Nautilus

The Ancient, Peaceful Art of Self-Generated Hallucination

Cornelia Kopp via Flickr

fter five years of practicing meditation, subject number 99003 began to see the lights. “My eyes were closed,” he reported, “[and] there would be what appeared to be a moon-shaped object in my consciousness directly above me, about the same size as the moon if you lay down on the ground and look into the night sky. It was white. When I let go I was totally enveloped inside this light… I was seeing colors and lights and all kinds of things going on… Blue, purple, red.

You’re reading a preview, subscribe to read more.

More from Nautilus

Nautilus5 min read
I Never Stopped Learning from Daniel Dennett
They say, never meet your heroes. Daniel Dennett, who was exceptional in so many ways, and who died last month, was for me an exception to this rule, too. Like so many, I was first inspired by Dennett on reading one of his many bestsellers: Conscious
Nautilus7 min readIntelligence (AI) & Semantics
The Soviet Rebel of Music
On a summer evening in 1959, as the sun dipped below the horizon of the Moscow skyline, Rudolf Zaripov was ensconced in a modest dormitory at Moscow State University. Zaripov had just defended his Ph.D. in physics at Rostov University in southern Rus
Nautilus3 min read
The Curious Life of a Singing Fish
The world of larval plainfin midshipman fish may look alien, but it could be as close as the cobbles beneath your feet, if you walk the rocky shores found along much of the North American West Coast. Adults of this species swim each spring from the o

Related