Philosophy · Where the practice comes from
The older traditions Bindu Tessera draws on: Dzogchen sky gazing and tögal, yogic trataka, and the Dzogchen and Mahamudra view of mind and awareness. What the texts and scholars say, what small studies have found, and where our exercises fit.
Bindu Tessera's exercises are modern. They use on-screen illusions from perception science, not traditional methods. But they were inspired by much older practices of looking. This page describes those traditions as accurately as we can, with sources, and says clearly where a connection is our own analogy rather than something the traditions teach.
Tögal (thod rgal), often translated as “direct transcendence” or “leap-over”, is the visionary side of Dzogchen, the Great Perfection teaching of Tibet. It uses particular postures and gazes, usually directed at the open sky or at light, or practised in complete darkness. Practitioners report a sequence of “four visions”. It begins with unstable specks of light called thigle (in Sanskrit, bindu) and luminous “vajra chains”, and grows into lattices, rainbow circles, mandalas and, finally, deity forms. The standard scholarly study is Christopher Hatchell's Naked Seeing (2014).
Scholars have noticed that the early lights resemble ordinary entoptic effects such as floaters and phosphenes (Geisshüsler 2024). Light experiences during meditation are reported across Buddhist traditions and resemble the effects of sensory deprivation (Lindahl et al. 2014). The lattices also look like the geometric “form constants” that Heinrich Klüver described (Klüver 1966; Bressloff et al. 2001). The resemblance is real, but nobody has tested a direct link, so treat it as an interesting parallel rather than an explanation.
In the tradition, tögal is an advanced practice. It is taught by a qualified teacher, after the student has been introduced to the nature of mind (rigpa), and its gazes are directed at sky, light or darkness, not at designed images. Our on-screen exercises are not tögal and are no substitute for that training. Calling them a modern doorway into this kind of seeing is our own analogy.
Some tögal manuals describe gazing at or near the sun. Please don't try this. Looking at the sun can cause solar retinopathy, an injury to the retina that can leave lasting blind spots and blurred central vision (American Academy of Ophthalmology, EyeWiki). Nothing on this site asks you to look at the sun or any other bright light.
Trataka means gazing steadily at a small object, classically a candle flame, without blinking until the eyes water, and then holding the after-image with the eyes closed. The Haṭha Yoga Pradīpikā lists it among six cleansing practices, the ṣaṭkarma (2.31–32).
A few small trials, all from India, report benefits for attention and memory. The strongest is a randomised trial in 60 older adults: after 26 days of practice, the trataka group improved on digit span, letter cancellation and the Trail Making Test B compared with a wait-list group (Talwadkar et al. 2014). A self-controlled study of 30 people found better Stroop test performance straight after a session (Raghavendra & Singh 2016), and a study of adolescents reported better Stroop scores than a control group (Sherlee & David 2020). A 2025 systematic review found only three randomised trials and called the evidence preliminary (Roj et al. 2025). So the results are encouraging but small, and not yet settled. We found no brain-imaging studies of trataka.
If you try trataka, keep it gentle. Blink when you need to, rest your eyes regularly, and stop if they become sore. Watering eyes are part of the traditional description, not a goal to push toward.
Our breathing cube borrows the simplest part of this: a steady, relaxed gaze on one point while something changes. Unlike trataka, it asks you to blink normally.
Dzogchen and Mahamudra both centre on recognising the nature of mind: the awareness in which thoughts, images and perceptions come and go. Dzogchen calls this awareness rigpa. One classic statement comes from Self-Liberation through Seeing with Naked Awareness, a Dzogchen text attributed to Padmasambhava and revealed by Karma Lingpa in the fourteenth century. In John Myrdhin Reynolds' translation, verse 21 reads:
“…the nature of the mind that is inherent awareness is (none other than) the spontaneously perfected Trikaya. What is realized and the one who realizes it are not two (different things).”
Self-Liberation through Seeing with Naked Awareness, verse 21, translated by John Myrdhin Reynolds (Station Hill, 1989; revised edition Snow Lion, 2000).
The Mahamudra tradition makes a similar point. In the Third Karmapa Rangjung Dorje's Aspiration Prayer of Mahāmudrā, verse 13 reads: “Whoever does not realize this circles in the ocean of saṃsāra; whoever realizes this is no other than a buddha” (Nālandā Translation Committee).
Our exercises borrow one small, practical piece of this view. Each one lets you watch a perception change (a cube flipping, a hidden shape appearing, a pattern turning) while you notice that the awareness seeing it has not changed. That is a beginner's pointer, not the realisation these texts describe.
Buddhist teaching has an old picture of the same point. Six beings stand at one river. The hell being sees molten metal, the hungry ghost sees pus it cannot drink, the fish sees its home, the human sees water, the demigod sees weapons, the god sees nectar. None of them is wrong. Each sees what that kind of mind is built to show. The image appears in Yogācāra texts as "one water, four views" and grew to six realms in Tibetan commentary; Mipham takes it up in Beacon of Certainty. It is the plainest statement in the traditions that perception is a rendering, which is the premise of every exercise on this site.
Why might practices like these matter for insight and creativity? Our working theory, with the established research and the speculation kept clearly apart, has its own page.
Klüver, H. (1966). Mescal and Mechanisms of Hallucinations. University of Chicago Press. (Book.)
American Academy of Ophthalmology, EyeWiki: Solar Retinopathy.
Haṭha Yoga Pradīpikā 2.31–32 (e.g. Swami Muktibodhananda, trans., Bihar School of Yoga, 1985). (Book.)
Pettit, J. W. (1999). Mipham's Beacon of Certainty: Illuminating the View of Dzogchen, the Great Perfection. Wisdom Publications.