One of the biggest missteps we can take in life is to lose our imagination. Having the ability to see beyond current conditions and into infinite possibilities is key to successful survival. For a long time, I questioned the validity of the visions I saw. However, after years of research, I’ve learned; they hold more truth than any other perception in my life.
Let’s pause for a moment and ground ourselves in what I mean by vision. It is not visualization. When we visualize, we are bringing to mind something consciously known. Visualization is an act of recollection. If I ask you to visualize something foreign to your conscious mind, say a yetrr, for example, you can’t do it. The same is true of fantasy. Our conscious desires bind it. It is what we want or hope or wish would happen.
Vision is the sensory experience of information not previously available to the conscious mind. It is some collection of the eighty-three billion subconscious neurons conveying information to the three billion conscious neurons. Think of Noah or Moses. It is the burning bush or the random call to build a boat. It is often unclear and requires a tremendous amount of faith to follow.
Why is it unclear? It might seem wise for the subconscious mind to send more straightforward instructions to the conscious mind, but the subconscious mind does not speak in words or thoughts. Its language is feeling. Language is one of the few brain functions that is divided by hemispheres, and neuroscientists have long questioned why. I think the reason is far more valuable than anyone has recognized. I think it’s the key to evolving thought. The simple function of meditation proves it.
If we move beyond the perception of meditation as a centering practice and recognize it as the more advanced function of active listening, there is overwhelming evidence that ‘having a vision’ is an everyday occurrence for many humans. In eastern cultures, expanding consciousness is a fundamental result of daily meditation.
As our subject engages with visioning practices, the experience is not about whether or not she believes in real guidance. No meditation is about whether or not the experience is real. When you imagine yourself on a beach, you don’t question the existence of the beach. You know you are not on a beach, but maybe you can recall visiting a beach. Perhaps it was while you were on vacation, and it allowed you to relieve the tension you were carrying. When you imagine the beach, you are using the familiar experience of waves and sand and seagulls to relax your mind.
In addition to understanding where vision originates, it is also important to remember how it originates. It is not the thought of the beach that transforms your experience. It is the sensory memory that stimulates the shift in conscious experience, not an idea, but a feeling. I can give you a list of statistical data about the beach. If you don’t have a sensory connection to that information, it does not become impactful.
Vision is the result of the subconscious mind speaking to the conscious mind in a language it doesn’t understand. The conscious mind must translate the message. A picture, for example, is worth a thousand words. Our subject is doing the same here. She is allowing herself the experience of being nurtured, an entirely new experience for her. It took her time to comprehend because it was foreign. It has nothing to do with who she’s been. It’s about who she might become.
It is a subconscious sensation that she is trying to comprehend in her conscious reality. It is not an illusion. The truth is, it probably has more to do with who she is than it does a hoped-for opportunity. As it might have been for those visionaries of the Bible, she is told, “You are not alone.”
The experience is painful because it exposes her isolation. Feeling authentic experiences of love when we’ve spent our lives starved of them is difficult. The mind has learned to reject the possibility to survive without it. It might even be a thing we actively fight in the beginning because it demands too much of our faith. It’s too great a risk. However, over time, being surrounded and nurtured by a room full of loving caregivers will also offer her the opportunity to completely transform her life, whether they exist in what we call reality or not.
She now has the opportunity to recognize and accept support in her life. She is offered the opportunity to not just compensate for past development issues, but might now be able to restore the core building blocks of a healthy life. This is not a thing she could have done alone. All the knowledge we have originated from outside our consciousness at the time. We must concede that we were not born with a conscious understanding of the language we speak. We were not born knowing how to walk or to run. We must learn, and in the same vein, if we hope to have a fundamental understanding of love, we must begin with knowing we are loved and supported.
As in early development for children, our first task before exploring the world around us is to be supported by that world. Our subject must return to this beginning. However, she has been born during the development of a new survival model. She will not follow that path of social survival during her development. She will discover a new way and, with that it, a whole new possibility for humanity.
She will begin again with Birth and Survival, but this time, she adopts the human race as her tribe, and it may be she has gained the wealth of their knowledge with it.