Close your eyes in a dark room and wait. At first, nothing. Then, almost imperceptibly, something begins to move. A shimmer at the edge of vision. A pulse of light that seems to come from nowhere and everywhere at once. Geometric patterns that appear, rotate, fold into themselves and dissolve. You are not imagining these. You are seeing your own nervous system at work.
These are phosphenes. The light your visual system generates entirely from within.
Most people notice them occasionally, usually in that drowsy state between waking and sleep, or when you press gently on closed eyelids. But in contemplative practice, phosphenes become something far more interesting. They become a doorway. Not a metaphor for a doorway. An actual perceptual opening into a space that has genuinely unusual properties. Your own internal space of your consciousness.
Here is what I mean.
When you sit quietly with closed eyes and let the phosphene field stabilise, something remarkable happens over time. The patterns do not stay flat. They do not behave like a screen in front of you. They begin to acquire depth. Simple shimmering gives way to geometric forms, mandalas, yantras, symmetric structures of extraordinary intricacy. Then those structures begin to move, to unfold, to open. Tunnels of light appear that you travel through. The space you are perceiving starts to feel larger than your head. Much larger. Impossibly larger.
This is not a poetic description. It is a precise phenomenological observation. The inner space does not behave like ordinary three-dimensional Euclidean space, the kind you measure with a ruler. It behaves as if it has more room in it than geometry should allow. A small movement of attention takes you somewhere entirely different. The field keeps expanding without ever reaching a wall.
Researchers studying extreme psychedelic states have noticed the same thing and given it a precise name: hyperbolic geometry. In hyperbolic space, unlike in the flat space of everyday experience, area grows exponentially as you move outward. A circle twice as large contains not four times as much space but vastly, incomprehensibly more. This is why people in deep altered states consistently report that the inner space feels boundless, that there is more in there than could possibly fit, that dimensions multiply, that the normal sense of inside and outside stops making sense.
What is extraordinary is that this geometry is not produced by drugs alone. It is produced by and in your nervous system. The retina, the visual cortex, the networks of neurons that generate your inner visual field are organised in precisely the patterns that give rise to these geometric phenomena. The symmetric structures, the tunnels, the expanding fields of light: these are your own cells becoming visible to themselves. You look directly into your architecture.
This is what the yoga of inner light is really about. Not relaxation. Not visualisation in the ordinary sense of constructing mental images. But learning to perceive what your nervous system is already doing, and following that perception into the space it opens.
What you find there, if you go slowly and let the practice deepen, is something the contemplative traditions have always described and always struggled to put into ordinary language. A space that is limitless. A space with no edges. A space that is somehow both entirely interior and strangely impersonal, as if you have stepped through your own subjectivity into something larger than it. The ancient traditions called it the ground of being, the void, the light of pure awareness, the Self behind the self.
I called it the ultra-subjective hyperspace, in many of our papers described it in detail, because that is precisely what the phenomenology shows. It is more subjective than ordinary experience, in the sense that it is closer to the bare structure of consciousness itself, stripped of objects, narratives, and the usual furniture of the mind. And it is hyperspatial, in the sense that it does not obey the geometric constraints of ordinary three-dimensional experience.
The striking thing is that you do not need exotic substances to find it. You need practice, patience, and the willingness to look at what is already there when you close your eyes and stop trying to think your way somewhere.
The phosphenes are always running. The inner light is always on. The geometry of that space is already hyperbolic, already boundless, already waiting.
What changes with practice is simply this: you learn to see it.
From from Gómez-Emilsson to our work
A researcher at the Qualia Research Institute recently mapped the geometry of extreme psychedelic states with unusual precision. What he found was that as altered states deepen, the inner visual field moves through recognisable stages: first simple geometric shimmer, then interlocking symmetrical patterns of extraordinary complexity, then full immersion in a space that feels enclosed yet boundless, populated by presences and structured by an architecture that no ordinary room could contain.
What strikes me about this progression is how precisely it mirrors what happens in deep phosphene meditation, without any substance at all. The entry-level phosphene field, with its pulsing symmetries and geometric tilings, corresponds exactly to what he calls the Chrysanthemum.
The portal stage, where the flat field opens into depth and you find yourself moving through tunnels of expanding light, corresponds to his Waiting Room.
The geometry he describes mathematically as hyperbolic, space that keeps expanding faster than you can reach its edges, is what I experience phenomenologically as the ultra-subjective hyperspace.
We are describing the same territory from different directions. The critical difference is this: his map was drawn from the outside, from trip reports, from doses and algorithms.
The yoga of inner light draws the same map from the inside, through practice, through training, through the slow cultivation of a capacity that your nervous system already possesses. No substance required anymore. Just attention, patience, and the willingness to follow the light that is already there. But for those with an inner eye that is still not exercised, some substances might enhance the capacity to see. There is no contradiction.
breath4balance 