LUMENATE

Spiritual and psychedelic experiences without drugs

I don't use drugs and I don't need drugs to have spiritual experiences. Now there is developed an app which gives psychedelic and spiritual experiences without drugs.

Worth to try and now everyone can have their own spiritual experiences and this might be also a solution to drug problems.  I have four friends visiting my place and we all tried Lumenate. I saw violet colors and experienced deep inner peace. Others said that they saw orange lights/colors and experienced euphoria.

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A new app claims it can get you high, using just your smartphone. We tested it out.

https://www.vice.com/en/article/g5b497/i-tried-lumenate-app-that-makes-you-trip-review

Luckily, someone is finally trying to right that wrong. A new phone app called Lumenate claims to alter the brain’s rhythms with a smartphone’s torch, putting users into a state somewhere between psychedelic high and deep meditation – and unlike a seven-hour LSD trip, it can be disengaged in a swipe. 

Lumenate is quite literally carrying the torch, with an app built on the same principles as the Dreamachine – only it’s now a smartphone light that gets you “high”. It was created by the Bristol-based Tom Galea and Jay Conlon, who say they’re “on a mission to make subconscious exploration more accessible than ever before”, and that the app has had over 25,000 downloads since launching on 2nd March. The pair have even secured their own celebrity backing in the form of recent Golden Globe winner Rosamund Pike, who tried the app during its beta phase and found it so impactful that she’s now Creative Director.

Galea says that, in 2019, he and Conlon purchased an EEG machine – a device that measures electrical activity in the brain – and developed the app through hundreds of hours of self-experiments. “At a basic level, as the light flashes the brain also flashes in sync, sending a signal that something’s changing,” he explains, “and gradually that synchronisation with the light spreads through the brain and allows you to send it into the desired state.”

That state is one of elevated consciousness, and the theory goes that Lumenate replicates chemical aspects of the classical psychedelic experience – including increased functional connectivity in the brain and decreased activity in its default mode network.

Lumenate also has the thumbs up and funding from leading lights in the UK psychedelic landscape. Researcher Dr Ben Sessa and members of the psychedelic research team at Imperial College, London have given positive testimonials regarding Lumenate and its potential for therapeutic use, while investment has come from Beckley Waves, which fund companies in the psychedelic ecosystem.

The free app’s onscreen prompts state it’s best experienced in a dark space with headphones, and that alcohol use reduces the intensity (more on that shortly). Over the course of a five-minute taster session, a glacial male voice over some decidedly cosmic keys gives us the light-trip basics: start with the torch an arm’s length from your eyes, then experiment; try to keep your eyes “relaxed”; the visions you’re about to see are unique to you, man.

Depending on the chosen session setting – Lumenate has everything from one-off relaxed “explorations” to a four-part guided series tackling emotional blocks – you’ll likely be concerned with finding calm or something intentionally self-exploratory. 

The best way I can describe the visuals? Scrunch your eyes tightly – you’ll likely see a shadowy tableau of fractal light, braiding geometric shapes and perhaps a flashing, Tron-like tunnel that you can follow infinitely. Lumenate is like that, but starkly lit with unrecognisable hues, and laugh-out-loud beautiful at times.

I was honestly quite sceptical to start with, but my feeling now is that most people could find a use for Lumenate’s unique brand of solo tripping – whether you’re an anxious city dweller, nu-earth mum or festival scumbag. Whoever thought your phone could fly you into space?

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These Advanced Meditation Practices Unlock New Understandings of Consciousness

https://www.scientificamerican.com/podcast/episode/altering-consciousness-with-advanced-meditation/

Feltman: Yeah, what you’re describing has a, a lot of commonalities with the states that people talk about in psychedelic-assisted therapy. I’ve done some psychedelic-assisted therapy myself—I’m curious where you see the intersection and interplay of psychedelics research and meditation going.

Sacchet: Generally I think of psychedelics as more of a window than a door, and maybe meditation might be more of a door to some of these states. I mean, it’s a metaphor that could be unpacked in a lot of different ways.

There are a lot of different touch points between psychedelic research and advanced meditation research. There’s questions as to whether, you know, maybe a meditation practice before a psychedelic experience might increase the likelihood of a positive outcome or increase the magnitude of that positive outcome—we’re doing research in that actively, actually.

My view of sort of what’s happening in society is that it seems like [the science of] psychedelic medicine is further along than [that of] advanced meditation, but my prediction is that, just like you might argue we saw in the 1960s and 1970s, you know, a lot of people that maybe got started with contemplation maybe started with psychedelics and had different kinds of experiences that, you know, might’ve showed them something that really inspired them or they thought was interesting, and then maybe they drifted toward meditation.

Of course, you see the opposite—I’ve heard, certainly, anecdotes of people that say things like, “Look, I’d been meditating for years and didn’t really know what I was doing, and then I took a psychedelic and, you know, sort of understood what meditation was about.” You see these different interplays between these things for sure.