Why our inner “visual grammar” and the loop of self-reference make the sense of the sacred both repeatable and deeply personal, and how studying those loops can bridge neuroscience, religion and art.

Think of that famous sentence-paradox, “This sentence is not true.” It folds language into itself and produces a tiny electric shock: meaning that refuses to settle. The image that has accompanied such puzzles for millennia is the ouroboros, the snake eating its tail , a perfect emblem of self-reference. It is eater and eaten, subject and object. Philosophy and mysticism have long shown us that a mind that reflects upon itself forms strange loops: the knower and the known begin to mirror and eventually collapse into the same gesture.

This looping is not just an intellectual gimmick. It is the architecture of the self.

Modern cognitive science calls much of this process “self-reference”: information that links to “me” is encoded more deeply, sticks in memory longer and becomes the scaffolding of identity. In evolutionary terms, this is sensible: agents that prioritize information about themselves survive and reproduce more reliably. But there is a shadow side. Because our attention and memory are tuned to what concerns “me,” we build a private movie, a persistent, self-tailored narrative and then mistake the movie for reality.

Here is where our phosphene work enters the scene.

The brain’s visual alphabet: start with tiny lights then big stories

Phosphenes, those sparks and patterned lights people report in meditation, sensory deprivation, migraine aura, or psychedelic states, are not random hallucinations. Across contexts, visual reports tend to recycle a small set of motifs: points, spirals, tunnels, lattices, mandalas and finally formless luminous fields. These so-called form-constants are the raw alphabet of the visual brain. They arise from anatomy (retinotopic maps, recurrent cortical loops), from dynamics (excitation–inhibition balance) and from thalamocortical gating.

If language gives us letters and grammar, phosphenes give us a constrained visual grammar: a limited set of shapes and lawful transitions that can be combined, elaborated and culturally interpreted. That is the core idea of our Ultrasubjective Hyperspace (USH): a reproducible, first-person domain in which luminous phenomena develop in stereotyped phases and where meaning is woven by attention, affect and cultural frames.

Strange loops meet the inner light

Now imagine the ouroboros again, but this time the loop is not only cognitive (thought reflecting thought) but perceptual. Neurons build a representation of the world and, within that representation, include a model of the one who is perceiving. The eye, in a manner of speaking, points back to itself. Self-reference is realized as a perceptual loop.

When phosphenes intensify and organize into mandalas or fields of light, they become the content through which the looping mind turns and recognizes itself. A luminous mandala may be experienced as an archetypal image; an immersive field of radiance as a dissolving boundary between observer and observed. The self-reference effect amplifies these events: because the phenomenon is experienced as relevant to “me,” it is encoded with exceptional vividness and meaning. The result can be a powerful sense of being seen by something greater, or of briefly losing the sense of the separate self, experiences that traditions call “numinous,” “mystical,” or “enlightening.” In that moment I experience myself as pure luminous empty potentiality of consciousness. Once having seen that, into the Goedel Lemniscate, the Great Transformation starts and you become what you are. Pretty cool I think! And ultimately so simple.

Shunyam Adhibhu