What I see with my eyes shut

Yesterday I spoke in a church class about a matter that I have kept almost entirely private except in a recent blog—what I see with my eyes closed.

The class theme was learning to pay attention in order to discover the holy ground on which we walk every day. During the meditative part of the class I paid attention, as I often do, to what was going on behind my eyelids.

If I close my eyes and assume that I am seeing nothing, I see nothing. But if I keep looking I see, at first, undifferentiated graininess in tones of brownish orange, if it is daylight, or blackish brown if it is dark. There are afterimages, of course, of what I have been looking at before I closed my eyes. Those soon disappear. Gradually the graininess begins to move and take shape, differentiate. Often the first thing to pop out from the graininess will be a ball near the center of my vision that looks like a cluster of pebbles, spinning.

When I was a child I used to watch this spinning ball as I went to sleep. Perhaps this is something other children do. In the movie The Black Balloon a young girl tells her new boyfriend how to really look at what you see with your eyes shut.

The most interesting phenomena appear when I keep my eyes closed for a fairly long time and keep watching in a relaxed, meditative state.  I begin to see blobs and waves. Then the waves become regular pulses and patterns. Blobs emerge one after the other, moving right to left or left to right or far to near. The waves have fluttering edges like the ruffles of jellyfish and the blobs dissipate and explode. Colors will emerge. The usual pattern includes a pale, luminous green and a deep indigo. I can watch pulsing waves and bursting blobs of indigo for a long time; the longer I watch, the more intense they become. When this happens, even more dynamic shapes may emerge from the blobs, sometimes twisting flame shapes, one after the other, like computer-generated fractal imagery.

Over time I have learned to look for the indigo. It seems to be associated with a relaxed, meditative state; with deep, active prayer; or with strong energy flow, as in the session I reported recently with Vic when I was in the hospital.

When I am meditating it usually takes a while for the blue to come through. When I am in the presence of good energy vibes, however, it starts almost immediately. During yesterday’s class I saw blue right away and enjoyed it all through the several minutes of guided meditation. That is why I reported it to the other members of the class. I thought the prevalence of blue marked the class itself as holy ground.

This beautiful light show is not well studied, although in the 19^th century it was called Eigenlicht: self-light or intrinsic light. There are less-than-satisfactory articles about it on the Internet, including Wikipedia, which calls it “closed-eye hallucinations.”

The nice thing about Eigenlicht is that everybody has this capacity. It can be a kind of entertaining feedback mechanism on your internal state and the environment you are in. You just have to close your eyes and watch. Holy ground indeed.