky action at a distance. Until he figured it out, you couldn't make a rowboat you weren't touching in any way (ie via wires or your hands) move. It was magic. Recall the Arthur C. Clarke quote about any technology, insufficiently understood being the same as magic. The point here is Tesla was able to imagine doing it, focus on that imagined action, and then pull it out into reality. He changed the world.

At the Velvet Rocket , Justin Ames describes Tesla’s work:

“In 1899, Tesla moved his research to Colorado Springs where he devoted himself to experiments with high voltage and electrical transmission over distances. Here he constructed electrical devices of Dr. Frankenstein proportions, most notably his Magnifying Transmitter, a 52-foot diameter electrical coil that was capable of generating millions of volts and sending lightning arcs 130-feet long. Witnesses claimed that they saw a blue glow like St. Elmo’s Fire emanating from the environs of the laboratory, with sparks emitting from the ground as they walked. On one occasion, a backfeeding power surge blacked out the whole of Colorado Springs.”

As I was noting in the last post, you can’t worry too much about ridicule or the reactions of others...

In his autobiography, My Inventions, Tesla said
"In my boyhood...When a word was spoken to me, the image of the object it designated would present itself vividly to my vision, and sometimes I was quite unable to distinguish whether what I saw was tangible or not.
...
The theory I have formulated is that the images were the result of a reflex action from the brain on the retina under great excitation. They certainly were not hallucinations such as are produced in diseased and anguished minds, for in other respects I was normal and composed.
To give an idea of my distress, suppose that I had witnessed a funeral or some such nerve-racking spectacle. Then, inevitably, in the stillness of night, a vivid picture of the scene would thrust itself before my eyes and persist, despite all my efforts to banish it. Sometimes it would even remain fixed in space though I pushed my hand through it.
If my explanation is correct, it should be possible to project on a screen the image of any object one conceives, and so make it visible (10)."

Now, consider this a ratcheting up of the intensity of the world as you experience it. You see perhaps not a particular funeral but the nightly news, in which things are constantly exploding, dying, being endangered or molested, etc. See how he experiences it with so much intensity, and so he is forced to do something about it. And what does he do?

"To free myself of these tormenting appearances, I tried to concentrate my mind on something else I had seen, and in this way I would often obtain temporary relief; but in order to achieve it, I had to conjure continuously new images. If was not long before I found that I had exhausted all of those at my command; my 'reel' had run out, as it were, because I had seen so little of the world--only objects in my home and the immediate surroundings....Then I instinctively commenced to make excursions beyond the limits of the small world of which I had knowledge, and I saw new scenes. These were at first very blurred and indistinct, and would flit away when I tried to concentrate my attention upon them, but by ad by I succeeded in fixing them; they gained in strength and distinctness, and finally assumed the concreteness of real things. I soon discovered that my best comfort was attained if I simply went on in my vision farther and farther, getting new impressions all the time, and so I began to travel--of course in my mind. Every night (and sometimes during the day), when alone, I would start on my journeys--see new places, cities and countries--live there, meet people and form friendships, and meet acquaintances and -- however unbelievable-- it is a fact that they were just as dear to me as those in real life, and not a bit less intense in their manifestations.
This I did constantly until I was about seventeen, when my thoughts turned seriously to invention. Then I observed to my delight that I could visualize with the greatest facility. I needed no models, drawings or experiments. I could picture them all as real in my mind. Thus I had been led unconsciously to evolve what I consider to be a new method of materializing inventive concepts and ideas, which is radically opposite to the purely experimental, and is in my opinion ever so much more expeditious and efficient."

This is important, because this is where he explains what you're doing when you work on the latent image in your mind of the world you want to be able to see versus tinkering with the physical world around you, which is no more than animating the latent image you already carry:

"The moment one constructs a device to carry into practice a crude idea, he finds himself unavoidably engrossed with the details and defects of the apparatus. As he goes on improving and reconstructing, his force of concentration diminishes, and he loses sight of the great underlying principle. Results may be obtained, but always at the sacrifice of quality."

The studies in the field of psychiatry that have been done on this subject suggest that children around 7-14 are highly likely to have this kind of memory or imagery, and that adults are highly unlikely to. As you grow, it becomes less spontaneous; you have to try, and the energy/interest doesn’t seem to be there. It would seem that this degeneration of the eidetic ability is a result of our coming to more completely accept what is in front of us (the consensual reality, based upon our ‘latent image’) as the only possibility, thus forgetting the agency we could have. Eidetic imaging is a sign of our agency--for being able to see, fully and in all detail, what the person next to you cannot, and being able to accept that vision enough to take the time to inspect it and acknowledge and believe what you have seen is to recognize that you need not be constricted by consensual reality. If you can see it and inspect it, isn’t the next step simply an additional thickening--just a little bit more than what you already have in front of you, and the objects are physical? And if you can convince the person next to you of your vision, then the fingers will feel it when either of you reaches out to test it: the tactile sense, remember, happens in the mind, which is why an amputee can feel a limb, and why, if that amputated limb then brings him considerable pain, he can relieve it by enacting stretches and exercises of the opposite limb by a mirror, convincing his mind that both sides are doing the relieving exercises.


Unfolding its leaves to reveal...

So enter the image, whatever image you have decided on. Feel all of it, use all your senses. Then start tweaking. In the den of your mind, add a chair. A chair of a color that doesn't match the others. Add a pattern. Change the lighting. Move the table. Did you discover a secret hatch underneath it? Maybe you don't see it yet, but go out into the world now, 'awake', aware, and you will stumble onto a secret hatchway of sorts. When it happens, pay attention. Notice that you have just worked magic, because noticing this boosts your belief in your ability, and that belief boosts your ability.

DINNER PARTY, by Gina Litherland
Then come back and tell me about it. Because the fact that you can do it will help me. :)

Gina Litherland's work came to my attention via Jodi LeBirge at Yew Tree Nights .