![[[ Trigeminal Nerve Sensory Areas ]]](Trigeminal_Nerve_Sensory_Areas.png)
I'm working mostly with my right nose bridge, where the effects are most obvious, but the same effects happen on the left over a smaller "arc"-to-bridge area.
Rotating my head inward, it is comparatively easy to keep the nose bridge close in and watch objects be cut off by it, but across an area beginning from an arc from the brow mark down toward the nose tip and centered around the nose bridge, objects slide toward the bridge and get smaller or farther away, and rotate opposite my head rotation, before they disappear.
The temptation is to allow the nose bridge to project toward infinity as it rotates, since the objects it is hiding seem to be receding toward infinity. When that happens, the objects shrink and rotate in the same direction as my head rotation as they recede, as if they were on a turntable centered far in front of me that was matching my head rotation. This effect allows objects in central vision to be larger that they are in peripheral vision, and I suspect it is a compensation for negative lenses that made central objects smaller. But it also means "I" am outside the world I see, in a narrow corridor around the central "turntable".
Rotating my head outward, trying to keep the nose bridge close-in requires total concentration, and quickly leads to visual overload - excessive tearing to the point of obscuring the view, reflexive lid closure, and painful combinations of eye, jaw, and neck muscle tension that feel "crazy". But it also leads toward spreading the 3D space of central vision across the nose bridge to the objects in peripheral space beside and behind me, so their size and orientation can be correctly visualized as they suddenly appear in central vision.
The overwhelming temptation is to allow the nose bridge to project toward infinity and pass outside the objects in the peripheral area, trusting their size and distance only after they have rotated inward past the arc described earlier. As they move from the nose bridge toward the arc, they gradually take up sizes and positions within a "bubble" of 3D space outside and in front of my body, in a process that does not generate mental or visual disturbance.
Visualizing the nose bridge receding toward infinity as the head rotates outward is consistent with the anatomical fact that its image does shrink as the eyeball rotates away from it. My habit has been to force the perceived size of the nose bridge to stay constant despite this fact, and "see" it change distance instead of size.
The tip of the nose, being much farther from the pupil than the bridge, does not change size nearly as much with rotation, and since it was seen through lenses rather than behind them, it does not take part in the effects described here. All of these effects are visible only from the top of my visual field down to the bridge of my nose. From the tip of my nose down to the floor there are entirely different rules and effects.
Not much change for weeks now, but my neck and shoulders have been stiff and sore.
This morning I woke up with an erection, and the sense that my teeth and jaw were enlarged and thrust forward. There seemed to be an energy connection between those two sensations. When I try to remember that now, it seems more like my eyes pull back deeper into my head and the sixth chakra area gets smaller, while the second and fifth chakra areas retain their physical size but gain energy.
My conclusion this morning was that the perceived size of peripheral space, and the positions of my eyes relative to it, had shrunk to match the size of central vision, leaving the nose boundaries seeming larger relative to objects they crossed, and seeming farther away from my "eyes" (the counterpart of my eyes seeming recessed deeper into my head). The important part of this experience was that for the first time I can remember, the nose boundaries were not the "figure" of my attention - the objects they were crossing were solid and remained stable between central and peripheral vision while the boundaries became the variable ground - without my having to intentionally force that experience.
I typically think of my vision originating from the location of the pupils of my eyes. This has been happening at least since I wore hard contacts as a child. I remember feeling like the contacts defined my location in "reality", and "I" was "swimming" through life behind them, attached to the world only through the fluid grip of my eyelids on those bits of plastic. This morning's experience put the center of vision back around my ear canals, and allowed me to rotate my head without the objects in peripheral space slithering away as I turned away from them. It was a dramatic step toward living in a solid, three-dimensional world.
Of course I lost most of it when I determined it was long past time I needed to be dealing with the "real world".
A week ago, I woke up with my mouth and sinuses dry and painful. (I had intentionally not added any horseradish, nettle/eyebright, or THIM-J to the previous night's meal, to see if it really makes a difference. It does!) I was reminded of the pain I felt after my tonsillectomy at age six, particularly on the right side. It seemed like the painfully swollen lymph nodes between the posterior angle of my lower jaw and my ears went right through to where my tonsils used to be. Also sore in that area were and are the rear tips "greater cornu" of my hyoid bone, and seemingly everything they can be moved near.
Exploring this just now, I found a position where it seemed the right cornu of my hyoid was pulled about a centimeter lower than the left cornu, and my airway partly closed off. Simultaneously, my vision blacked out over most of the right periphery and pixelated back on in a space where the computer screen seemed farther away but in better focus. I can't get back to that space, but it reminded me that last Wednesday I was outdoors in the sun writing, and by manipulating the space around the lymph node to tonsil connection I could bring small print at about twenty inches distance into sharp focus. That experience I could repeat, as long as I kept the majority of my attention on maintaining it. If I concentrated on what I was writing, my vision deteriorated.
The original "tonsil" experience also reminded me of the constant pain and tension I experienced while wearing glasses as a child. I kept the superficial muscles behind and above my ears tight, possibly trying to pull the glasses which were constantly trying to slide down my nose back up into functional position. The earpieces would cut into the tight muscles at the top and back of my ears, leading to a constant balancing of superficial pain against "visual space" pain. That muscle tension blended into the muscular patterns I'd learned to protect the soreness after the tonsillectomy, and the chronically sore lymph nodes in the carotid triangle, to make the entire region a "sacrifice area" within my psychoros.
Over the past week, my visual exercise has been to pull "space" around behind this painful area and then inside it and forward, but still outside of the nose boundary on whichever side I'm working with. When I first began trying to understand my psychoros issues, the nose boundary, which I know is physically on the centerline of my body, seemed to project beyond it to infinity, and all central objects behaved as if they were between the left nose boundary projected to left infinity and the right nose boundary projected to right infinity. Within about the last year, I've been able to pull the apparent location of the nose boundaries back to the centerline of my body, and keep objects outside the nose boundaries in peripheral vision stable in space as they passed between central and peripheral vision. This weeks new experience seems to be a similarly large step, in that now the nose boundary seen by my left eye appears to be to the left of my body centerline, much more tightly connected to the left eye than to the rest of my body. It actually seems to be to the left of all of my body, and "I" am now (at least while I can maintain the required visualization) inside a central "cyclopean" space rather than floating behind a pair of eyes.
It has become fairly easy to reach this state on my right side, but in order to do the left side simultaneously, it seems I will need to deal with the space behind, above and below my body. When I try to bring space around behind and inside the painful carotid area, it wraps around my spine and the chakra line, and I'm faced with the sense that space around my lower spine is huge compared to space in the carotid area and fifth chakra. One way to deal with this is to expand the fifth chakra area, projecting the sore spots out toward infinity to create more room for objects to appear in the central cyclopean area.
More difficult than this flattened oblate spheroid visualization, but probably more productive, is to bring the excessive height behind my spine forward into the cyclopean space and make it a true sphere. This produces a dramatic release of "Kundalini" energy, a restoration of visual space above my head (in a direct reversal of the "turning out the lights" visualizations I did in church as a child), and a confrontation with H. Rennert's "Vertical Displacement of the Visual Angle ... with a lowering (or raising?) of the horizon" phenomenon that I need to write about for this site. Moving the back of my spine forward into cyclopean space brings back memories of the Consumed by the Light experience, and the rip I made in the fabric of reality in order to be able to breathe again.
Last night was a full moon and eclipse (which I missed, engrossed in a challenging work issue). Why is it that whenever there are daffodils outside my window, I'm swamped with real world issues? Later I had a long vivid dream that began as a need to patch a hole in a truck bed. There was a rip about six inches long and an inch wide, as if the end of a heavy steel bar had punched through the sheet metal floor. The issue was how to fasten the patch material to the truck bed without having the fasteners project out into the cargo space and mar the cargo or interfere with sliding things in or out. By the time I'd settled on steel pop rivets as the only readily available choice, the problem had morphed into patching a wound across the front of my heart, and the same hole shape had been pulled toward me and rotated upward along the front of my chest.
But I didn't have the rivets, which still seemed like the only reasonable choice, so I walked on down the road. It was dark, raining occasionally, and there were other people rather aimlessly walking the same road, approaching the edge of an unknown city. At one point I took off my glasses, which I'd been unaware of wearing, and noticed they made no difference in my vision, and in fact were shaped more like my current safety goggles than like childhood spectacles. As I tried to wipe the rain off of them, the earpieces went limp, bent out parallel with the lenses, and then came unscrewed and fell off. I was careful to catch the tiny screws as they fell out, and watched as they grew in my hand to become 1/4" diameter brass machine bolts.
I kept the bolts tightly gripped in my fist until I reached an outdoor table at a small cafe, where I though I would re-assemble the glasses. But when I opened my hand and dropped them on the table, they were raisins instead of hardware.
My new 1350 AH @ 24V house battery bank is finally here, after last fall's challenge of buying a literal ton of lead against the Chinese onslaught into the metals market and the collapse of the dollar, but due to various details of code compliance it isn't hooked up yet. I'm still running my off-grid solar house on the original 21-year-old batteries that are definitely at end of life. For the last dark, rainy month or so, I've cut back on feeding my big external computer display, and used the built-in screen on my little tablet most of the time.
Both the tablet and my new Motorola Q Smartphone have their LCD screens mounted "sideways", so that my left eye sees a darker version of the image than my right eye. I've had a hard time merging my left eye image with the dominant right eye image for years now, and this has greatly aggravated the right dominance. Sometimes after hours of work I can't even pretend to keep my left eye properly aligned, but I've persisted in playing with this because of the interesting visual and psychoros effects it seemed to be triggering.
The most dramatic is when I am able to notice the ground I'm walking on in "left-eye space". I can't intentionally look at it, because then my right eye takes over and I see the expected scene. If I can pay attention without triggering that switch, I see the ground movement speed up to a dramatic rate as my body moves forward between footfalls, and then slow to zero as the next foot hits the ground. I know from pushing the firewood cart that my body moves at a much more consistent rate than that, and in right-eye space I see consistent movement.
Even more dramatic is when I turn my direction of travel to one side or the other in left-eye space. I literally see the ground rotating at twice the rate my right eye would see. The effect is so convincing that I immediately begin to bend sideways and veer off toward the direction of rotation, and would lose my balance and fall if I didn't grab a railing or revert to right-eye space. Both of these effects remind me of when I was first wearing the bifocals as a child. There was the normal world seen through the clear "plano" upper parts of the lenses, and then there was the "portable hole", the area within a foot or two of my feet that could only be seen through the bifocal lens. It seemed farther away and moved differently, and I learned to separate that part of the world and judge its motion independently.
The other effect of allowing my left eye to diverge from right-eye space has been a chronic pain in my left shoulder and neck. I can sit here right now and totally relieve that pain by visualizing applying the patch to the wound in my heart. The patch brings with itself an effect like walking over to the left edge of the world and "putting it on" as if it were a coat and the objects in it used to be printed on the inside of the coat but are now seen through the coat. As the coat comes up against my body, the extra "space" and dimensions that allow effects like the double-speed rotation of the ground are squeezed toward the right, and the parts of my world where right-eye space applies get smaller - fewer of the visible objects are in right-eye space, and those that are seem much closer together and closer to me.
I'm left with a mystery, though. The whole idea of my first bifocal lenses was that the bottoms were plus lenses, supposedly to make my myopic eyes stretch toward longer vision when I was reading, or at least reduce the habit of constant accommodation that was required for close work. Yet I remember seeing my feet and the ground as smaller and farther away when I looked through the bifocal part instead of turning my whole head down, as if the net effect was negative. I've independently verified that the bifocal part was positive, measuring 0.81 diopters which probably means they were ordered as +0.75. Is my memory wrong? Was the net effect of looking through the edge of the lens at a radical angle not the intended positive?
Daffodils are near their peak, and unfinished projects are nagging from all sides. But if I don't steal some time to write this, it will disappear behind the mundane thoughts.
Last month's insights faded after a week or so. Intellectually I remembered them, but I couldn't "feel" them like I had then, not even before opening my eyes for the first time in the morning. That's typical, moments of seeming clarity about my tangled self concept fading away. One of the goals for this series of notes is to see if there is a pattern to the changes. Maybe my point of view toward myself changes with the moon phase or temperature or something... But I fear there aren't enough data points.
This morning's insight was about chakras versus the spine. The Psychic Institute used chakras as landmarks for locating and communicating about body energies. They also used a visualization of "running energy" (Kundalini) up the spine as a way to clear and open the chakra column. I absorbed a sense that the chakras were (at least supposed to be) centered around the spine.
Now I'm convinced that what I feel as chakras are not and probably should not be on the same plane front-to-back as the spine. Maybe I'm misusing the chakra concept, but when I look for "energy centers" in my body I find them forward of the spine. At the first chakra level, whether I count the physical grounding of the ischial tuberosity "sit-bones", or the muscular focus of anus, sphincter, and prostate, the energy is forward of the spine.
At the second level, the crura of the diaphragm, leading down and back toward the spine, seem to be my focus. But there is also something profound and still only vaguely understood going on here. Probably the greatest confusion in my whole body is between the crura and the top of my right hip. The diaphragm itself seems like one of those automobile windshield shades or photographic reflectors where a circular hoop can be twisted and collapsed in on itself so that the fabric surface folds up. Mine has an extra twist between spine and right hip, where I can store variable amounts of "space" with variable orientations relative to the rest of the world I see. My focus of energy at the second chakra level is definitely forward of the spine and to my right.
My third chakra, associated with breath and the solar plexus, seems centered left-to-right, and relatively centered front-to-back. In fact, it seems I can feel it either in front of or in back of my spine. That's a new insight just now, and needs further exploration...
My fourth, heart chakra, clearly is to the left of my spine and forward. It seems to lie on a straight line of energy across the third and down to the second level where energy is clearly displaced to the right. Hmmm... It is possible that when the focus is on the "extra loop" at the second level, the line from there to the heart passes the third level behind the spine. More exploration needed...
My fifth, voice and throat chakra, is mostly centered left-to-right, but seems swollen a bit to the right at the moment. Here it seems the spinal energy takes a detour, my awareness of my hyoid in front of my throat is much stronger than that of my spine. It feels like energy coming up the spine veers forward through the hyoid, or alternatively that my sixth vision chakra is so far behind my spine that from its perspective even spinal energy moving straight up is way in front of it.
But that displacement of the sixth, vision chakra behind my spine is mainly on my right side. Mirror the energy line from my right hip through the centered third chakra to the heart on my left, and it goes back through the relatively centered fifth and out to the strongly rightward displaced sixth. The extra loop of space at the second level corresponds to the extra visual space at the sixth, exactly as esoteric texts say the second and sixth chakras "arc" together around the heart.
My seventh, "crown" chakra, like the first, is relatively centered, though clearly in front of the spine when I "go there" to check. But if I start from lower in my spine and feel upward for the top of my existence, there is an alternate path out the back of my throat and up through the "extra" visual space on my right, with a virtual seventh chakra as high as the ceiling or the sky.
The "Consumed by the Light" episode was clearly the origin of the zigzag displacement of chakras. I remember ripping open a space to the right of my heart and displacing my breath into it. I wish I could establish when that happened in relation to my progression of lenses, as I suspect the unconscious goal was the creation of the extra visual space needed to cope with "adaptation" to lenses that were almost impossibly painful to wear.
Connecting back to the previous entry where I described having trouble keeping my eyes converged on my computer screens when the images seen by the two eyes have different brightnesses, it seems that my dominant right eye sees the screen in the stable left side of the body visual space. My left eye wanders off into the flexible perspective allowed by the "extra" visual space to the right of my second and sixth chakras. I can sit here with my right eye closed and warp what I see like a photo editor in liquify mode, just by "adjusting" my second chakra.
Sun to Moon phase 279 degrees, Phase 22 according to the system in my favorite astrology book, "Phases of the Moon" (Busteed, Tiffany, Wergin; Shambhala 1974).
Interestingly, Barack Obama was born with either Phase 22 or Phase 23 (his exact birth time does not seem to have reached public awareness yet.) [Update 080628 - Obama's birth certificate is now public, and his moon phase is 290.8 degrees, making him phase 22, 23, or just barely 24 depending on your choice of system.] Guess I'll post the thoughts I've been sharing with friends about him... After I describe this morning's thoughts about myself...
Whatever clarity I thought I had achieved in the previous post has gradually faded to a pale memory. It seemed like a lot of extra space was intruding between my closed down third chakra and those above it. The lower chakras now seem "way down there" far away from my thoughts and my visual perception. The pain in my left shoulder returned, and it became harder and harder to integrate that part of my body with those below and above it. Basically I've just resigned myself to staring at the computer screen until my taxes are done.
This morning while trying to collect myself together, I had an image that I was "wearing my heart on my sleeve". The left one, to be precise, right over my biceps. Visualizing moving it back where it belongs released strong waves of energy and brought back moments of feeling like my world made sense. But as soon as I lost focus on the visualization I could feel my heart snap back over there and my chakras scatter away to their distant outposts. That's still happening.
So... Barack Obama, supposedly born with this phase:
Obama is either phase 22 or 23 [or just barely 24] (of 28), depending on which system you use. Somewhere in the middle of phase 22 the divide that is central to the "moon phase" system is crossed. The native's orientation changes from a desperate clinging to the individualistic "personality" revealed at the full moon stage of the cycle, to the beginning of a surrender to social responsibility and the "character" by which culture is preserved for the next cycle.
In phase 22, ruthless pursuit of personal ambition and intellectual exertion should be suddenly submerged by an overwhelming wave of humility and optimism. What began as a frantic and willful search for ultimate principles is, unless the process fails in an anxious and desperate effort to impose an intellectual and manipulative world-view upon others, reversed into charity and a religious pursuit of the highest values of society.
Phase 23 begins an emphasis on the external world outside the individual intellect. "The native attempts to fix or crystallize - in the form of material and social structures - the truth beyond words which he has begun to perceive. His chief concern might be politics, religion or social legislation, but in any case he wishes to lead others in reorganizing and perfecting current circumstances. Success, when it comes, should exalt a group of people, not any particular individual."
Yeats wrote, "He must kill all thought that would systematize the world, by doing a thing, not because he wants to, or because he should, but because he can..." The book continues, "Responsibility is not sought, but felt from birth, and almost without effort near perfection in a particular skill is sought and achieved. When in-phase, the native has no master to please, no competitors to surpass, and no personal ego to satisfy: he has only a skill to apply to one task after another. Having put forth his best efforts, he is as surprised as anyone else at the results: a piece of work [...] which in the long run will benefit many people."
"Personal feeling no longer claims a central position in his life, but insofar as he senses what other people suffer and need, he will rise to help them." "His emotions have grown to be every man's emotions, and the knowledge of every man finds expression in him as wisdom." "At best he is filled with an audacious, refreshing joy." "Intellectual discussions of events repel him, since in his opinion they obscure more than they reveal. For his part he would rather perform than talk, for his work reveals more than it obscures."
Basically, as long as he avoids personal desire and ambition, he will find joy in his chosen work. If he tries to create rather than discover meaning in his life, he may succeed in the eyes of others, but fail miserably in his own.
As always, the book reveals how someone feels about his life rather than what he will or won't accomplish in it. From what little I've learned about Obama, it seems quite plausible that he really isn't driven by personal ambition, that he really is as surprised as anyone by what is happening around him.
By birth, I'm 213 degrees, Phase 16, 17, or 18, depending on which of the division systems one uses. Not quite three days past full moon, still in awe of the vision of unique "personality" achieved at full moon, but aware that the vision is pointless unless it can be shared with other people and integrated into society through development of "character". Hence this web site...
I've wondered for years whether there might be a pattern to my glimpses of self-integration. Could they be driven by the phases of the moon? Could that be why the insights in the "Phases of the Moon" book strike me as so profound? I'll be tagging my posts here with the moon phase - just in case there is a pattern to be found.
Lunar phase 23 or 24... So sometime yesterday was the gateway between personality and character. This morning (I can really only get these insights first thing in the morning before I open my eyes) it was clear that my shoulder pain could be instantly eliminated by breathing into it instead of into somewhere far behind it. Extending that, I found that the energy "way down there" I referred to yesterday was actually from the crurae of my diaphragm, the deep source of breath movement.
I worked with trying to keep those insights while opening my eyes, and had some success so long as I could avoid actually selecting any visual object as the "figure" to attend to. Like the Escher "Print Gallery" image, I could fit the edges of my field of view together, but there remained an area in the center that could not be mapped to rational space. As soon as I attended to a particular object, it resolved into rational space, and the periphery lost coherence.
Working with opening up the crurae energy and letting it run up my spine as Kundalini, I was able to let go of "figure" perception more completely. Visually the effect was like losing consciousness, with the world pixelating away into swirling randomness. Huge amounts of additional space opened up above and behind me - the same spaces I remember "turning out the lights" in while sitting in church as a child.
With all the additional peripheral space surrounding it, the central vision area where "figure" objects are attended to seemed smaller. As images of the physical world gradually returned, I was able to visualize changing the size of the "bubble" that contained my normal world. and noticed that at its habitual size the bottom of the bubble passed just about through the crurae, with my lower body extending outside it. At the interface between things that were made to fit inside the bubble and things that had to relate to my sense of my lower body, there were "impossible" warps in visual space.
I still haven't found time to answer the question of what my first bifocal plus lenses actually did to my perception of my lower body, but all of the things I experienced this morning were clearly related to my adaptation to lenses as a child. If only I had as much time to devote to working with them now as I did then...
Lunar phase 5 or 6... As the cycle progressed from the previous post through the new moon, I lost even the imagined ability to make sense of my inner perceptions. I pretty much gave up knowing where I was in space, other than in front of the computer cranking out tax numbers and solving work issues. Since the new moon, I've noticed energy focusing in my lower spine again. First just a gentle awareness of first and second chakras, then more clearly that energy is being blocked instead of just noticed.
Yesterday was the point in the cycle the moon phase book calls "Closing of the Primary Tincture", somewhat analogous to the fixed focal point between cardinal and mutable qualities at 15 Taurus. It is the "tipping point" between the "primary" quality of "character" that rules the new moon, and the "antithetical" quality of "personality" that rules the full moon.
Yesterday I woke up with a very clear sense that I was divided down the center left-to-right. Those halves were then divided top-to-bottom, the left half at my third chakra, the right half at my second. The divisions seemed to be simple facts. I could focus on one or the other, but couldn't resolve them into a whole.
This morning my focus was on the same area, but instead of noticing the divisions, it was the connection between them that seemed important. With each breath, the tension in my crurae brought one or the other division to attention as "figure", and "spun" the unfocused "ground" image "out there" into "unreal space". Instead of being a passive observer, I am now an active participant in my sense of space. Still right now, if I consciously stop blocking out the awareness of it, the direction of my breath in or out modifies the apparent distance and orientation of the physical world objects I see. It seems like this happens by modifying the "tag" that identifies which image is from the left eye and which is from the right, so that the resulting 3D composite depth reverses.
It is obvious that at certain points in this alternation between seeing physical objects as figure and as ground, my perception of them becomes objectively much sharper, in the sense that adding the right physical lens would make the image sharper. To say that another way, it is obvious that I actively push my physical vision out of focus to avoid the dissonance between my physical perception and my sense of Psychoros space. With each breath I juggle most of the world I see away from the nearby bit of space I live in.
Yesterday morning, 3:25 AM, was the full moon. By the time I was awake, it was probably three degrees past full. The left shoulder pain was back, as it has been for a week or so. I'd found if I "pulled" the energy from my shoulder down in back, toward my heart chakra, the pain went away, but yesterday that image was almost impossible to reach.
It seemed all of the "extra dimensions" among which I can normally move were concentrated in my third chakra, in a small tight ball, a three-dimensional yin-yang symbol. It was like I had taken all the topological impossibility of the Escher "Print Gallery" drawing and concentrated it in the whited-out center of my being, leaving my view of the "real" world logical and consistent. I could "go" to other chakras, and even move bits of energy among upper or lower points, but any time I got near the third chakra I'd get sucked into the topological maelstrom. "Running energy" seemed impossible.
Today I can just barely sneak a path out around the third chakra, as if the topological knot that was concentrated at my center yesterday has an opposite side out near infinity. All the paths I can traverse there curve and twist in a yin-yang spiral, which seems to relate to diagonal tension across my lungs and belly. It seems impossible to hold awareness of any straight path, particularly of the front or back of my spine.
In contrast to such vague speculation, I did investigate something concrete yesterday. I still have what I believe are the first three sets of bifocal lenses I wore as a young child. It turns out the bifocal "plus lens" area does make the ground I'm standing on appear larger - if I look straight down. The "portable hole" phenomenon arises because of what I see when I look out straight ahead. At the bifocal dividing line between the two different lens powers, the smaller objects above the line seem to curve upward and toward me, while the larger objects below the line curve downward and away from me.
As I tilt my head downward, and the dividing line projects closer to my feet, the larger ground around me seems to dive under the smaller world I see through the top part of the lens. Despite the space directly under my feet appearing larger, its motion at the dividing line is the stronger influence on my perception, and I conclude it is at least a foot farther away, that I am standing in a hole.
Lunar phase 15, 16, or 17 (of 28), depending on which system you use. In contrast to yesterday's complexity, this morning my energy seemed simple. Everything above my fourth chakra was locked to it, and everything from the third down was locked at that level, but at the far right side, between my right hip and the ribs above it.
The only path between those areas was via the "hay-lift" route. During the elementary school period when I was struggling with wearing lenses, I would occasionally go visit my uncle's farm, where one of the constant tasks was baling and stacking hay. The heart of this performance was to stand balanced on a flatbed wagon that was towed behind the baling machine which was itself towed behind a tractor, grab the bales as they gradually emerged from the baler, and stack them behind yourself on the moving wagon. The bales weighed easily as much as my cousins and I did at that age, and since the fields were neither smooth nor level, the baler exit chute bounced around relative to the wagon, and the wagon itself tipped and lurched wildly.
Among my cousins' circle, being able to handle this job was the best sign of manhood, and competition was unavoidable. With the extra visual processing I had to do, the task was extremely difficult, but I was determined to learn. The emerging bale was bouncing around in the "portable hole" I wrote about yesterday, and I had to grab it and toss it up onto the stack, sometimes over my head high. The "hay-lift" move I evolved consisted of getting my right knee under the edge of the bale, and then pulling that knee straight toward my right eye as violently as possible, while momentarily blinking and "leaving my body" to avoid facing the topological impossibility (within my elaborate Psychoros map) of what I was doing. With the upward momentum that move gave the bale, it was then relatively easy to guide it into place on the stack.
After about an hour of "meditation" on this morning's configuration, I was able to at least temporarily restore what I believe is proper energy flow along my spine. I hadn't noticed earlier that my awareness of the boundary where my nose cuts off the view of my left eye toward the right had been pushed outside my body toward infinity at the right. But as soon as I had restored more normal spine awareness, peripheral space rushed toward me from the right and filled in not only the wedge hidden by my nose but also the space above and behind my head. The intrusion of my nose from the right into my straight-ahead visual field is now quite obtrusive, and accompanied by a feeling that my eyes are crossed, as if I'd put on prism glasses. It would be easy to go too far with this visualization, and end up with the left nose boundary pushed to infinity, and the left peripheral space reduced to a 2D map. Staying centered seems to require constant effort and vigilance.
Sometimes I have wondered if these spatial extremes could be triggered by awareness of the direction of light hitting one's nose, and whether they relate to the classic visual images of the moon phases as a face superimposed on the moon... I also remember as a young child feeling this sense of being "on the right" or "on the left" of where my energy center should be, and thinking this must be what grownups meant when they referred to someone's politics as "on the left" or "on the right". I was a bit disappointed when I finally read the story of the French Legislative Assembly.
I just reviewed earlier posts from around this moon phase, and found this, from 187 degrees (21 Feb 08): ... an effect like walking over to the left edge of the world and "putting it on" as if it were a coat and the objects in it used to be printed on the inside of the coat but are now seen through the coat. As the coat comes up against my body, the extra "space" and dimensions that allow effects like the double-speed rotation of the ground are squeezed toward the right, and the parts of my world where right-eye space applies get smaller - fewer of the visible objects are in right-eye space, and those that are seem much closer together and closer to me. That seems to describe a similar kind of movement from seeing 2D objects at infinity to experiencing 3D peripheral space coming toward my body, but from the left instead of from the right, and by moving myself toward infinity instead of having infinity expand toward me. Intriguing that the topological issue is similar, despite the opposite direction.
There is one possibly strong complicating factor in comparing that February note with today's observations. Yesterday was "Ukiah day", my roughly twice a month, 75 mile shopping expedition, during which any interactions with the outside world that can't be accomplished online are concentrated. The all-day onslaught of people, activity, smells, and stress affects my perception for at least the two following days. The 21 Feb observations were free from outside influences.
Lunar phase 17, 18, or 19 (of 28), depending on which system you use. Yesterday was my natal moon phase, but I didn't feel particularly "at home". Perhaps the anxiety was worth it, because I believe this morning brought a major breakthrough. It is hard to believe in "breakthroughs" after so many years of this process, but this one ties together several previous experiences, and it has definitely changed how I move through space.
It started with imagining the "hay lift" move I wrote about last time, and realizing that I now imagined my right knee coming up outside my right nose boundary, in right peripheral space. Then I noticed that as I turned my head slightly and that right nose boundary alternately hid and revealed distant objects, the space below the tip of my nose seemed tiny compared to the space above the tip, and objects below the tip couldn't be superimposed on the left eye's image of the same objects.
As I began working with the left eye, I brought back the terrible cramp in my left calf that has occasionally appeared since childhood, and putting that together with the experimental movements I'd been doing with my right leg, I suddenly was able to connect both legs in a very unaccustomed space. Both legs were clearly in "central" space, equally balanced between right and left eyes and right and left nose boundaries. The amazing part was how long they seemed - I realized then that all space to my right below the tip of my nose and below about my right kidney has seemed compressed and tiny for as long as I can remember. The effect is a spiral like the Escher "Print Gallery" image, with the logically impossible part connecting my right kidney and my right hip.
The convincing part of the insight was when I stood up and tried to walk. It was like I was walking in the "portable hole" again, with my feet about 16 inches below where I would normally expect the ground to be. Every time I tried to turn I literally lost my balance, and I nearly fell several times. Going down the stairs (very slowly and carefully), my habitual sense told me I was all the way down when I was still two steps above the floor.
I just went back to the stairs to try that again. Even if I'm watching my feet in their new distant space, there is an independent sense that tells me I've reached the floor when I'm still two steps above it. The amazing thing is how every tiny move I make in the area of the stairs triggers environmental cues that alter my sense of balance, and would send me spiraling off into a fall if I wasn't holding the railing for guidance, and trying very hard to focus on what I believe is the new, correct view of my feet.
I'm now more-or-less constantly in what I was calling "left eye space" on 21 Feb 08 (187 degrees): The most dramatic is when I am able to notice the ground I'm walking on in "left-eye space". I can't intentionally look at it, because then my right eye takes over and I see the expected scene. If I can pay attention without triggering that switch, I see the ground movement speed up to a dramatic rate as my body moves forward between footfalls, and then slow to zero as the next foot hits the ground. I know from pushing the firewood cart that my body moves at a much more consistent rate than that, and in right-eye space I see consistent movement. What happens is that as I extend a foot forward, the space it is moving through is judged by my muscle sense, which is apparently still tuned to the old idea of how long my legs are. I visually see that my body is moving relative to the ground, but more slowly than my foot is moving forward. As soon as my forward foot is back on the ground, I shift to a completely visual sense of speed relative to the ground, and it seems like my body rushes forward. As a foot begins to lift off the ground there is a crisis of balance, especially if I plan to lift it up onto a stair. It seems I am momentarily unsure which foot is which, and which side of each foot has the big toe, and a wave of side-to-side reaction rushes up my body.
Another connection is to the 26 Jun 07 memory of the Consumed by the Light experience, and the rip I made in the fabric of reality in order to be able to breathe again. The point near my right kidney where the compressed lower right space begins is just below that rip, and related to it in ways I'm just beginning to explore.
Today's story has no particular connection to today's moon phase. It just happens to be a Sunday and I feel like I can afford to take time to catch up here.
The "breakthrough" in the last post quickly degenerated into several days of coughing fits triggered by moving or even just thinking about any of the body landmarks involved. The coughing did not clear my throat, even when I was actually wheezing with excess mucus that needed to be cleared. It did bring back memories of seemingly endless childhood illnesses when the same thing happened - uncontrollable but useless coughing fits. They typically persisted until I gave up trying to maintain the integrity of my psychoros, and surrendered to any new configuration that would stop the coughing.
After a week of coughing and another week of confusion, I've pieced together a few conclusions. My sense of my right nose boundary, where right peripheral space is hidden from left eye view, is split just above the tip of my nose. The very tip of my nose, which was visible to my left eye through my glasses as a child, is attached to what was then the bit of space where I read, wrote, and did fine physical work. Objects in this bit of space were made larger by the original plus bifocal lenses, and then smaller by my eventual series of increasingly powerful negative lenses.
Like my 21 April description of the conflict between looking straight down and seeing objects magnified versus watching as my direction of view gradually lowered and the dividing line between lens powers made the magnified objects appear to move behind un-magnified objects (the "portable hole" effect), the objects I saw through my old lenses were judged not by their perceived size but by what happened when they crossed the boundary at an edge of the lens. The visual tension between what I saw through the lens and what I saw outside the lens was projected to that "impossible" space between my right kidney and my right hip, and the physical tension went into my diaphragm and its crurae.
Above that very tip of my nose, along the part of my right nose boundary that was not visible through my old lenses, that was hidden behind the spectacle frames and curved up into my left eyebrow, the space outside the lens used to seem tiny. Over the last week it has grown to be relatively huge. From a point between my shoulder blades upward, it now seems like my head is much taller than from there down to the ground. The ceiling used to feel like it was nearly touching the back of my head, but now it feels like it really is eight feet above me. And a similar amount of new space has been added all along the horizon in my right peripheral view - enough space to reach down to where I was amazed to see my extra-long legs move so oddly last time.
Along with the added space to my right have come added degrees of rotation - as I turn my body to the side my mental compass now rotates through the appropriate angle. When I walk down my stairway, I feel the 180 degree turn at the landing in the middle, instead of about 90 degrees. Apparently I had previously judged body rotation by how much space slid past my view and disappeared as it reached the edge of my former lens. The difference is startling, it is impossible to maintain balance without holding onto the handrail.
So I can mentally put together this new view of right peripheral space, and extend it way up to the ceiling and down to my feet. With concentration I can even pull the very tip of my right nose boundary into that space, though noticing it is still more likely to suck me back into my old habits. What I can't yet do is integrate the boundary effects up at the bridge of my nose.
If I hold onto my new sense of peripheral space and its extension above my head, and concentrate on objects above my right eyebrow while turning my head to the left, I see the objects approaching the limit of the bridge of my nose from my central vision area slide off into a space warp where they shrink and recede toward infinity - as they used to when they reached the edge of my lens. The almost irresistible temptation is to focus on those objects and abandon the new peripheral space - which leads to the sense that my head is rotating through only half as many degrees as it really is.
As objects cross the boundary from peripheral space into the former lens area, there is no space warp. Size, speed, and distance are preserved. Trying to maintain the same constancy in the other direction produces a total visual overload, where I reflexively squeeze my eyes shut and tear profusely.
Today's entry is pretty obviously triggered by something I did rather than by the moon phase. I've been worried that my left eye was losing motivation to stay synchronized with my more dominant right eye, and that my ability to read at a distance was declining. After much inner struggle, and a lot of web searching, I found an optometrist and vision therapist who seemed open to working with me to see if lenses might be of use.
It turns out the left eye problem is due to "variegated zones with differing powers within the lens". The doctor repeated that this is not the same problem as cataracts, but it seems the only standard treatment is the same - surgical lens replacement. I need to do a lot more research before even considering that, since if I look down at the particular angle that was required to read through my original bifocals, the left eye multiple zone, multiple image problem disappears. How can the direction my eye is pointed relative to my head make such a difference if the lens itself is so defective?
Back to today... So I have a new pair of modern oxygen permeable soft contact lenses to play with. I believe much of my problem with previous lenses was due to trying to correct my oblique astigmatism. It definitely exists, I can see it in the elliptical blur pattern when I look at the tiny LED indicators that dot my world, and I can measure it rather objectively using the movement of laser speckle, but the amount and angle changes from day to day, hour to hour, and (like my left eye problem) with the angle of view relative to my head.
Subjected to the typical "is one or two better" investigation with only distant letters as a target, I know I prefer far too much astigmatism correction at far too radical an angle. Sure enough, even with a supportive doctor and awareness of my habit, the normal exam process produced a prescription with angles I knew were not appropriate. Luckily the fancy computerized autorefractor reported astigmatism angles at exactly the nearly vertical positions I had suggested as being the average of my blur patterns.
Given the obvious variability of my astigmatism, the doctor was kind enough to indulge me and let me try a pair of contacts without the astigmatism correction the machines say I need. For my right eye, the result is as good as I can imagine, and according to the blur patterns I see today, they somehow overcorrect my astigmatism even though they supposedly don't deal with it at all. The tiny remaining blur ellipse is ninety degrees away from where it would normally be. For my left eye, they unfortunately make all of the multiple images sharper, with only that spot where my old bifocals were ending up with clear, sharp single vision.
Returning to the psychoros, today's adventures were about how the new contacts affect my sense of space. I started working with the right peripheral space, since that is where I had noticed the most tension when wearing the new lenses out of the doctor's office. I was able to revisit most of the discoveries and conclusions I've written about in the past few weeks, with the lenses seeming to make little difference. It was not until I turned my attention to the other part of my morning ritual that I discovered anything new.
When I reached the outside of the upper left quadrant of my mouth, running the "PerioAid" toothpick along the junction between my teeth and gums, my vision changed dramatically. I realized the very tip of my nose, the part that had been seen by my right eye through my old spectacles, moved in synchrony with the peripheral space above my left eyebrow. As I wrote on 11 May, ... as objects cross the boundary from peripheral space into the former lens area, there is no space warp. Size, speed, and distance are preserved. Trying to maintain the same constancy in the other direction produces a total visual overload, where I reflexively squeeze my eyes shut and tear profusely. Objects crossing that boundary, from above the very tip of my nose up to the bridge of my nose, into peripheral space still want to slither off to the side and shrink in size. With the new lenses in place, the peripheral area is much sharper than it used to be, so it is easier to hold onto it as stable space and ignore the strange movement of the objects leaving central space.
Putting together the very tips of my nose, the eyebrow boundaries, the dramatic height of peripheral space above my shoulder blades, and the other recent discoveries makes so much sense and makes the world seem so solid, I'm convinced I've found the right path for learning to live with the new lenses. But I'm sure there is more to be discovered...
The insight about the very tips of my nose moving with my eyebrows and upper peripheral space has proven maddeningly difficult to hold onto. My habit of seeing objects change size and orientation as they cross the upper parts of my nose boundaries seems irresistible. It has drug me back to my anatomy book and what I've called the Trigeminal or "Nose Candy" issue.
The trigeminal (fifth cranial) nerve is the sensory nerve to the face and forward scalp, and to the mucous membranes and internal structures of the head. It is also the motor nerve to the chewing muscles, to the mylohyoideus and anterior digastricus that form the floor of the mouth and raise the hyoid bone, to the tensor tympani that tighten to protect the hearing from loud sounds, and to the tensor veli palatini that tighten the palatine velum (the back of the roof of the mouth, where the uvula hangs down).
The name Trigeminal reflects the nerve's three branches, the Ophthalmic, the Maxillary, and the Mandibular.
The area of the face sensed by the ophthalmic branch begins at the tip of the nose and includes the parts of the nose boundaries that are grossly distorted or blocked by spectacles, all of the eyes and eyebrows, the sinuses, and the top of the scalp. The maxillary branch senses from the tip of the nose and the lower eyelids downward through the upper lip and upper teeth, outward to the cheekbones, and upward to the temples as a narrow peninsula. The mandibular branch senses and controls the lower jaw and teeth, and the large part of the side of the face, back to the ear, that moves while one is chewing.
The ophthalmic area senses eye movements and visual boundaries that need to be shifted sideways when we put the two separate images from our two eyes together into a single view of the world. For instance, what I call the "left nose boundary" prevents the right eye from seeing toward the extreme left. In my brain's sense of the space around me, it can be projected anywhere between left infinity and its objective location at the centerline of my body.
Sensations from the mandibular area should not be subject to this kind of interpretation, since it is clearly tied to the body centerline by several muscular connections. (Mine is definitely not so simple, a victim of dental braces, endless glandular infections, and the twisted meditations I indulged in to try to release the pain of those effects conflicting with my childhood lenses. But that story will have to wait for another time.)
The maxillary area is caught in between. The bottom of the tip of my nose, that was visible through my spectacles, and the side lobes of my nose leading back to my upper lip, still need the sideways shift when the two eye images are combined into one. But the sensations from my upper lip and teeth do not make sense when shifted equivalently, particularly when my upper front teeth meet their equivalents from the lower jaw.
For most of my life I couldn't make them meet. My lower teeth were always held inside their upper counterparts, and I had a very hard time actually using my incisors to bite cleanly. (Probably one of the reasons I gravitated toward vegetarianism...) As part of the work I've done untangling my psychoros, I've learned how to make my incisors meet, but that is only possible on the opposite side of a spot where my jaw "pops" when I chew. The tips of my molars meet when my incisors do, but to actually get the chewing surfaces of my molars together I must move my jaw back across the place where it pops, and tuck my lower incisors up inside the upper ones.
To tie in the "Nose Candy" label I mentioned before, I found back in the day when nasally inhaled drugs were the fashion among a few of my friends that anaesthetizing the maxillary area made dramatic changes in my spatial perception. I didn't have the current conceptual framework to tie them to, but I was looking at the same landmarks that I use now, and the differences in how they behaved were quite disconcerting and hardly pleasurable. The few people I tried to talk to about this responded that I was wasting good drugs by thinking so much.
Returning to the problem of how objects appear to change size and orientation as they cross my nose boundaries, it seems clear that depending on which way my head is turning, I selectively attend to either the ophthalmic or maxillary branch of the trigeminal nerve. Whether that will help me control my perception remains to be seen, but at least I've begun to capture another facet of my experience here.
I wore the contacts for an all-day road trip on the 20th, so I had a lot of boring drive time to observe how they were working. I didn't catch on during daylight hours, but after dark it became clear that my right eye was dominating. It was providing almost perfect resolution, no double images and very little astigmatism. My left eye was "giving up and getting out of the way" rather than trying to contribute.
Before today's appointment to have their fit checked, I had some time to explore the effects of the contacts again. What I ended up convincing myself was that the greater minification of the stronger left lens was discouraging fusion. Trying to judge this at a distance was quite subjective, but at computer screen distance I could compensate for the size difference by just turning my head so my left eye was closer to the image.
![[[ Kitaoka - Dot Tunnel Illusion ]]](Dot_Tunnel-Kitaoka.gif)
(More geometric art at Akiyoshi Kitaoka’s site)
This image by Japanese artist Akiyoshi Kitaoka proved quite useful. It is easy to compare the size of its black center between the two eyes, and I found that when my head was turned to exactly the right angle it would rather suddenly jump from being a flat pattern to being a deep tunnel. With the unequal contacts, I had to turn my head to the right until the image was at the far left of my binocular field of view, almost at the limit of the bridge of my nose.
I find now, with my unaided eyes, I still need to turn a bit to the right to equalize the images. I'll need to try this over a lot more time and different situations, but I wonder if I have a tiny bit of natural size difference.
Based on these explorations, I convinced the optometrist to let me try equal lenses for left and right. So far I think it was the correct choice. On the way home from the appointment I found my left eye actually contributing to useful vision, and had spontaneous flashes of quite nice stereoscopic depth to the road ahead. After dark it was easy to notice that distant headlights were the same distance apart in each eye. Interestingly, the right eye image was no longer as perfect as it had been when it was dominant - it was obviously sacrificing clarity in order to achieve fusion with the left eye. The left eye image was dramatically better than it had ever been with the unequal contacts, with most of the doubling of the image somehow gone. It will be very interesting to see how this progresses.
This morning I was able to bring my recent insights about unequal lenses and minification together with my ongoing work to bring the projection of my nose boundaries back from infinity toward my face. I don't have prescriptions or precise measurements for my old lenses, but I suspect my left eye was always given a stronger negative power and thus a smaller image. That would explain why when I turn my head to the right and objects begin to disappear behind my left nose boundary, they seem to slide off to the left at an accelerated rate and become smaller and farther away. Long ago while I was wearing unequal lenses, as objects left the field of view of my dominant right eye, they needed to appear to become smaller to match the minified left eye image. Apparently that spatial processing habit remained active through all the time I was not wearing lenses.
On my right side, at least today, the effect was different. I found my habit was to push the right nose boundary out toward infinity, and watch the objects that should have disappeared from left eye view behind it as I turned my head to the left seem to cross in front of it and move inside my head. Once inside my head, they appeared to grow in size until they reached the angle where the blind spot of my optic nerve lies. If I continued turning my head so they reappeared beyond the blind spot, they then slid off to the right at an accelerating rate and became much smaller.
I could go on digging into the past, reaching for vague memories of childhood sessions where I would spin like a dervish to "pump" space in or out of my body by exploiting this size differential at my right blind spot, but I'm getting far too un-grounded and anxious. Perhaps the most I can accomplish yet in this session is to try to capture what seemed to be the goal of this morning's work. There seemed to be a plane inside my body that intersected my right nose boundary, right shoulder blade, right kidney, and the crest of my right hip. When I was able to feel it as a flat plane, my right nose boundary seemed to be (as it really is) between my eyes, dramatically and obtrusively to the left of where it has habitually been, and there was no size change as objects crossed my right blind spot. Space seemed to have equal size all around my body. If I let go of that visualization, the plane seemed to twist into a spiral as the nose boundary moved out toward infinity and the size variations returned.
One new puzzle piece this morning... In the past when I've watched objects change size, speed, or apparent distance as they slid across one of my nose boundaries, I would ground myself in peripheral space, behind my head or well to the outside of the boundary area. Yesterday I noticed that if I grounded myself sufficiently far enough toward the other side, in my central vision area, objects crossing a nose boundary remained solid. My vision would sometimes flicker like a slow frame rate movie, and my eyes would tear excessively and sometimes involuntarily close in "overload", but the size, speed, and distance of objects was solidly preserved.
Now I know what "sufficiently far" meant - I need to "hold onto" the opposite nose boundary! It is still quite impossible to actually see both left and right nose boundaries at the same time, but I can look at one, mentally remember that angle, then look at the other while holding onto the previous angle, and experience turning my head in a solid 3D world.
It feels like there is a "movement detector" layer to my vision, and the area that originally covered all of my central vision, from left nose boundary all the way to right nose boundary, shrank along with the minified view through my old lenses. The shrunken area then floated back and forth between the boundaries as I turned my head. When it reached a boundary and couldn't slide farther, it changed mode and caused objects to appear to change size.
The movement detector area has obviously shrunk much more than just the amount of minification enforced by actual lenses. I suspect I actively adopted that mechanism as one of the ways to "leave my body" as a child. It doesn't appear I've talked about this yet, but for all of my childhood my parents' greatest fear was that I would get a "swelled head" - too much ego or self-pride. When the school spent two full days of first grade time giving me the Stanford-Binet, and proclaimed me a "genius", my parents' fear became a compulsive campaign. I didn't even know what a "swelled head" meant, but it seemed like when I left my body and moved my consciousness to a small point at the back of the room they were happier.
However it developed, the prohibition on seeing both nose boundaries at the same time, and the resulting exile from living "in my body", are the most deeply ingrained reflexes I've yet confronted on this journey.
For weeks I've been struggling with my habit of feeling excess space to my right, beyond my right nose boundary, inside my head and inside the right side of my body. In my 27 May post, I was working with "a plane inside my body that intersected my right nose boundary, right shoulder blade, right kidney, and the crest of my right hip", and noted that it tended to twist into spiral shapes. For days the most comfortable position I could get it to was along an angle from my navel to my right kidney. That was with my right nose boundary projected well to the left of my body centerline, so that it seemed to be on the other side of my navel from my right kidney.
This morning I was able to go a quarter-turn more, as if the plane was hinged along an axis from the tip of my nose down to my right hip, and I could grab the opposite back edge of the plane and swing it around the back of my spine toward my left kidney. With that movement it felt like I had closed a huge access panel in the back of my body, and compressed all the excess space back into its proper volume.
That visualization was satisfying, but I wouldn't bother writing about it without the two experiences I had while holding onto it. The first was when I stood up too quickly and began to black out. Usually when that happens my peripheral vision blacks out first, closing in until I'm left with just some small point of central attention that I'm holding onto, and then the periphery gradually reappears in an adjusted position. Today it was the far peripheral space that stayed constant, and a small area of almost central vision, just behind the tip of my right nose boundary, re-oriented itself. Surprisingly, the spot, about two feet across on the floor, did not pixelate away to blackness and re-appear changed. It just changed its apparent distance and orientation while fully lit and visible! I felt all the usual tingling and impending loss of balance, but there was no blackout.
The other experience was probably even more profound, though it is likely to sound entirely trivial to a person with normal perception. I turned the rotary selector switch of my Fluke 87 multimeter to the mV setting in order to read the current going into my solar electric system's new batteries. I looked up at the value shown on the meter's display, and as I took my hand away was startled to realize I was seeing the selector knob and the labels for its positions simultaneously with the LCD display. Normally there is a strict either-or, figure vs. ground relationship between those two scenes, even though they occupy the same four inch square area, and if I attend to the selector switch the reading on the LCD vanishes from consciousness.
This morning I added one more puzzle piece to my map of the space around my right nose boundary. Several recent posts have been about feeling space from above and behind my head downward toward my hip, kidney, or the base of my spine. When I visualize that, I'm aware of the nose boundary from about the middle of my eyebrow down around the bridge and then the tip of my nose, and halfway back toward my face along the bottom of my nose.
There is another route, which starts at my feet, works upward through my calves and thighs and very diffusely through my abdomen, and then jumps to where the bottom of my nose meets my face. Similar to how the "down from above" visualization disconnects from the visual nose boundary along the bottom of my nose, halfway from my face to the tip, the "up from below" visualization disconnects from visual perception at the bridge of my nose. Until this morning, those two visualizations were strictly either-or, and I wasn't aware they only shared that part of my nose outline that was visible through spectacles. Now I can occasionally unite the upper and lower images.
It is easier to describe how one would go from normal perception to where I found myself before this morning's insight: Imagine you are looking between two vertical, floor to ceiling cords, within easy arm's reach and spaced left to right so they appear just inside the bridge of your nose on each side. The cords are anchored at their tops and bottoms, but elastic in-between. Reach out, crossing your arms left for right, grab the cords and pull the left one to the right, the right one to the left, like drawing an opposed pair of bowstrings, until they form a diamond shape in front of your face that just outlines your central vision area.
Within that diamond space, my sense of left- versus right-handedness is crossed, and I need to think abstractly about the direction I need to turn a water faucet or gas valve. When I imagine undoing my left-right crossing, I can't yet visualize keeping my body solid and just un-crossing the diamond area in front of my face. Whenever I try that I get the foreboding sense that if it worked I would find myself totally unable to read and write. So far the best I can do is to try to slide the left and right nose boundary images back across the diamond, passing them between the external scene and my body, while leaving my sense of left versus right unchanged for the rest of my body and for the external scene.
Working with the "bottom up" visualization brings back childhood memories of playing in the snow so long my toes would get totally numb. They even now still feel like they have never recovered, like everything forward of the balls of my feet is shriveled and distorted. When I try to stretch out the shrunken sensations, I cause horrible cramps in my calves. I remember as a child spending time off by myself in the lake. While the rest of the family swam and got rowdy, I would find a spot where the bottom sloped very gradually and the surface was perfectly calm, and practice seeing the part of my body that was under water get shortened as I walked deeper into the lake. I remember going out until the surface of the water was exactly at the point along the bottom of my nose boundary where the top-down visualization stops, and there was just barely enough clearance above the water to breathe through the tip of my nose.
In The New Yorker for June 30, 2008, there is an article by Atul Gawande titled The Itch, which begins discussing the sensation of itching and progresses through various insights about sensation, phantom limbs, and V. S. Ramachandran's mirror box treatment. It presents so many interesting directions to explore, I barely know where to begin. For one, it gives a name to the surprisingly intense overall itch I sometimes feel upon getting out of the hot tub - even when it is not very hot. "Aquagenic pruritus" is supposedly a symptom of having too many red blood cells...
The article leads up to a new "brain's best guess" theory of perception. "The mind integrates scattered, weak, rudimentary signals from a variety of sensory channels, information from past experiences, and hard-wired processes, and produces a sensory experience full of brain-provided color, sound, texture, and meaning. We see a friendly yellow Labrador bounding behind a picket fence not because that is the transmission we receive but because this is the perception our weaver-brain assembles as its best hypothesis of what is out there from the slivers of information we get. Perception is inference."
This connects directly with my thoughts for today through the mirror box treatment. People with chronic pain in phantom limbs can relieve it by inserting a mirror into their perceptual frameworks, to reflect visual images of their functional limb into the perceptual space occupied by the phantom limb. I'm now using virtual, imaginary mirrors, but I learned to do that by using real physical mirrors. Up until age ten there was an old dresser in my bedroom. It had a central fixed mirror, with hinged movable mirrors on either side that when swung around formed a triangle that would just barely enclose my head. In my usual meditative way I spent hours exploring the sensations and spaces I could generate with different angles and motions of the movable mirrors. At this point I don't remember any details, but I can feel how I carry those mirror experiences around in my psychoros to this day and how my brain uses them in the process of building what I seem to experience.
For weeks I've been struggling with the same region of my body and psychoros - what I've been calling the "right nose boundary". There has been a gradual accretion of clues, but nothing that seemed worth writing about.
I've become quite comfortable with a new perceptual arrangement on my left side, such that I'm occasionally aware of my left eyelashes appearing closer to my virtual cyclopean eye than my right eye's image of my left nose boundary. (Eyelashes are of course too close to the eye to ever be in focus, but the motion of flashes of sunlight glancing off of them, or of light refracted by the meniscus of tears next to the eyelid, or of the diffraction patterns as eyelashes pass in front of distant objects, are sometimes readily noticeable. Closing the eye partway makes all of these effects easier to see.)
Where before the apparent size and shape of the nose boundary were preserved under all conditions, and it seemed to move across distant objects with a linear ratio to my head rotation, now it is my eyelashes that move in proportion to my head rotation. The nose boundary, instead of seeming "attached" to my left eye, now seems as it logically should to be attached to the virtual cyclopean eye. It floats out beyond my left eye's perception of my left eyelashes, and I'm aware of its position being referred across my body centerline to my right eye which is in fact seeing it. The relationship involves the same mechanisms that you feel when you put on prism glasses or a new pair of glasses that will require "adaptation".
The dramatic part of this experience is that the size and shape of the perceived nose boundary are no longer preserved. As I turn my head to the left of straight forward, the image of my nose gets gradually smaller and appears to recede toward infinity on a line about ninety degrees left of straight ahead, until it fades from awareness. As I turn my head to the right, the image of my nose gets larger and appears to move forward toward infinity along a line roughly straight ahead of my body. Instead of tracing out a circular arc that was out at infinity when I began working with these perceptions but has gradually moved closer to my body, with me at its center, the tip of my nose now traces a hyperbolic path which approaches infinity at the extreme left and right of the head turn, and nearly touches my body when I'm looking straight ahead.
I remember being taken to the Disney film Pinocchio when I was very young, and being left with a huge personal crisis. The film implied that one's nose would grow longer if one lied, and I clearly saw my nose grow longer (as I just described above) as I turned my head to either side. It seems absolutely silly now, but what is most likely a normal visual experience troubled me deeply for years of my childhood. At this point I can't say that I intentionally altered my perceptual habits to try to avoid seeing my nose grow longer, but I'm sure I was relieved when I stopped seeing it happen.
At that point in my life I always referred to myself in the third person - "He's hungry"... I quite consciously thought of my body as a foreign thing that I operated by remote control, and I found its physical needs to be rather meaningless interruptions of my meditation. The film's focus on the possibility of becoming "a real boy" created an existential dilemma as well as the perceptual crisis.
Though the hyperbolic nose path has been confirmed to be the original state of my perception, and is pretty easily selectable on my left side now, making the same thing happen on my right side seems exceptionally difficult. I can get the shadows of my eyelids to appear inside my right nose boundary as I close my eyes. I can sometimes get size constancy for my eyelids and eyelashes during head rotation, while allowing the nose boundary to change size. Occasionally I can even feel the hyperbolic path... But my right shoulder and arm remain a huge problem.
It is as if I've reached out through the boundary of cyclopean space, and my right arm, along with everything perceived behind my right nose boundary, follows different rules. Physically this anti-space extends back inside my body and down along the right side of my spine and chest, creating odd patterns of tension and trapping digestive and intestinal gas. Perceptually those parts of my body seem to be the source from which the "extra" space that intervenes among the perceived objects in my "map like view" of the world around me was stolen. Clearly it is time for me to get back to trying to find the Rennert research concerning perception of the horizon in schizophrenia I had happened across about thirty years ago.
Late last night as I released the tensions of the day, I realized I had become so distracted trying to capture the background for yesterday's post, I totally forgot the main point! Yesterday morning's insight, that prompted me to finally try to write about a struggle that has been rather stuck for a month, was about the role my hyoid bone plays in the apparent location of the nose boundaries.
The U-shaped hyoid, the only totally floating bone in our bodies, is suspended between the lower jaw and the "Adam's apple" by muscles that connect to the tongue, jaw, skull, throat, thyroid cartilage, and sternum. There are even the omohyoid muscles that pull downward on the middle of each side of the hyoid and radiate all the way to the shoulder blade. They run behind the sternocleidomastoids (the muscles that contract into action between your skull and your sternum and clavicles when you lean your head backward or take an extremely deep breath).
![[[ Hyoid area from front ]]](Hyoid_Area_386.gif)
In the middle of this run each omohyoid becomes a tendon for some variable distance, sheathed in fascia that attaches it to the clavicle and first rib near the sternum. As it exits this corner and becomes a muscle again, it is running sideways in the triangle between the clavicle and the upper border of the scapula. It normally connects along the top edge of the scapula (shoulder blade), but apparently in some people it connects to the clavicle or other locations in that area. If I put a finger just inside the acromion (that bone that sticks up on top of my shoulder), and roll it backward and down into the notch between the outer end of my clavicle and the top of my scapula, I can feel the end of the omohyoid. It is extremely sore, particularly on my right side.
Yesterday's insight was that the apparent location of my nose boundaries depends on my perception of my hyoid bone and all its associated structures. Whether, for instance, the left nose boundary seems to be immediately to the left of the right eye (which physically observes it) or all the way to the left of the virtual "cyclopean eye" which includes the perceptions of my left eye (that is physically beyond the nose), depends on the patterns of muscle tension surrounding my hyoid, how I'm holding my neck and jaw.
Most dramatically for me, the feeling that I've "reached out through the boundary of cyclopean space" with my right arm and shoulder can be traced back directly along that omohyoid muscle from the inner top of my right scapula, through the inner corner at the junction of my clavicle and first rib, up behind my sternocleidomastoid to the right side of my hyoid, up the stylohyoideus muscle past the still painful scar where my tonsil was removed at age six, past the rock-hard swollen lymph node just behind my temporomandibular joint, and onto the styloid process of the posterior mandibular fossa - right behind where the lower jaw articulates and just below the opening of the ear.
That painful ex-tonsil spot seems to correspond to the blind spot in my vision, and that muscle path seems to be the route toward the ear for the clicking sound that has always accompanied swallowing and adjusting to air pressure changes. So many of the stresses I was subjected to as a child focused here - the earpieces of supposedly therapeutic but painful to wear bifocal glasses, dental braces, the tonsillectomy, and parents who were extremely determined that I never appear arrogant. The chronic tensions in my jaw, shoulders, and neck seem to be compensations that once relieved the stress of wearing improper lenses, but now maintain habits that prevent cyclopean vision. At this point exploring these interactions is a bit like entering a house of mirrors, and building a rigorous scientific understanding seems hopeless, but at least one more clue has been written down.
This morning I awoke thinking I understood the next step along the breadcrumb trail back to wholeness. I could feel the left side of my body from the top of my head through the base of my spine and all the way to my toes, and particularly a little "tail" of energy that typically escapes from the back of my second chakra but was properly grounding straight down along this left-side perception of my spine.
There is always a "but" in these experiences, and today's is clearly the problem of my right hip, diaphragm, kidney, lung, scapula, and the ribs in that area (see 14 Mar 08 and later). With the proper combination of concentration and meditation, I could release all the confusion in that area and feel only the clarity along my left side. But every breath irresistibly interfered, dragging me out of the solid space I felt to the left and plunging me through a maelstrom of confusion into a tiny flexible world that seemed to be floating just behind where my left-side frame of reference felt my left nipple. The experience is something like being in the Escher drawing on the Concept page, except in this case it is like I'm standing in my own shirt pocket, in one of the nodes on an infinite fractal spiral of becoming ever smaller.
If there is a breakthrough here, it is only now approaching my awareness. It seems like once I am "in my own pocket", I try to regain wholeness by expanding the tiny in-the-pocket body to match my memory of how big my left side used to be. Perhaps I need to become my left side and pull the right side back up out of the pocket instead. But the tiny right side owns my eyes and my breath, so it is very tricky to avoid connecting to its tiny left side counterpart instead of to the sightless, breathless left side that is wearing the shirt whose pocket I'm in. The involvement of my eyes in writing this of course pulls me away from the experience I'm trying to recall and express, which is both frustrating and exhausting, so maybe that is enough for now.
I do want to include some notes about my perception of geographic directions. Last summer I bought a GPS and set up a moving map display I could watch while driving. Instead of the typical mode where your direction of travel is always straight up on the display, I set it to keep the map oriented with north at the top, so the orientation of the road is obvious. I grew up on the Great Plains, where most roads run straight north-south or east-west, so there were typically only four choices for direction of travel. On the few roads that made diagonals to the grid, my mind was aware of the true direction, but my body was locked into the nearest of the four cardinal directions. (Yes, I thought about such things even as a young child!)
Now that I'm in a part of California where there is no such thing as a straight road, let alone one aligned with a cardinal point, comparing my inner sense of which direction I was traveling to the angle of the road on the moving map display proved dizzying. Often the disagreement was ninety degrees or more. Tiny bends in the road which were hardly noticeable on the map registered in my mind as corners where my body's sense of my direction of travel changed by a right angle. Sometimes I would go ten miles thinking I was traveling mostly (for instance) northward when the map showed I was going mostly eastward. With the help of the map, it was obvious that I could completely ignore the direction of the sun and the time of day, feeling I was traveling in a direction they obviously contradicted. Like I said in a previous note about the full moon, I could explain the astronomy, but I just never directly saw how it projected into my inner world.
Now that I've logically learned the orientations of the roads I commonly travel, I've been experimenting with not using the moving map. Often I catch myself remembering what direction I'm really traveling, and make the same mental adjustment the map used to stimulate. But occasionally I notice my perception becoming unusually three-dimensional and solid, and I get a sense I'm traveling in a direction that is neither the one from my old habits nor the one from the map. Sometimes this new directional sense is over ninety degrees away from either my memory or the map.
Hmmm... My house is "square with the world" (as people say out on the Plains), in order to point all the solar panels on the roof toward the south. The table I'm sitting at has me facing about 45 degrees between east and south, but my inner sense is clearly that I'm facing south. Perhaps that is because the south wall is much farther from me, so I can "stretch out" to the south, or perhaps it is because the entire east side of the house seems to me to be less solid and real than the south side.
I just paused for a minute and visualized hopping up out of my shirt pocket and into the full left side space, and had one of those 3D, unique direction of travel experiences. Oooh! Part of that experience, the part that makes it seem "3D", is that I actually see objects change size as I move toward and away from them. Not just theoretically, but as solidly as being punched in the chest. If I get into the "3D" space and move my face even one-quarter inch toward the computer screen, I'm hit with an irresistible urge to breathe - and breathing allows my perception of the size of the screen not to change, but forces my sense of my own body size to change. Holding my breath helps reach the "3D" space, and actually see the screen change size, but it is tricky - I must not only block my airway, but also avoid arching my spine to move air around among the lobes of my lungs.
This is all very interesting, but I sure wish I could just turn it off and be normal sometimes!
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Revised 27 December 2008