Changing the Priors

Years ago I described a practice. Ten to fifteen minutes of binaural entrainment into theta, then trance induction, then intense visual focus on a single point until the patterns around it began to shift, then holding the focus until the mind locked onto one pattern. I called the result a phase-shift, and I said that when it was achieved, I had access to a different band of the information field. I described the feeling as visceral and complete, and I admitted I did not have the language for what was happening.

I have the language now, and I want to rebuild the practice on top of it, because a practice you understand is one you can improve.

If perception is a model corrected by the senses, then a phase-shift is a change in the model's priors.

Go back to the last entry. Your brain predicts, the senses correct, and what you experience is the corrected prediction. The strength of the prediction, how much sensory error it takes to move it, is the prior. Strong priors give you a stable, familiar world and a Gate that keeps out anything unexpected. Weak priors give you a world that is closer to the raw signal, less familiar, more open, and also less stable, because the model is not doing its usual work of smoothing everything into what you already know.

Every step of the old practice, I now believe, was a way of weakening the priors on purpose.

Entrainment. Theta is a brain state associated with the edge of sleep, with memory, and with the loosening of ordinary attention. In the language of the model, it is a state in which the top-down prediction is turned down. You are not building a strong expectation of the room. You are letting the expectation go slack. The ringing I described when I removed the headphones was, I think, the sound of a model that had briefly stopped predicting the silence.

Trance. Hypnosis is, at bottom, the deliberate substitution of one set of priors for another. The whole art of induction is the art of getting a mind to accept a suggested expectation over its habitual one. Self-hypnosis, then, is learning to loosen your own expectations by choice. Progressive relaxation works because tension is a prediction (of threat, of effort, of the next thing) and releasing it releases the prediction with it.

Focus. This was the step I understood least, and I understand it best now. When you fix your eyes on a single point for long enough, the senses stop delivering error. The point does not change; the model has nothing to correct against. And a prediction with no correction begins to drift. The patterns I saw shifting around the blade of grass, the chevrons and the flat carpet cycling into each other, were the model losing its grip on the periphery, trying one expectation after another with nothing from the world to settle it. I used to think I was seeing into another band. I now think I was watching my own model come apart at the edges, which is a stranger and more useful thing to see.

Lock. And then the hardest step: choosing one pattern and holding it until it stabilized. That is the installation of a new prior. Not the old one, which had been starved, and not the chaos of drift, but a chosen expectation, held long enough for the model to accept it. When the lock came, the world was different, because the model generating it was different. That is the phase-shift. It was never a radio dial. It was a retraining.

I want to be clear that none of this makes the experience less real. I hear the skeptic already: so it was all in your head. Yes. So is the room you are sitting in. So is the face of everyone you love. The model behind your eyes is the only reality you have ever had access to, and learning to change it deliberately is not a retreat from reality. It is the first time you have had any say in it.

The practice, rebuilt.

1. Loosen. Entrainment or breath, ten to fifteen minutes, until the ordinary commentary in the mind goes quiet. You are turning down the prediction.
2. Release. Progressive relaxation or whatever induction you trust. You are dropping the priors held in the body.
3. Starve. One point of visual focus, unmoving, in a quiet space. Do not chase the patterns when they begin; that is the model looking for something to predict. Let it look.
4. Choose. When the drift becomes rapid, pick one pattern. Not the most vivid; the most still. Hold your attention on it as you would hold a hand.
5. Lock. The moment it stabilizes, you are in. Stay. Do not name what you see; naming is a prior. Let the senses deliver.
6. Return. This step is new, and I learned it the hard way. When you come out, spend as long coming back as you spent going in. The old priors need to be reinstalled gently or you will walk into the kitchen and not recognize your own cupboards, and while that is instructive once, it is not a way to live.

What is this for? In the old entries I used the phase-shift as the doorway to past-life work and to remote viewing, and I still do. But I understand its purpose differently now. The machine has learned to predict us from our past. The feed trains our priors. The Gate holds them. This practice is the one thing on this site that directly and deliberately reaches into the model that generates your world and changes it, by your own hand, on your own terms. You cannot be predicted from a training set you have just rewritten.

It is a small freedom, an hour at a time. Small freedoms are the only kind I have ever been able to verify.

May you find and keep the truth, life, and light.

~ Ron

Part of VII. Controlled Hallucination