Liber Yod - Third Method
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A kind of psychological blindness is possible, but there's a much more common (and easily replicable) phenomenon: The thing one is visually observing seems to disappear.
Simple test: Stare at the tip of your nose until it disappears. Since you can still feel the tip of your nose after this happens, the phenomenon is a cessation of the sense of sight to communicate what it is seeing.
Generally, looking at any one thing for a relatively short period of time (a few minutes) without shifting what you look at will cause the thing to disappear.
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@Iugum said
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"1. Let the Hermit stimulate each of the senses in turn, concentrating upon each until it ceases to stimulate.
(The senses of sight and touch are extremely difficult to conquer. In the end the Hermit must be utterly unable by any effort to see or feel the object of those senses, O.M.)"What would it be like to stimulate sight to the point where it "ceases to stimulate"? Blindness?"
If one's eyes are focused absolutely without movement on a given object for a long enough period one's frame of perception begins to fade from the outside inward, beginning with what might be called *tunnel vision *& culminating in static. Perhaps this faculty (?) can be developed.
729
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Right. If you keep your eye stilled, so that the image being seen is static, the brain begins to treat it like a blind spot, and fill it in with unconscious projections.
For me, it's a progression. Things turn black and white. If I look at an object positioned against a patterned background, then the object begins to go invisible, as I fill in the pattern. It's very difficult to keep the eye still long enough to move past this... but then, I also get something like static.
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I've been able to do this readily since I was a child, without effort. I just played with it: "Now it's there, now it isn't. Now it's there, now it isn't. Hahahaha!"