I want to talk about an experience i had when surveying the sky. This was about 7 years ago. Back then i had already made experiences with psychedelics and was using thc and amphetamines regularly. At that day i was stoned. I somewhat had a thing where i was surveying sky back then. Think about the shapes, imagine things in them and so on. But at one day i had a pretty shocking experience i still cant really comprehend, or say i dont know what to make of it.

I was just sitting in my foldable plastic chair (because i broke my office chair), looking out the window. I was interested in open eye meditation back then, and i liked to let my vision go "dark". This day the sky was filled with big sharp clouds. As i was watching the sky, i felt like my vision swapped completely, and i was able to interpret the cloud edges as buildings. Immediately as this happened, i felt like im in the presence of something up there, i was watching this cloud-castle-like construct. It felt i was knocking on its door. This overwhelmed me alot and i quickly drew back, as i was really unsure what was happening or what im doing.

This is still a mystery to me. I was able to see the cloud edges turn to buildings sometime when i concentrated alot, but never to this degree, completely seeing, or say feeling them.

Has anyone ever had this before?

So this might not be the reply people are looking for or value much but this is how I see it especially after practicing meditation with Sam Harris.

Your consciousness is the creating of your mind. And it holds the keys and values of everything.
The tree you see, its actually an illusion of a tree. What you percieve is the creation of your mind, not the actual tree.

How this works is basically your eyes percieve light particles, and send signals to your mind, about colors and locations and such, as far as I understand. So with this information now your mind creates an image of sucha thing, may that be a tree or whatever. So you see, you dont actaully "see" the tree in real time, you more like experience an image that your brain created for you. At least this is how I see it

And psychedelics for me at least pretty much put a dot on this aswell.

When people talk about "experience universes" and "how can it be so big and complex" it is quite simply, because your mind is actually capable of creating such things. It just never has the input to do so. When you look around in your world, most of these things created will be far away. So you don't get enough light particles for instance to percieve it properly, or your eyes are not working properly, etc etc. You see the point.
But your mind? Your mind is definitely able to experiecne all of that lol. And what you drink Ayahuasca for instance, you experience all the inputs that your mind can create


Coming onto your point, shapes will have different meaning to a human consciousness. Think of animals, and how they "recognize" things. Like, experiments of animals looking into mirrors.
Your mind has different levels of recognizing things. This will as far as I can see depend on your current understanding of your surroundings. The do you see the dragon in the clouds is a perfect example here. Occasionally you look at clouds, and even though you percieve the clouds and understand quite clearly they are just clouds over there, you can see shapes of a dog, or a dragon, and your mind can percieve that as an actual dragon in the clouds. It associates the lines of the cloud with an image of a dragon from your mind.

How I see this, with my very very limited understanding of this world and myself in it, is basically your mind is a complex entity that controlls a whole lot of different things all at once, some of them will be conscious and some of them not. Sometimes, you can get things that are not so conscious in your every day life, more conscious, like your breathing for an example.
So what I think kinda happened here is, certain parts of your brain that are not ver conscious most of the time, and that feed you with the experience of what is happening around you like "i was watcinh g this cloud castle like construct" sure looks to me like you looked at certain shapes and the imagination kicked in, for a lack of a better word, so this part of your consciousness got dominant in your experience now. And that is what you have went through Which could then scare you a little bit, and can be similar to psychedelic experiences.


How this works exaclty I am not sure, or even if what I have written is true, I am not an expert so take everything I have said with a grain of salt. Just some observations ...

Thanks for the elaborate reply.

I think youre spot on with the self-interpretative way on how we see experience our surroundings. Reminded me how Thomas Metzinger explains it in "The Ego Tunnel" (or thats atleast the german title), a book which pretty much is the fundament of my belief system.

I would like to believe it was just my imagination at this one specific part of a cloud, but in reality it was more like my whole vision shifted. It went from: hey cool, all these very sharp clouds in the sky, how beatufil. Is that a panda? To: Im currently seeing a whole city in the sky. WTF. Why does this one building feel like its watching me..... And i got scared, i tried to get away which worked, and it all went back to normal. This intense swap of my vision stayed in my memory. Maybe that gives you an idea.

We do seem like we have alot in common when it comes to how one self interprets the "reality", but this experience contradicts my beliefsystem to this day.