Detachment: No you won't

On Tuesday evening I got the feeling that a specific member on that Discord server had died. Tried to help her pass on in my mind, and went to bed.

The next morning it felt like that member was alive. I failed to find any particular details which could've indicated a parallel realm. So, in the end I was just left confused as to what happened.

Detachment

While walking to the bus station on Thursday morning, I decided that all the unnecessary burden was a bit too much. Detached from everything. The moment I did, my left eye started to hurt and water. A bit further and I couldn't go on. Installed glasses to keep the wind away from the tears. This helped me go a bit further but eventually had to stop and rest the eyes before I could move on. Through a practice of willpower and concentration (I noticed that whenever I applied both, I could temporarily force through) I made it to the bus station. Applied eye drops against inflammation. They didn't help. Waited a bit for things to improve but things gradually only became worse.

Decided to turn around and go back home. Had to greet an acquaintance on the way which I found a bit embarrassing. Struggled hard to keep one of my eyes open for periods long enough not to be run over by a car or bicycle, and to avoid bumping into other people (or streetlamps posts). Took breaks every now and then. The longest break I took at the beach and in my mind's eye that's the spot where I left the burden.

Eventually made it back home. None of the old tricks helped and things only got worse until Sunday morning. Again an inflammation of the left eye with a fever. There was a constant pain with periodic nerve pain and spasms on top. Standing or sitting pose with both eyes closed was the most comfortable. Any tilting of the head caused the pain to ramp up.

Edit: Due to the timing of it all (missed a family Christmas party), I was forced to tell my grandparents (and thus the whole family) about it. This made them worry about me, calling me every day, asking for a status report. This, however, is the main reason why I haven't told them about previous health issues.

Desire to sleep

The pain was a bit too much for me to just go and face it right away. Tried to find ways to sleep without laying down. In that I failed. After about two sleepless nights like that, I wasn't able to hold my head up while sitting (kept falling asleep only to wake a split-second later in pain again). I became aware that the almost constant darkness, pain (and probably fever, too) were starting to get on my mental health. In my mind's eye I was already experiencing 3-4 left eyes having pain in different places.

Eventually I had to face the pain and "enjoy" it for long enough to become used to it so that I could at least sleep for a couple of hours or so. While quite a feat by my personal standards (especially since the pain was beyond anything I had experienced before), this was a breakthrough.

OBE: Playing four

I was "playing a game" of being 2 male and 2 female people somewhere in the dark alleys of maybe Tokyo or someplace similar. These people had no past nor any future. They were just there without knowing anything about where or why they had come from, what they were doing there and so on. All of them were in separate places and it was their interactions with other people which for some odd reason I considered to be of interest. While I only "saw" their shadows, I think they were all dressed in trench coats and shoes similar to what was in fashion in the 30s.

Different perspective

"What kind of a sick fantasy is this," I thought and woke up into pain and darkness. I could not remember who or where I was, or why I was where I was and I could not open my eyes. It took me some minutes to regain my memories again. It could have been that some of the body was still asleep and the memory was still cold-booting.

Went on the pilgrimage to wash my left eye with fresh water (as opposed to applying eye drops) and take some tea. While the trip was painful, I found myself more-or-less content with my life (in comparison to the sick excuse of a dream I had woken from). It is actually possible that a part of the pain was from over-usage of the eye medicine which did not work due to fever.

Once I got back to my bed, I thought I could see the spot of pain on the pillow. "A concentrate of pain," I thought, and realized that a pretty flower can only grow from a good (well-balanced) soil. While probably possible through a lot of effort, a pretty flower could be grown on a bad soil, it would be a waste of resources. Asceticism had suddenly lost its glare.

It also occurred to me that nowadays the fundamental physics is built on the assumption that charges must be in balance for things to be stable. However, if we assume that this universe or multiverse allows for mutually exclusive things to be true simultaneously, then such an assumption might not hold. It could be that some charges are properties of one universe, whereas some other are properties of another, etc. Or perhaps some of them are a part of the underlying structure supporting the universe whereas the others are a part of this universe. Will not try to elaborate on this here too much. Will just note down that the idea spawned from an assumption of a finite universe within an infinite one.

Healing

Decided to reduce the pain by actively focusing on relaxing the eye and the nerve strands which were tensed up due to inflammation. Laid back in the concentrate of pain and started going nerve through nerve, trying to relax the eye. Got half of the eye back to normal and managed to sleep some. Then continued the work. It took 3 iterations like that, with the far corner of the eye taking a bit longer.

But at least now I could open my left eye without mopping the floor (or soaking the blanket or pillow) with all the water that came out.

It made me really happy and a bit proud also (for once, healing was actually useful and worked).

Clairvoyance

Since I was practically blind for several days, I used the opportunity to improve seeing with without the eyes.

While it did work occasionally, and sometimes it worked beyond my expectations, there were also cases when it did not work or worked but did not produce any useful results. Quite often, the skill provided at least some persistence between quick glances of the surroundings.

Some observations:

1. With the point of view being from a random place (and sometimes changed between consecutive attempts), it was sometimes difficult to assess the distance to objects (and grab them with my hand).
2. Sometimes the view was not aligned to the body (I was standing at an angle to what I saw). This got me really confused and I managed to get lost in my own room.
3. Sometimes I saw things morph around or look different from how they were in reality. For example, I saw my feet stretched out when in reality they were not.
4. A sudden change from a dark room to a well lit room dispelled the skill. Things seemed to have worked better in dark rooms and hallways, but maybe also because of the signals from the physical eyes confusing the brain.
5. Regardless of how clear and detailed was the vision, I did not see all objects. In particular, I think I mostly saw objects which I had interacted with the most. For example, I could see my mug and a box of cookies on the kitchen table but completely miss the bag of cat's biscuits right behind the mug.
6. Sometimes I saw light shining through gaps or cracks which I would have found difficult to see with my regular eyes because of it being really faint.
7. In some places I saw some kind of glowing objects. One such object was attached to a corner of the blanket. I could only see it with my eyes closed but not with any of my eyes open.

Based on some other experiments with consciousness and its features, several of the issues with clairvoyance seem to stem from using a very powerful tool without properly configuring it first. Seeing with one's eyes closed is a rather simple use case for conscious shaping of one's consciousness density function.

Edit: Forgot something important. A couple of cases which I personally found interesting.

After applying eye drops (in a tiny bottle), I tried to put the bottle back to its place. In doing so, I used my left arm in a somewhat inconvenient pose (horizontally beyond my head which was on the other side of the back of a chair). Once I accidentally dropped the bottle. I managed to catch it before it reached the floor, without seeing it. And even if I had somehow seen it, I would have probably still missed it because of the inconvenient pose of my arm which would have messed up the whole motorics coordination. However, somehow such a feat was possible.

Once I was trying to reach a tissue on the floor. I had not paid any attention to where I had left it, so I was somewhat surprised to see (with my eyes closed) that it was far away from the others. Without opening my eyes I picked it up and it was actually there.

Shop visit

I had consumed almost everything consumable in the fridge. Went to the shop to buy something more. Felt really weird, but I guess that can happen after being blind for about a week. For one, I had to re-learn how to walk normally. The shop with all the people and signs was surprisingly overwhelming (even though I knew it would be).

I noticed that for once I relied more on intuition than on eyesight. I suspected that I had broken the plastic bag and instead of shrugging it off I went through the effort to determine where it was that I had broken the bag. This confirmed that I had indeed broken the bag without noticing it. While I wasn't aware of it at first, I somehow had another bag in the jacket pocket so I distributed the load.

Got to a traffic light and instinctively started walking towards the button even though the lights were already green. Later it turned out that I could only make it halfway across the crossing (intuition was right again).