I was thinking, “If the physical world is an illusion, how can I come to access the world beyond illusion? Senses are all no-go’s. What else do I have to work with?” And I thought, oddly enough, of senselessness.

So I closed my eyes very, very slowly. I watched as my vision, which seemed to take up the entire potential visible field, began to develop definite ‘edges’ The top and bottom of my visual field started to disappear into the lightlessness of closed eyes. And soon what remained of my vision was just a tiny, trembling flicker surrounded almost entirely by lightlessness until my eyes finally closed entirely. And I’d do this again and again, very slowly opening them back up, and very slowly re-closing them.

I started imagining an image of myself with two tiny, round TV screens floating in front of my eyeballs like the lenses of eyeglasses. And each of them was showing me a very slightly different perspective on the world in the same way that 3D glasses do to present a 3D movie.

And the interesting part really began when, as I slowly closed my eyes, I would imagine the screens compressing horizontally until they dissolved away, and as I slowly opened my eyes, the screens would emerge again and slowly expand. And I held this visual in my mind very strongly and probably spent no less than 15 minutes imagining that, as I felt my physical eyes close, the 3D screens were dissolving. I recommend you do this and pay special note to what you begin to ‘see’ when your eyes are closed.

The sensation settled in that as I closed my eyes, I was effectively opening my actual visual field to the “genuine” world – and naturally when I felt like I was opening my eyes, I was actually covering up the real universe with a virtual screen.

What are the implications of this exercise?

Well, it implies that the emptiness you see when you close your eyes is kind of “more real” than what you see when your eyes are open. This means that total sensory deprivation, including thoughts, would be the effective extinguishing of the physical world – and also, therefore, might share similarities with the state of mind of an enlightened being. This may be intuitive, but what’s (I think) profound to imagine is that what’s left, the dark, scentless, tasteless, sensationless, thoughtless world you’d experience in total sensory deprivation, is precisely the state you return to in deep sleep, certain states of meditation, or death. When you close your eyes, you’re looking at the “Real World” beyond illusion. The only illusion would be to imagine that you’re seeing the backs of eyelids.

I found this to be very powerful to experiment with.

Another very interesting thing that can be done with this practice is to, while sitting in a dim-to-dark environment, perceiving all of the dark spots in your field of vision (shadows, black objects, etc.) as ‘holes’ in the screen. The nature of the visual field suddenly becomes very thin, 2D, and almost transparent.

I want to make perfectly clear that this is an exercise intended to stretch and bend the mind, chip away at conventional understandings, and make you as flexible as possible. The darkness or blindness of closed-eyes is no more ‘real’ or ‘genuine’ or ‘enlightened’ then the light and visuals of opened-eyes. You are not actually perceiving anything more valid when your eyes are closed. But framing it this way is a very powerful thing to play with precisely because we so often DO think of our opened-eyes perceptions as being ‘real’. This is not, in and of itself, a method of insight, but rather an exercise in flexibility. An important distinction.