Spirituality for Living

Everything you ever sense is filtered through the same system of neurons that encode your memories. There is no one section of your brain that records memory, no specific type of neuron that does it. They all do. So even before you become aware you see something, your brain has already filtered it. You see what you expect to see. You see what you imagine you will see.

Neuroscience also shows that you respond not only to your own sensations, but also to what you instinctively recognize in others. You have been practicing not one form of visualization, but two. Your private imagination and your social imagination, and your social imagination tends to win out over your personal imagination or “will”.

Whatever you want to be, do the same thing that the world does with you, imagine it, convince yourself of it. But remember, it won’t happen any faster than you are willing and able to have it happen. Just as it takes time to really lead you to believe something, to convince you of something, it likewise takes time to imprint this on the world.

“Visualization is daydreaming with a purpose.” Bo Bennett

Sensory Way

Shall we talk about visualization? Are you all familiar with it already? Well, I’ll start with a question. How do we cause things to happen? I mean anything. Is it just physical activity? We think about it. And the biggest part of your brain is the part responsible for visual processing. Planning helps. Even the most rudimentary planning involves some measure of being able to reproduce what something might be like in a sensory way. Can we think without involving sensory information? I’m a big planner myself, and I’ve found it kind of irritating that I can spend hours planning something and… Seek More

Image-ination

How much of an impact do you feel your imaginations have had on your real life situations? Visualization can be described as the active use of imagination. Image-ination. Maybe we create our reality with our imagination. There are many wise old cultures that believe that very thing. It may even be proven true as science advances as well. I know I use it all the time. Constantly. Can you drive home without your imagination touching on the trip at all? I think it helps you understand the map. I think of landmarks at certain places. Can you make a map without… Seek More

Parts of Imagination

Precognitive thought, as I am familiar with it, occurs in that space that your senses register the world around you. But you haven’t started thinking about it yet because you don’t believe you control what your senses perceive. They can learn patterns that you aren’t consciously aware of, and sometimes they offer a finished pattern to your thought. It pops into your imagination in a really vivid way because it comes from the same part of your mind that has direct access to your senses. Like the body becomes an antenna, tingly spider sense? Yes. I believe it’s real, and… Seek More

Mass Imagination

People have been shown to be able to do amazing things under hypnosis. They haven’t yet done anything that seems outside the realm of public reason entirely, but they do accomplish things that they personally believe themselves unable or unwilling to do. People fear their personal imagination would be exploited, so it’s easier to just go with the accepted norm? Actually, they fear separation from the pack. We have no instinct that understands exploitation. Any idea of exploitation is a learned thought rather than instinct. But the reason why people who think they are weak show great strength under hypnosis? Any… Seek More

Retain Control of Attention

I think imagining a violent murder is sort of healthy. It puts reality into perspective. It is sort of healthy, yes, and then the reflexively screening of it or putting it aside is also healthy. We have to retain control not of our imaginations. We don’t have what you might call true control of that. We have to retain control of our attention. If a fantasy of violent murder occurs to you, that is natural. If you can’t take your mind off of it, that is when things get dangerous. In fact, they have done an analysis of these very people.… Seek More

One Immutable Light

The mind has a geography all its own. Meditation can reveal a lot of that, and selective sensory immersion can reveal a lot more. This is why artists always seem so intuitive and insightful. In order to learn to do their art, they have to really focus on the sense involved in making their art, vision or hearing, even tactile. I guess that’s what Buddhist mindfulness training is doing? Yes, but that is only a start. It is exercising imagination? Yes. There are some popular spiritual teachings that actually steer people away from exploring what they see as too much of… Seek More

Willingly Go Into the Dark

Here is where things get tricky. Our heart can seem to go where we don’t want it to, no? Our heart wants what it wants, goes where it goes of its own accord, yes? It can go to those painful memories. Or so it would seem. There is a deeper way than that. Shall we go there? People chicken out of exploring those dark stains on their heart, those feelings that hurt. Strange thing though, they hurt when we visualize them as being individual incidences. When we see them as self-contained realities, they look very scary, seem very real, and we… Seek More