"... getting out from under the tyranny of the clock or the sun. Mainly it felt destabilizing: Apparently time tells you what to do and, by extension, who you are. I made my way to the pass box and found I’d slept through a [food] delivery. It was Saturday, midmorning, I decided. Von Bujdoss had prepared a delicious bowl of what might or might not have been kugel; I reached for my spoon, held the bowl to my mouth and gracefully shoveled its contents in. I was midbite when a projector switched on inside my skull. Gaza. Ukraine. Sudan. School shootings. Terrible images came roaring out of some corner of my mind.... In normal life, I struggle to summon visuals in my head; here I was Rembrandt.... One moment I saw my children navigating their climate-crisis future; the next I watched Seth Meyers slicing blue cheese in a galley kitchen. Here was a friend’s death, and then my own gravestone; there was my wife looking cute...."
Writes Chris Colin, in "'You’re Going to Lose Your Mind': My Three-Day Retreat in Total Darkness/The author spent days in a room with no light. Who would he be when he emerged?" (NYT).
पोस्ट्स
४० टिप्पण्या:
Well, not Aaron Rodgers.
The political virtue-signaling is strong in this guy.
The best rooms are the ones that are also sound proof.
Those will fuck you up.
Colin is such an appropriate name for the writer, whose head is definitely up his own.
Tom T., seriously!
That said, it would be interesting to see what your mind does in the absence of its* primary source of stimulus. I know people experience brain-originating flashes of different light and such. I think I've read that many people experience more detailed visual hallucinations.
But I wonder what it looked like, to him, to see his children "navigating their climate-crisis future." We're they, what, sweating? Staggering through a featureless desert, buffeted by Category 5 winds? How does his brain hallucinate a "climate crisis"?
3 days without sunlight will start to cause health issues.
If you want some good reading “red-light” therapy is actually very popular right now. It is actually non-visible red light that is under investigation and that can penetrate quite a ways through material.
After days reach a certain shortness each year studies have shown that there is an increase in all cause mortality a few months later that follows yearly and latitudinal patterns.
Concentrate your life energy to your own orbit. Don’t waste it on distant parts of the world that have and always will be at war with itself.
There is a reason solitary retreats are usually 10 days. You need to exhaust this drama queen phase of monkey mind.
Jamie said...
Tom T., seriously!
That said, it would be interesting to see what your mind does in the absence of its* primary source of stimulus.
It is quite literally a form of torture.
If you are not trained sensory deprivation is pretty rapidly torture. If you are trained it just takes a bit longer.
Sorry, my its*:
* For most people. Obviously the brains of people blind from birth must have a different primary stimulus.
Also: I am again struggling with the comment box's to let me scroll through my comments to progress; I can only see the first six or eight lines, then scrolling zooms me to the bottom of the comment so that I can only see the LAST six or eight lines. And, even the mobile-formatted site behaves like the Web-formatted one, in that the font is too tiny to read unless I turn my phone sideways (or manually zoom it and scroll side to side). Adjusting my display settings does diddly. This happened before, and then inexplicably went away. Now it's back. I hate Blogger.
Is that how bill hurt devolved in altered states into a neanderthal
SERE was designed to counter east bloc torture regiments
Fear fantasies and fever dreams amplified. I'll pass (on the article and the torture).
If he can mark the passage of time by meal deliveries, then he still has a clock.
The rest of that article- yikes. He already has sensory deprivation from having his head up his ass.
Cranial inversion can be painful
I read NYT articles for the comments, to learn what their readers are thinking. I pulled this one out for y'all!
****
F Johnson
Seattle
4h ago
I don't need to pay money for a special yoga retreat to experience extended darkness. I've experienced it for free since Trump's first inaugural address.
Reply100 RecommendShare
Hello darkness hello friend
Its show how reactionary and self-satisfied our power elite is, that instead of having intelligent articles about the state of country, or high culture, we get this ridiculous articles about someone's sex life or sitting in darkness for 3 days, or taking mircro-drugs. Never does the NYT's challenge the beliefs or point of view of its wealthy liberal readers.
The hunger games areaspirational for them
What Achilles said: Those will fuck you up.
Less than an hour in a blacked-out anechoic chamber will drive many people beyond the beyond. Way beyond.
Always with the drama. The notion that Progs could even attempt to be the arbiters of what is or is not "science" is beyond absurd.
I didn't read the article, but apparently he experiences politically correct hallucinations. No need for him to go to that special room mentioned in "1984", I'm against feeding him kugel though. He should have been fed tofu with room temperature water. On the third day, he should have been gently brought back to reality by having Barack Obama read from his collected speeches and being fed unsweetened oatmeal in a setting with dimmed lighting. In such a way, he would be thus fortified and equipped to join the ranks of Kamala's volunteers. Room 101 is not necessary for true believers, but for those who wish to amplify their faith, this is the proper way forward.
It's like waterboarding with darkness. If you want a happy dippy experience of mind expansion take mushrooms. It's the cheapest way to instant karma that I have found, hahaha
I, for one, know the time of night based on the number of bathroom trips I've made since lying down to sleep. Damn that prostate!
"I opted for a journey to the bathroom, mostly recreational..."
Been there. Done that.
Drivel. The political virtue signaling is CRINGE. A self-respecting newspaper would not have published this.
Jamie,
> I hate Blogger
So does Google.
I am, of course, not going to read an article in the NYT, but I am curious if the author was trying to get a sense of what the hostages held in the dark by Hamas for two years experienced.
Chris Colin, the writer, comes across as a stressed out urban dweller who had no experience with meditation. He went into this extreme retreat without any genuine preparation. I give him credit for having the audacity to try this experiment but at the same time dismiss his motives as ridiculous and foolish. His experiences were a massive psychic dump, not a profound spiritual encounter. An analogy might be a child sticking his finger into a light socket or someone jumping off a cliff into a body of water without knowing its depth. Fortunately Colin's ego is also massive and his defense mechanisms strong enough to not be harmed.
What interested me was his description of Von Bujdoss's teacher.
NKP said...
What Achilles said: Those will fuck you up.
Less than an hour in a blacked-out anechoic chamber will drive many people beyond the beyond. Way beyond.
Hang them from the wrists with a bar holding their feet apart. Chain the bar to the ground and make sure the manacles on the wrist and ankles are very soft and don’t cause pain.
Hubby and I once took a tour of Mammoth Cave. The tour guide turned the lights off so that we could experience total darkness. It might have been a minute, but I know that 30 seconds more and I would have been screaming.
Woke and a black hole... whore h/t NAACP at the intersection of racism and sexism. NYeT - suspicious - needs to review its style guidelines that are broke back mounting.
gracefully shovelled
He’ll come out the same person he was when he went in. Three days isn’t long enough for anything of substance to happen.
BG said...Hubby and I once took a tour of Mammoth Cave. The tour guide turned the lights off so that we could experience total darkness.
Have you noticed it’s hard to keep your eyes open in total darkness? For some reason, when there is no difference between open and closed, they are more comfortable closed.
All the news that’s fit to print? Maybe that described the NYT a very, very, very long time ago. Clearly not when this article was published.
Altered states would have told him not to do that.
“'You’re Going to Lose Your Mind': My Three-Day Retreat in Total Darkness/The author spent days in a room with no light. Who would he be when he emerged?"
Big deal. People who go suddenly blind don’t go crazy. They walk around, bump into stuff, pretty soon they know where everything is. They adapt. If this guy banged his head on the wall a few times he probably came out better than when he went in.
Mikee: Look into HOLEP surgery for BPH.
@tim maguire: At 16 I was a tour guide for a small cave near Dogpatch, Arkansas (yes, it actually exists) and we always did the turning off the lights bit on every tour. Like you say, it's easier to keep your eyes closed when you can't really tell if they're open or not. Also, it wasn't until experiencing the darkness several times that I got over the initial sense of disorientation to the point of dizziness. I used to warn the tourists to hold on to something before flipping the switch.
"The tyranny of the sun"? New Yorkers. You start to feel bad for them after a while.
Here in the Sunshine State, we kinda like it.
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