12

Spontaneous Color Imagery during Meditation

Colors are the deeds of light—at once, light itself, and the results of light.

Johann von Goethe (1749–1832)¹

Colors were an early interest in my childhood. Not until I was 49 did I begin to practice formal Zen meditation in Kyoto, Japan. Soon, like other novices, I noticed that a soft play of colors could enter my central field of vision. If such “deeds of light” commonly occur in meditators, why consider them now?

• Distinctive color and luminosity phenomena can emerge during meditation. It is time to describe them in greater detail and give them an appropriate name.

• Not until 2009, when I was 84, did I notice that these colors tended to shift into my left visual field. This late evolution is important. It means that those color percepts in the left visual field are arising—spontaneously—somewhere over in the opposite, right side of my brain.

• A preferential increase of fMRI signal activity, down in my right fusiform gyrus, might be among the functional MRI correlates of these delayed luminous colors.

• The subtly blended color sequences are consistent with the microanatomy of color receptors that other researchers have found in the visual cortex of our primate relatives.

• The lines of evidence reviewed here converge toward a novel working hypothesis: A more open access into allocentric processing pathways could play a useful role in some mechanisms of neuroplasticity that gradually evolve during long-term meditative training. This chapter’s hypothesis becomes the preamble for the notion to be explored in the next two chapters:

• Greater access to these other-referential innate resources—including those relayed through the ventral processing stream in the right hemisphere—could have the potential to access more intuitive capacities than did those exaggerated top-down functions that one’s dominant egocentric processing networks had imposed during earlier decades.

The first section in this chapter spans decades. It begins with a neurologist’s observations of visual phenomena made when he was only a novice meditator. Color plates following page 122 illustrate how, after 35 years of meditation, some of these phenomena underwent a shift over into the left visual field. The second section discusses these longitudinal observations and comments on their changing nature. The third section considers the mechanisms of the findings and their potential implications for health professionals and meditators in the society at large.

Observations over Decades

How the Colors and Luminosity Began

In 1998, I used the words “yellow-green” and “blue-purple” to describe the hues that had been entering my vision regularly during open-eyed meditation in dim light. [ZB: 374, 379] Throughout that interval of 14 years, I had grown accustomed to the way the colors had entered chiefly the central and lower regions of the visual fields, whether my eyelids remained open or partly closed.

I accepted that this color imagery clearly fell within the old Japanese term makyo. This term implied that the colors were by-products of meditation and would drop away with time. Indeed, I noticed them less and less. I had always been strongly influenced by colors as a child and was an occasional weekend watercolor painter.² Therefore, their tendency to persist could be dismissed as idiosyncratic. Importantly, no tendency to shift toward either field had been evident before 2009. The basic meditative setting and conditions described next have remained essentially unchanged for over three decades.

The Stable Conditions under Which Color and Luminosity Phenomena Have Been Recurring for Decades

Upon awakening, the light from three overhead 60-watt bulbs is switched on, the routine morning ablutions begin, followed by 15 minutes of simple yoga and setting-up physical exercises. Now, under the light from a single overhead 40-watt bulb, a conventional Zen approach begins: with sitting posture erect and eyelids open, I gaze down gently at an angle of 30 degrees toward a 5-millimeter dark spot 3 feet away on a pale blank wall. No specific goal has been set to see or do something. I simply remain aware of lower abdominal breathing movements and of whatever else transpires.

Within the first 5 minutes, the usual diffuse haze of faint greenish colors emerges. It begins lower down and ascends to occupy both sides of the visual field. During the next 25 minutes or so, it then evolves to include most of the following phases. (The asterisks identify which color changes lateralized since 2009.)

The Phases of Color Evolution during the Current 30-Minute Period of Meditation

• During the first 10–15 minutes, thoughts recede. Though still gazing toward the spot, my eyes diverge slightly, allowing external visual clarity to become increasingly unfocused. As vision blurs and softens, the early mottled hues of this faint haze gather substance. They now register as shades of yellow-green and/or blue-green throughout the full extent of the visual field’s original gray background.

* After the first 10–15 minutes of settling in, this symmetrical greenish haze coalesces and undergoes a distinct shift to the left of the midline of gaze (see color plate 2).

* Whether this lateralized process had occupied the entire left half of the (homonymous) fields at onset or had begun down in the left lower quadrant, the area of greenish color now intensifies as it tends to coalesce into the left upper quadrant (see color plate 3).

• During the next phase, a faint gray haze intermediate between red and pink develops throughout the visual fields symmetrically. Inside a dark peripheral zone, it coalesces in the midline into a circular area of pink-purple color that has a soft-edged circumference (see color plate 4).

A soft wave of mental relaxation and physical ease sometimes accompanies the initial appearance of a bluish-pink-violet hue in its center.

* Waxing and waning during the following minutes, this previous round and soft-edged midline area that blends pink to purple colors can also drift over to the left and coalesce into the left upper quadrant (see color plate 5).

* Each phase becomes more translucent as its color becomes increasingly saturated, lateralizes to the left, and later coalesces into the left upper quadrant. There, the maximum zone of illumination is often reached closer to the circumference and nearer the 11 o’clock than the 10 o’clock position.

Each phase of these soft-edged color progressions from yellow-green through reddish-pink-purple usually lasts from many seconds to several minutes. However, neither this outline of sequences since 1974 nor the changes since 2009 are necessarily stereotyped. Cycles of unlateralized blotchy, shifting darker blue-green colors or pink-purple colors may mingle with thin, hazy washes of yellow-green and aquamarine or reddish pink throughout the entire visual field. No shades of blood red have been observed similar to the vivid red band seen in photographs of the spectrum of sunlight out at its long wavelength end.³

General Discussion of the Phenomena

Their Nomenclature and Nature

These color phenomena are not some kind of synesthesia.⁴ [ZBR: 232] Synesthesias occur when two different sensory avenues blend into one unified mode of “cross modality perception.” For example, numbers or letters can then take on particular colors.

It would help to have a unique diagnostic label, one that could further separate these two different conditions. One such term might be “meditators aurora.” Aurora was the name the ancient Romans gave to their goddess of the dawn. It was Aurora’s faint colors, glowing just above the horizon, that heralded the Sun, about to rise from below. Accordingly, in keeping with its Latin origin, aurora meditatorum suggests itself.

To be sure, more subtle colors emerge during meditation than we can see unfold in the dramatic displays of the aurora borealis. Notwithstanding, the spontaneous shifting colors and luminosities of aurora meditatorum present a scientific challenge. Which basic mechanisms cause these phenomena to arise spontaneously from the brain’s vast array of endogenous visual functions? The colors do share one fact with other benign hallucinations: no discrete external stimulus causes them to emerge. Unlike formed hallucinations, they do not exhibit edged characteristics. Unlike hypnagogic hallucinations, no overt drowsy intervals necessarily precede their onset. Indeed, because this meditator has been stimulated by his early morning routines, he feels awakened and remains a wakefully observant witness.

Note that no I is prominent in the foreground of this scene. No person is trying deliberately to produce visual imagery by concentrated top-down attempts to focus attention during some kind of trance. Indeed, it is when I relax and open up into the greater degrees of bare awareness during receptive styles of meditation that these spontaneous color phenomena become more vivid. By the time that washes of the early thin hazes and left-lateralized visual phases begin to emerge, my original soft gaze has become unfocused, and the 5-millimeter dark spot on the wall has faded from view.

Commentary on the Additional Observations That Developed since 2009 (see asterisks)

The early haze of soft colors still began as centrally and symmetrically as before. Now, however, their distinct luminosity was apparent against the gray background. It infused the colors increasingly as they became more saturated, shifted to the left, and coalesced into the left superior visual field (see plates 2, 3, and 5). Had this conspicuous left shift into the left field occurred in this overt manner in earlier decades, it would have been obvious to any visually attuned neurologist. [ZBR: 174–175, 306–312, 410–420]

The real aurora borealis is seen more vividly against a black sky on dark nights before the moon rises. In a similar manner, the color and luminosity phenomena can be appreciated more readily in the darkness created by allowing the eyes to drift slowly and gently upward, in parallel. The extra darkness occurs because the pupils are now hidden under three-quarter-closed eyelids. [MS: 74–91] Plates 2–5 illustrate the results following this procedure. Without straining, this technique allows the colors and luminosity to stand out more clearly against the resulting dark gray–black background. This approach preserves a gap at the bottom through which the stimulus effect of ambient light still enters through the lowest edge of the field. This desirable aspect of standard Zen practice remains a useful way to minimize drowsiness. [ZB: 582] The colors and luminosity are usually more intense during gentle up-gaze than gazing down below eye level, even when similarly darkened conditions of partial eyelid closure are maintained.

Throughout these last five years, from 2009 to 2013, repeated observations during meditative retreats confirm that the left-lateralized cycles of translucent colors arrive sooner, become more vivid, and last longer during the later parts of each retreat than during the first days. The phenomena did not arise on mornings characterized by a sluggish arousal from sleep and general inattentiveness. Nor did they occur if the previous day was characterized by mental and physical depletion. At last, the inquisitive neurologist decided to address the seemingly obvious “What?” question. What was causing this long-delayed visual shift to the left? Neuroimaging studies began at this point.⁵

Functional MRI Correlates?

Regions of special interest were six pairs of sites in the brain that were the most color-selective. These sites were found by Beauchamp et al. in 1999 when they studied how normal subjects respond when shown a variety of different external colors.⁶ During my first study in the 3 Tesla MRI scanner, before I began to meditate—and before any spontaneous colors arose—the total volume of pooled activity (voxels) in these 12 sites was statistically the same on the right and left sides. This data profile shifted once the luminous colors coalesced into the left upper visual quadrant. Now, the profile of my spontaneously active brain regions closely resembled the local maxima found when those nonmeditating subjects in the 1999 study were actually being stimulated by external colors. Now the fMRI signal activity increased down in my right posterior collateral sulcus and fusiform gyrus. There, it reached a level almost twice that (98% more than) found in the same region on the left side. Moreover, this localized, right-sided fusiform activity was also 68 percent greater than that found over in the opposite, left mid-fusiform gyrus and was 38 percent greater than that in the left occipital V-1 cortex. Figures 11.1 and plate 1 illustrate an important point about the location of this right-sided fusiform region of visual association cortex. The fusiform gyrus (FG) lies along the ventral stream of the right allocentric processing pathway. Preliminary research to identify the predominately right-lateralized cortical correlates is ongoing.

Potential Mechanisms and Practical Implications

Each basic mechanism involved in colors, or meditation, or light is individually complex. When they interact, their complexities become daunting. Therefore, this section must narrow the scope of its discussion to five subheadings: (1) color generation phenomena, (2) the dynamic retinal/cerebral origins of color sequences during meditation, (3) the tendency of later evolving colors to coalesce on the left and into the left upper visual field, (4) the co-arising luminous background, and (5) potential mechanisms related to intuitive processing functions. Pointed questions [•] will again be inserted to sharpen key aspects of the discussion. The research reports selected indicate techniques that can yield useful answers in the future.

Color Generation Phenomena; Recent EEG, Neuroimaging, and Optical Imaging Studies

• How does vision change when normal subjects gaze into a uniform, homogeneous, blank visual field (Ganzfeld)?

After several minutes, the luminance of the field diminishes. Its diffuse, blotchy inhomogeneities now resemble a “cloudy fog.”⁷ The interesting finding is in how the EEG shifts, 20–60 seconds before these normal subjects develop a wide variety of hallucinations. The particular EEG profile suggests that these shifts occur in the deep feedback loops that normally link the thalamus and the cortex into their usual oscillating circuits. (see chapter 11)

• When a Zen meditator settles into a prolonged relaxed awareness, which brain regions become active—and less active—in ways that might correlate with the generation of colored percepts?

In 1988, after I had been meditating daily for (only) 14 years, a deoxyglucose PET scan monitored my brain during a prolonged, 2–3-hour period of relaxed, meditative awareness.⁸ [ZB: 282–283] Sections at multiple levels of this scan revealed substantially greater net metabolic activity in the right cerebral hemisphere, including the inferior occipito → temporal region of the right fusiform gyrus. In contrast, both right and left medial prefrontal regions appeared deactivated.⁹ In addition, all language-related cortical regions on the left showed a relative deactivation. This was in keeping with the way my internal word-thoughts in the scanner had been dropping off to a very low level (see chapter 9).

Functional MRI research since 1988 has increasingly correlated these medial prefrontal regions (mPFC) with a variety of autobiographical functions. These are referable to the I-Me-Mine operations of our psychic sense of Self (see chapters 2, 3). Therefore, these major reductions of prefrontal activity in my PET scan tend to confirm the generally passive and openly receptive nature of my bottom-up awareness during this extended interval while I was engaged in the practice of a predominately receptive, nonconcentrative form of silent meditation.

During this new millennium, functional MRI researchers uncovered another crucial finding: when normal subjects are seemingly resting, their medial frontoparietal Self-referential regions also undergo slow, spontaneous fluctuations in amplitude. These occur a mere two to four times a minute. Importantly, these very slow medial spontaneous fluctuations often correlate inversely with another set of very slow waveforms of activity. These arise—simultaneously—in the dorsal and ventral attention systems over the lateral aspect of each hemisphere.¹⁰

Recall that chapter 3 also discussed the same kind of reciprocal seesaw relationship between the networks representing our Self versus those devoted to attention. However, that inverse relationship was observed acutely. It happened each time the brain was reacting to a brief external stimulus. Clearly, the spontaneous and the reactive observations have significant implications for meditators: Innate mechanisms in the brain are poised to deactivate the Self when attentive functions are activated.¹¹ [MS: 74–91] We continue to discuss the pivotal consequences of these dynamic inverse relationships in the later sections of this chapter.

• How does visual perception change when a normal subject is deprived of external light?

An artist chose to be blindfolded throughout a three-week period. During her first two days, she reported simple, vivid, elementary, brilliant red and yellow hallucinations.¹² Thereafter, these faded in intensity. Functional MRI signals increased during her hallucinations, in the left lingual gyrus and in the right parahippocampal gyrus. The left lingual signal cluster was said to overlap with other left-sided sites. These occurred in her secondary visual area (V-2), ventral posterior area, and that ventral area referred to simply as “V-4.” Not until the other normal subjects in a separate study had first undergone dark adaptation for 45 minutes did gentle transcranial magnetic stimulation of their occipital cortex finally cause them to see light flashes (phosphenes).¹³

• Do discrete receptor sites exist in the normal visual cortex that represent greater local sensitivities for particular colors?

High-resolution optical imaging techniques began by mapping monkey V-2 cortex.¹⁴ When these primates fixate on a single external color, their peak response to this color occurs in myriad arrays of tiny cortical sites. Each is usually less than 0.5 millimeters in diameter. Although these sites are separable, their borders frequently overlap those of certain other adjacent colors. This overlapping occurs in a distinctive, sequential manner.

For example, suppose researchers show the monkey a purple color. Instantly, the corresponding purple-sensitive (P) receptor regions respond within its V-2 cortex. Their circumferences often overlap with one or more adjacent sites. The closest next site responds when a blue color (B) is shown. Moreover, when this monkey is then presented with the next single external hues—green, yellow, orange, or red—similar overlapping tendencies continue. Indeed, these next four successively adjacent color receptor sites again tend to follow in that particular topographical order: G, Y, O, R.

The authors call this a “hue-dependent proximity relationship.” The same trend also exists in the primary visual (V-1) cortex.¹⁵ Here again, separable brain response sites occur each time the monkey is shown single purple, blue, green, yellow, orange, or red hues. These overlappings again tend to follow the preceding pattern of sequences.

• Why does this spectrum of reactive color sites in the brain seem familiar?

We see these same sequences emerging, from left to right, when a glass prism splits white daylight into its rainbow-like bands of color! The reddish-purple wavelengths of light are split the most, followed next by the bluish colors. These first (violet) bands emerge in this order off at the short wavelength end of the visible color spectrum. This region extends from 370 to 470 nanometers. Soon, green will enter (at around 500), to be followed by bright yellow (at around 580). After orange, the pure reds will finally emerge, far out at the long wavelength end of the spectrum (around 700 nanometers).

• So, why do we see pink?

In dorsal V-4 of monkey cortex, many clusters react to different colors, degrees of preference for luminance, and degrees of saturation.¹⁶ These sites tend to coincide in overlapping, spatially orderly sequences. Here, pink responses seem to represent superimpositions of bright white or lesser red sensitivities, not isolated pink receptor sites per se. In contrast, separate dark red–preferring patches appear to represent the dark red hue, rather than overlappings of separately activated red and black sites.

The Dynamic Retinal/Cerebral Origins of Color Sequences during Meditation

• Can the complex operations that begin with retinal rods and cones in the eye influence other mechanisms farther back in a meditator’s brain that generate images spontaneously?

Retinal layers in the eye respond differently both to illumination and to darkness. When we normally adapt to light or to dark, the results influence our cone color pathways.¹⁷ Intricate color-contrast phenomena further shape what we perceive. While rods are responding to the photons of light, their signals also influence certain cone pathways that are sensitive to shorter wavelength colors. Once we become fully adapted to bright light, our eye becomes most sensitive to yellow hues. However, in only dim light (including that cast by only one 40-watt bulb) a meditator’s initial color sensitivities for yellow can gradually shift toward the left (e.g., green ← yellow). This left shift (toward green) leads in the direction toward color sensitivites that can experience hues from yellow-green toward lighter blue.

Jan Purkinje (1787–1869), a pioneering physiologist, lived in an era spared from such scientific intricacies of modern color interpretation.¹⁸ However, he was a keen observer of the changes that occurred in his color vision during long meditative walks outdoors. As dusk deepened, he saw blue flowers and green leaves appearing brighter than before (in dim light, his color sensitivities would be shifting more to the left, toward the green and blue (blue ← green) middle wavelengths of light. In contrast, purple flowers (representing the short wave length extremity of the visible spectrum) or red flowers (representing the long wavelengths) appeared more subdued.

This meditator also witnesses other rapid shifts involving lesser degrees of blotchy color contrast phenomena. These phenomena develop in seconds when humans are adapting to the dark.¹⁹ However, the purpose of plates 2–5 is to depict the major soft-edged areas and color sequences. These evolve incrementally over a much slower time course of 1, to 5, to 15 minutes or so. This slower timetable coincides with the ways some parts of the meditator’s brain (and the contractions of the smooth ciliary muscle that had initially focused his lens on fine details) have been settling into a relaxed attitude of more divergent, unfocused, open awareness. During these later minutes, the meditator will have been gradually letting go of two cognitive functions: (1) the earlier minimal fronto ↔ parietal executive routines that had enabled him to pay the first steps of focused, top-down attention, and (2) the earlier discursive word-thought streams of interior language.

At this point, the discussion leaves the retina of the eye and returns to the dynamic mechanisms that express aurora meditatorum farther back in the recesses of the brain. Here, an important category of mechanisms could help sponsor these spontaneous visual events. Their mechanisms are disinhibitory.

• What does disinhibitory mean?

Disinhibitory means that the brain’s lower hierarchical levels become activated because they have just been released from prior top-down inhibitory restraints. The concept that higher centers had imposed these restraints was part of John Hughlings Jackson’s interpretation of release phenomena.²⁰ Our prefrontal cortex is a large high-level region that exercises these ongoing controlling functions on lower levels. Could its dorsal and medial regions that represent Self-centeredness also be the candidate sources when a release occurs from higher inhibitory controls? Could such a release then allow visual functions to become reactivated downstream in the posterior visual regions of an aging meditator’s brain? This hypothesis is supported by the serial fMRI changes described by Erb and Sitaram (see chapter 9, note 7). Other studies show that the medial prefrontal cortex does become more readily deactivated when the brain undergoes its normal process of aging between the third and seventh decades.²¹

The Tendency of the Later-Evolving Colors to Coalesce into the Left Visual Fields

Chapter 3 emphasized that our right hemisphere expresses a dominant role in attention. [SI: 29–43] It is also easier for normal subjects to detect external stimuli when researchers deliver these stimuli into their subjects’ left visual fields.²² What accounts for this attentive dominance of the right hemisphere? At least at the cortical level, much of it appears referable to the ways that the bottom-up functions of its ventral attention networks link our right temporoparietal junction (TPJ) with the right inferior frontal gyrus (iFG).

• Do other physiological biases of our right hemisphere favor information that enters it from up in this left upper quadrant of our visual fields?

Yes. Some of these normal physiological biases emerge when our sensory-perceptive and motor-activity functions combine their two levels of operation.²³ Subtle interactive biases enable us normally to perform tasks most efficiently in the left upper quadrant. In order to detect this improved efficiency, certain experimental conditions prove optimal. Researchers in Heilman’s team at the University of Florida place the visual target higher up and out to the left. Here the target lies within the more favorable sensory domain up in this left superior visual field, and it is also placed at distances increasingly farther away from an outreaching hand.

In a separate study, when an external blue color was presented up in the left superior visual quadrant of a patient, it evoked fMRI signals from a large irregular area down in this patient’s opposite right fusiform gyrus.²⁴ A yellow color presented to this patient’s left lower visual quadrant preferentially evoked responses from another region just posterior to the first. Which external color—among all 26 shown—evoked the maximal fMRI response from this patient’s brain? Notably, it was the blue-purple color at the short wavelength end of the spectrum.

• Could this author-meditator have sustained a silent stroke in 2009? Could such a lesion have damaged those left-sided brain pathways that would normally project colors into his right visual fields?

In theory, such a lesion might explain why a person would experience the color and luminance phenomena only in those opposite, left visual fields that had been spared. However, neither the clinical history nor structural MRI scans support this hypothesis. No focal lesion or other unusual pathological changes were evident in the structural scans that were routinely performed for incidental research control purposes in 1986, 2009, and 2011.

The Co-arising Luminous Background

• Why does a glow infuse the colors, enabling them to stand out brighter against the dark gray background?

Luminance is inherent in those same neural pathways that relay color-coded message impulses back from the cones in our retina. When these retinal impulses arrive back in V-2 and V-4 cortex, their responsive receptor sites are also color-preferring and luminance-preferring.²⁵ Moreover, special tests reveal that our left upper visual quadrant normally shows a second curious subliminal bias.²⁶ When we look at an object, this covert bias leaves us with the visual impression that some prior hidden external source of light already exists. Where is it coming from? From up above, and off to the left.

This subtle source of light does more than seem to illuminate the object from that direction. It enables the object to cast shadows. Detailed psychophysical and fMRI research suggests that this normal illumination bias arising from up above and to the left originates during the early stages of visual processing in the back of the brain. Moreover, this normal illumination bias, referred in a bottom-up manner, is consistent with ventral stream processing.

• So, these pages indicate that the meditator later experiences spontaneous colors and that they are increasingly saturated and luminous the more they become referable to this left superior visual quadrant. Might such a localized visual bias express a normal background hum, as it were? Could these left-sided and superior quadrant events be reflecting the later release into the meditator’s overt awareness of innate processing functions in lower pathways that normally begin in the opposite right inferior occipito → temporal cortex?

Such a proposal could be consistent with the overt empirical visual observations just described. It is also in accord with the normal right-sided preponderance of his PET scan during meditation and with the several sources of fMRI data commented on. Various lines of evidence indicate that the normal brain can have several substantially biased asymmetries of the usual resting activity among the lower visual regions on the right side. The arrow-headed line in figure 3.1 illustrates the ventral trajectory of some of these crucially important parallel processing networking functions. These brain functions are served by distributed systems along the “southern” visual pathways that can also access our allocentric frame of reference. Figures 11.1 and plate 1 illustrate how these early visual pathways on the lower right side will correlate with visual phenomena that emerge into consciousness in the opposite, left upper visual fields.

• Viewed in the context of the spontaneous colors that arise during meditation, why do these other-referential ventral processing pathways become of special interest?

The arrow-headed line in figure 3.1 passes through the long right fusiform gyrus (FG). In this specialized visual association region, we do more than integrate codes for color sensitivities. We also decode the separate identities of individual human faces and process the form of objects. The close proximities among these three crucial adjacent functions might now be relevant to an additional seemingly lateralized human bias. Part cultural, part psycho-physiological, it was disclosed during a survey of 659 paintings hanging in the Louvre in Paris: Artists who painted portraits during the thirteenth to nineteenth centuries often represented the light that illuminated their subjects’ faces as having arisen from one direction.²⁷

• Is there evidence that this illumination tended to arrive from a source external to the left side of their canvas?

Yes. The illumination appeared 8.6 times more often from the left than from the right. In contrast, artists who painted landscape scenes were only 2.9 times more likely to depict these landscapes as having been illuminated by light arising from this left side. Artistic and photographic conventions evolved during subsequent centuries. [MS: 81, 210]

Potential Mechanisms Related to Intuitive Processing Functions

Our rigid Self-centeredness causes big problems for ourselves, for others, and for the ecosystems that we are all responsible for. Imprisoned in the axis of its fixed belief system, our privileged Self seems isolated from the rest of the turning universe, feeling no responsibility for others’ well-being.

Given the consequences of this restricted point of view, the late spontaneous visual phenomena described herein are not necessarily minor ephemera. Rather, they may be regarded as clues that might provide fresh perspectives for a planet suffering from a litany of Self-inflicted woes. Various lines of evidence keep informing us: subtle sources of illumination can arrive from elevations just above our old Self-limited mental horizon. Yes, their deep mechanisms still seem obscure, yet might they also have some potential to shed light on issues of paramount interest to humanity in general?

At the barest minimum, let such a fresh perspective reassure other members of the author’s local Zen group. They are two men in their mid-40s. One is a professor of psychology who likens his slow play of colors to those of a lava lamp. The other is a retired marine. Having meditated regularly for the past five years, each person has a new understanding. Yes, their continuing to visualize colors during meditation might seem unusual, but it is not abnormal. Notably, the soft yellow-green and blue-purple colors seen by each meditator chiefly occupy the central fields and do not lateralize.

A recent local addition is a woman who has meditated regularly in the Vipassana tradition for the past 13 years. She meditates with her eyelids closed, as does one of the two men in the Zen group. She recalls her initial imagery as having been more of a deep blue and black in color. In recent years, yellow, green, and a variety of more vivid colors have developed in “circular swirls.” More colors develop in the later minutes of each sitting as she becomes more relaxed. The colors emerge only in the center and lower half of her visual field.

Chapter 13 looks beyond these meditative phenomena toward other implications of regaining a fresh perspective.