Companion Paper · Tamaya Press
HOW AURORA WAS PERCEIVED
The Perceptual Practice Behind the Morning Star Trilogy
A companion paper to the Morning Star Trilogy
Read alongside the full methodological apparatus:
Before the practice: a note on what this paper is
This is a companion paper. It sits between the Morning Star Trilogy and the full methodological apparatus that stands behind it.
The reader who has finished AURORA and asks how the book came into being is the reader this paper is written for. It is not a summary of the trilogy, and it does not interpret the trilogy. AURORA does not ask to be explained, and I will not explain it here. What I can describe is the practice through which it was perceived and recorded. That is a different question, and it is one I can answer plainly.
The practice is called Immersive Remote Viewing. It has a full methodological description, the IRV Whitepaper, which sets out the theoretical lineages, the phenomenological vocabulary, the comparison with other remote viewing traditions, the confounds, and the epistemic limits in detail. This companion paper covers different ground. It describes the practice as it was actually applied to one book, written by someone who has never needed to know what phenomenology is in order to read it. Where a technical term is unavoidable, I gloss it in plain words in the same sentence. Where the reader wants the full apparatus, the Whitepaper is named and linked.
I write in the first person because the practice is a first-person practice. There is no way to describe it honestly from the outside.
1. What the practice is
A session begins with stillness. I sit in a quiet room, in a comfortable and alert posture, with the ordinary sensory input of the day reduced as far as it can be: no interruption, neutral light, the body brought to rest without going slack.
Then comes the part of the practice that is not optional and that everything else depends on. I bring my attention to the area of the heart and let the breath become slow and even, roughly five seconds drawn in and five seconds released. This is a technique adapted from the work of the HeartMath Institute, where I trained and certified as a resilience coach years before this practice existed. What it produces is a measurable physiological state called cardiac coherence: a smooth, even rhythm in the variation between heartbeats, associated with a settling of the nervous system and a quieting of the analytical mind. For me it takes two to four minutes. It is not a mood. It is a state of the body, and it can be reached reliably once it has been trained.
From that settled state, the mind is allowed to descend. Ordinary waking thought runs at a fast electrical frequency in the brain; as the heart-focused breathing continues and analytical engagement is released, that frequency slows, through a relaxed middle band and toward the threshold the body crosses on the edge of sleep, where imagery becomes vivid and the commentary of the thinking mind grows quiet. I do not fall asleep. I stay at the threshold. The markers that tell me I have arrived are simple and recognizable once they have been felt: a deep quiet, a widening of inner awareness, very little internal talk, and a particular readiness that I can only describe as the difference between a closed hand and an open one.
Only then does perception begin. And here the practice works in one of two ways.
The two ways a session opens
The first I call active object-cuing. I hold something in my attention on purpose: a physical object, a person, a place, an event, a question. The held thing is the anchor. I attend to it, and what unfolds from it becomes the next thing I attend to, and the perception develops frame by frame from there. This is the mode closest to the older remote viewing tradition, where the practitioner is given a target to find. The difference is only that my anchor is something I am holding in inner attention, not a set of coordinates handed to me in an envelope.
The second I call receptive opening. I sit down with the intention to receive, but I hold no object at all. The interior is brought to coherence and to the threshold state, and the ordinary directing of attention is replaced by something better described as readiness. A first image then arrives on its own. I did not choose it. It is given. And that unsought first image becomes the anchor for everything that follows in the session: I turn toward it with the same sustained attention, and the perception unfolds from there.
Both are legitimate. Active cuing is the right choice when I have a specific question. Receptive opening is the right choice when I am willing to perceive whatever most asks to be perceived. The protocol I work within once a session is open is the same in both cases. I call it the Living Image Method, and its name describes the thing it produces. The image is living: it is not a still picture but a moving, unfolding scene that develops as I attend to it, and looking more closely brings more detail. The image is an image in the full sense: what arrives is a whole environment, a situation, an atmosphere, not a list of separate facts. And it is a method: structured, repeatable, and teachable, with definite preparatory steps, which is what distinguishes it from spontaneous experience.
That is the practice, described from the inside. What follows is how it was applied to AURORA.
2. How AURORA was composed
AURORA was composed across roughly three years, in close to one hundred and ninety-four sessions. Each chapter corresponds, in essence, to one session. The book was perceived in the receptive mode far more often than in the active one. I did not, for the most part, choose what appeared. I sat down prepared, in coherence and at the threshold, and a first image arrived, and I followed it.
There was no outline. There was no plan. There was no synopsis pinned above the desk and no architecture drawn in advance. I did not know, when a session began, what it would contain, and very often I did not know, when a chapter ended, how it connected to the ones before it. The connections became visible later, sometimes much later, and several of them I did not see until the book was complete.
The prose itself arrived in more than one way. Sometimes I was transcribing: the scene unfolded in front of inner perception and I recorded it as it moved, in much the way a witness records an event taking place outside the window. Sometimes the language arrived already formed, in whole sentences and occasionally whole paragraphs, so that I was not translating a perception into words afterward but receiving the perception and the words together, in the same moment. The phenomenological tradition has a name for this second mode, speaking speech, language that arrives in form rather than being assembled toward form. It is rarer than the transcribing mode, but it is reproducible, and it produced significant portions of the trilogy.
What I did not do is reconstruct. The text was not built afterward out of notes and fragments. What appeared in a session is what appeared. Where the language of a passage is rough, it is rough because the perception at that point was rough, and I let it stand. Editing for grammatical clarity is part of honest recording. Substantive reconstruction, changing what was given because a different version would read better, is not, and I did not do it.
This leaves a real question, and it is the question a careful reader is right to ask. Why does AURORA hold together at all? It runs to roughly one hundred and ninety-six thousand words. It was not planned. It was perceived in fragments across three years, each session sealed off from the others at the time it happened. A book composed that way should, by every ordinary expectation, fall apart.
My answer is the most honest one I can give, and it is an answer about the practice rather than a claim about the cosmos. The structuring was not done by me, and it was not done afterward. It was already present in what was given. Each session's first image contained, in a form I could not see at the time, the structure that the rest of the book needed in order to develop. The architecture emerged from the field that was perceived. It was not constructed onto it. The coherence of the book is, in that precise sense, evidence about how the perception works: a coherence beyond what intentional construction on my part could have supplied, because intentional construction on my part is not what supplied it.
3. What the practice perceives beyond the ordinary senses
The older remote viewing tradition, developed and tested over decades, draws a careful and deliberate line. On one side of the line are the simple sensory primitives: colors, shapes, textures, temperatures, dimensions. These are treated as legitimate perceptual data. On the other side is everything the analytical mind tends to manufacture around those impressions: names, identities, intentions, story-lines. That second category the tradition calls analytical overlay, and it trains its practitioners to notice it the moment it appears and set it aside, on the grounds that it is the main source of error.
For the operational context that tradition was built for, this is the correct discipline. If the task is to perceive a hidden installation and report what is there, the perceiver's narrative about who runs it and why is not signal. It is a source of confabulation, and excluding it is right.
Immersive Remote Viewing does not draw the line in the same place, and the reason is not carelessness. It is that the line, drawn there, excludes half of what is actually given. When I perceive a scene, what arrives is not only visual and not only auditory. There are the thoughts of the figures in the scene. There is the felt meaning of the situation, its weight, what it is about. There is the contextual sense of history and consequence around it, the grasp of where this moment sits in something larger. There is information that arrives not as a picture at all but as direct knowing. The older tradition would discard most of this as overlay. The practice I work in treats it as part of the legitimate bandwidth, on grounds drawn from phenomenology, which spent the twentieth century developing a precise vocabulary for exactly these kinds of perception: the felt grasp of another's inner state, the felt grasp of context and meaning, the way some phenomena give themselves in excess of anything the perceiver could have constructed.
This widening of the bandwidth is what makes a book like AURORA possible. A practice restricted to sensory primitives could not perceive a chapter. It could perceive the color of a room. It could not perceive the grief in it.
But the widening comes with an obligation, and the obligation is the subject of the next two sections. If the bandwidth includes felt meaning and direct knowing, then the question of where the perception ends and the perceiver begins becomes sharper, not softer. It has to be faced directly.
The perceiver's signature
Every perception is a perception by someone. This is not a confession of failure. It is the situation that any first-person inquiry operates in, and the practice is only honest if it names it.
I have a perceptual signature, and I can describe parts of it. There is a particular attention to the texture and surface of things: fabric, wood, the weight of light on something polished, the exact quality of a fold of velvet. There is a recurring attention to eyes, and to the small movements of the body, the gesture, the intake of breath, the way a posture carries what a person is about to say. There are settings that recur across the work because they recur in how I perceive: aristocratic interiors with their gold and their chandeliers, black boxes containing crystals, figures who appear at the threshold of a scene, military operations on Pacific islands, the iconography of Egypt. These elements recur in AURORA. Their recurrence is, in part, a feature of my perceptual character. Another practitioner would have another signature, and none is more or less truthful than another. Each is the particular style through which a particular person's perception is given.
This has a consequence I want to state plainly, because it governs everything in the next two sections. The recurrence of these elements in the book is not, on its own, proof of a structural feature of reality. It may be that. It may equally be a feature of how I perceive. The honest position is to name the signature and let the reader weigh it.
And this is the formulation I have come to use for it, the one that holds the practice together at its center:
The field gives what the field gives. The perceiver's filter shapes reception, not the field's giving.
The filter is everything I am: biographical, cultural, historical, trained, embodied. It shapes what I register and with what discrimination, and it shapes the form the registered content takes when it becomes language. It does not shape what the field gives. Two perceivers oriented to the same field would receive content that is structurally related and produce records that are notably different, because the same giving passed through two different filters yields two different inputs and two different outputs. What is on the page, then, is neither purely a property of the field nor purely a property of me. It is the meeting of the two, at the point where reception becomes language.
4. What the reader encounters as structural features
Several features of AURORA are not stylistic choices and not errors. They are direct consequences of how the book was perceived. Naming them here may help the reader meet them as what they are.
Recurrence
Certain chapters return to the same scene, the same encounter, the same moment, perceived from a different vantage, in a different texture, sometimes with a different outcome. This is not repetition, and it is not a set of drafts of one chapter that should have been merged. It is the book's central formal principle. In the practice, a perceptual location can be entered again, and the entering is a fresh perceptual act, not a faded memory. What the reader meets as recurrence is the field showing its depth. The reader is invited to notice the recurrences without resolving them. The same principle applies to names: a name in one chapter may reappear carried by a different figure in a different context. That, too, is recurrence.
Perception within perception
Some chapters hold, inside themselves, the re-entry of an earlier perception. A figure sits on a bench, or on a plane, or in front of a mirror, and what arrives next is given at the same perceptual temperature as the framing scene, with the same close attention to surface and detail. This is not memory in the ordinary sense, where the past returns dimmed and abstracted. It is what the phenomenological tradition calls iterated givenness: an imaginal location entered again, freshly, at full sensory weight. In a session this happens directly, a scene held within a scene with no drop in vividness between them. In the book it becomes an architectural feature, and locations are re-enterable both within a chapter and across chapters.
The witness figure
A figure recurs through the trilogy who is not, in the ordinary sense, a character. The witness figure functions as something the field does: it appears to show the protagonist what she is perceiving, and how. In several chapters the structure of the practice becomes the explicit subject, with the witness figure demonstrating to the protagonist the operation she is inside. Where figures within these re-entries carry roles that contradict each other in the register of physical persons but cohere in the register of perceptual positions, the contradiction is not a flaw of the scene. It is what the scene is showing.
The object as a way in
The book's protagonists are repeatedly shown working with objects: a remote control, a canvas, a window, a black box, a crystal. These are not, in the first place, metaphors. They are the work's images for its own operation, the active object-cuing mode of the practice rendered into narrative. A protagonist given an object through which she navigates between perceived scenes is the practice depicting the practice. The reader who notices this is reading the structure correctly.
5. What the practice does not claim
A practice is only as trustworthy as the limits it is willing to state. These are the limits.
The practice is not a scientific model, and it does not produce the kind of target-correlated result that the laboratory remote viewing tradition was built to test. There is no external target in the composition of a book and no feedback loop, and so the sessions cannot be scored for correspondence with hidden coordinates. That is a different epistemic category, and AURORA does not enter it.
The practice does not produce certainty about the external world. What is perceived is given to a particular perceiver, in a particular state, under conditions in which a known set of confounds is always present: ordinary imagination, projection of what one expects or fears, premature interpretation, the resurfacing of forgotten material as apparent new perception, and the shaping of a percept by cultural archetype. The full Whitepaper treats each of these in detail. The cardiac coherence state and the structured method reduce them at the source; they do not eliminate them. They cannot be eliminated. They can be named, and named is what they must be.
The practice is not documentary evidence. This matters most directly for one part of AURORA, and I want to address it without softening it.
A section of the book contains depictions of organized abuse, including the abuse of children. This is the place where the practice is most exposed to a specific and well-documented confound. The recovered-memory crisis of the late twentieth century is the most thoroughly documented case in the modern record of how perceptual practice undertaken in complete good faith can produce detailed, internally consistent, emotionally compelling accounts of abuse networks that were, in many documented instances, demonstrably false. Those accounts were not lies. They were the product of perception operating under conditions in which cultural archetype, suggestion, and the perceiver's own material had become inseparable from whatever was given.
This is not an argument that organized abuse does not exist. It does, the documentation is well established, and the world contains real harm that a practice of perception is right to register rather than look away from. It is an argument that the practice cannot, by itself, distinguish a veridical perception of such harm from a culturally absorbed archetype of it, and that this part of AURORA must be read with that confound named. The book is what it is: a sustained record of what was given to me in the practice. It is not offered as documentary intelligence about specific organizations, networks, or individuals. The pattern it depicts may correspond to historical reality, may correspond to the cultural archetype of that reality, or may correspond in part to both. The practice cannot adjudicate between those. The reader who treats the book as documentary evidence will misread it. The reader who treats it as an imaginal record, perception of a kind, by a particular perceiver, of material at the intersection of historical reality and cultural archetype, reads it as it asks to be read.
Naming this does not weaken the work. It locates the work accurately.
One last thing the practice does not claim. Where the language of AURORA resembles the language of quantum physics, or of any established scientific or philosophical system, the resemblance is experiential and not theoretical. The practice perceives. It does not prove, and it does not adjudicate. It is the disciplined first-person record of a particular perceiver, in a particular state, in the cultural and historical situation in which that perceiver lives. That is a real category of knowledge, with real value. It is not the same as objective measurement, and it does not pretend to be.
6. The framework behind the practice
This paper has described one practice as it was applied to one book. The practice sits inside a larger framework, named briefly here so the reader knows where the fuller account is to be found.
Immersive Remote Perception is the wider framework: the account of what is being accessed, the conditions under which access becomes possible, and the principles governing its quality. Immersive Remote Viewing is the method within that framework, the structured practice this paper has described. The Living Image Method is the operational protocol at the core of the method, the working tool through which an immersive perception is opened and sustained. And Applied Remote Viewing is the branch in which the practice is put to use, in consultation, in training, and in creative and literary work. AURORA belongs to that last branch.
The complete methodological apparatus, with the two intellectual lineages the practice stands in, the full phenomenological vocabulary, the comparison with the established remote viewing methods, the treatment of every confound, and the epistemic limits stated in full, is set out in the IRV Whitepaper. This companion paper does not require the reader to have read it. The reader who wants the depth will find it there.
The full Whitepaper is available on the Methodology page.
7. An invitation
Some readers will finish AURORA and recognize something in the practice behind it. Not in the book's content alone, but in the description of how perception can be stilled, widened, and disciplined. For those readers, this is a signpost rather than a conclusion.
There is a companion intensive, Riding the Matrix, which offers a concentrated live encounter with the method in operation. There is a companion course, Awakening into Freedom, which walks the ground AURORA opens. And there is the wider field of the work, gathered at evagattnar.com, where the teaching, the research, and the further writing continue.
None of this is required in order to read AURORA. The book stands on its own. But the practice can be learned, with reasonable fidelity, by those who are drawn to learn it, and the door to it is open.
The wider work is gathered here at evagattnar.com. The practice itself is set out on the Methodology page.
AURORA was perceived and recorded. It was not invented. This paper has tried to describe, plainly and without overclaiming, what that sentence means.
About the Author
Dr. Eva Gattnar is the author of the Morning Star Trilogy and the founder of Tamaya Society. The trilogy was composed through Immersive Remote Viewing, a disciplined practice of inner perception developed over years of structured inquiry. The chapters were not invented. They were perceived and recorded.
Her doctoral background is in computer science and biomedical engineering. For more than two decades she worked at the intersection of technology, leadership, and the optimization of human perception, with research spanning heart-brain coherence, altered states, and the structures of complex systems. The disciplined seeing the practice now makes possible has its ground in this earlier work.
Through Tamaya Society and the wider field gathered at evagattnar.com, the work continues: in teaching, in research, in the publication of what could not be said in earlier centuries. She lives and works in Zurich, Switzerland.
© 2026 Dr. Eva Gattnar. Published by Tamaya Press, an imprint of Tamaya Society.
Immersive Remote Perception (IRP), Immersive Remote Viewing (IRV), Applied Remote Viewing (ARV), and the Living Image Method are proprietary methodologies developed by Dr. Eva Gattnar.