Structured Imagination with Stable Attractors
From the public record
Where this comes from
- Kind of claim: Psychological. A shared feature of mind, not of the world.
- Framework by: Benny Shanon
- Applied to this phenomenon by: DMT Code editors (2026)
- Written about this phenomenon: no. This framework was built for another purpose and is applied here by this site. Its author made no claim about a laser.
Visionary content is generated by cognition but not randomly. The imagination has stable attractors that different minds fall into.
Benny Shanon's systematic phenomenology of ayahuasca visions documented recurring cross-cultural themes without concluding anything supernatural: the mind's generative processes simply have preferred shapes. Applied to glyphs, convergence reflects the attractor landscape of human visual cognition under tryptamines. This sits between the cortical account and the archetypal one, and it predicts family resemblance rather than exact symbol matches.
Source: The Antipodes of the Mind (2002) (book)
Tags: phenomenology, cognition