Extreme DIY Mysticism #

“The truth is rarely pure and never simple.”
— Oscar Wilde

You can approach these techniques from a psychological, neurological, or energetic perspective—but before long, things tend to get weird.

Altered states don’t neatly respect disciplinary boundaries. Many practices that begin as simple breathwork, focus techniques, or sensory experiments eventually start generating symbolic imagery, dreamlike narratives, or even encounters—with aspects of the self, with disembodied intelligences, or with something else entirely.

This isn’t a bug. It seems to be part of the terrain.

It’s widely accepted that psychedelics can produce profound and sometimes otherworldly experiences—entity contact, time dilation, spontaneous downloads, or psi-like effects. But when the same phenomena arise from non-drug techniques, we often become more skeptical.

Why? Possibly because these effects violate more than one norm at once: they’re not only “impossible,” but also inconveniently accessible. There’s no pill, no shaman, no lab coat involved. Just you, some quiet, and time.

This doesn’t mean every light show behind your eyes is a glimpse of the divine, or that every inner voice is wisdom from beyond. Skepticism is healthy. Interpretation is flexible. But the phenomena are real enough to be worked with.

So consider this: you’re not just exploring techniques. You’re stepping into a long lineage of mystics, monks, magicians, weird scientists, and rogue explorers who also tuned their perception and asked: what happens if I keep going?

This is why I have included some of the “fringe” material in Sensory Manipulation and Psychic Experiments. As Arthur Clarke once said “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” Well, any sufficiently advanced magic is also indistinguishable from technology. The lines start to get very blurry indeed. Staring into a flickering bonfire to receive visions is crazy, but using a Dreamachine to intensify the alpha waves of the brain is just good science. Scrying a dark mirror is the domain of the crackpot, but floating in a dark tank of water is a wellness tactic. If stuff from your subconscioous happens to come up, then you can rationalise that that’s how emotional processing works.

What’s quite fun about being a “psychonaut” in current year is that we have the technology to bring all these tools thoroughly up to date. But when you’re “exploring your subconscious”, don’t kid yourself that you’re a million miles away from the medieval magician summoning spirits.

Call it mystical, call it subconscious, call it emergent properties of nervous system feedback loops—but don’t be surprised if the techniques start answering back.