meditation: May 2008 Archives

Visualization sucks. There I said it. Almost every grounding technique I have seen out there on the internet relies on visualization; but what about the rest of us that have trouble with the visual system? My ability to visualize is amazingly powerful, but my ability to access that state of mind is extremely weak. I have to be in a near sleep state to even get there.

For beginners there is an aspect of visualization that can be disempowering; I just realized the following idea recently myself. First ask yourself what is the purpose of visualization? The visualization itself is just a way of directing your consciousness. In other words, a grounding technique that "roots" you into the center of the earth with cords of light is less about the what you see and more about the effects the technique has on your system. The visualization is just a way of directing your consciousness to get the desired effects. However, if you are overly reliant on the auditory system then there is really no need to visualize at all; you can direct your consciousness purely with your will and language alone.

There is no need for me to visualize at all to accomplish that particular technique. I just use my willpower to move my consciousness to the desired location. And that is what the visualization is doing as well except no one actually ever states that explicitly.

The downside to being so overly reliant on the auditory system is that you are not going to receive much info from the visual system. Another downside is there are higher level techniques and states that will be totally unavailable to you.

Robert Bruce has a great article from Astral Dynamics on visualization.

One interesting thing I noticed about visualizing is that my mind can more easily visualize an object that I have repeatedly seen versus an object, which may be very similar, that is relatively new to me. Obviously an object which you see repeatedly throughout your day will be more internalized than one which has not been seen as frequently. An example of how marketers take advantage of this fact can be seen here.

Visualization Primers

These techniques are primers to help your system get into a more visual mode.

Dan Scorpio's Mirror Exercise:

http://www.angelfire.com/nd/danscorpio/union.html
This mirror exercise was the first awareness exercise I tried and it was very profound.

Peripheral Vision and Third Eye Stimulation:
http://forums.astraldynamics.com/viewtopic.php?f=20&t=12360

Imagery in Sports and Physical Performance By Anees A. Sheikh, Errol R. Korn

Cal's fluid technique:
This is a simple primer technique and seems to have great benefits according to the guy that wrote it all up. The amount of enthusiasm in his posts suggest that his technique is worth seriously investigating thoroughly. I have noticed that it tends to relieve quite a bit of eye tension.

Get off the computer:
Being on the computer too much creates a huge amount of tension in your eyes.

Word associations:
Say a sentence to yourself in your head and instead of just hearing the sentence also see/create a picture for each word.

Visual system overlay:
This technique comes from the book Monsters & Magical Sticks and can be applied to the audio or kinesthetic systems, if you have trouble with those, by just reversing the order the steps. First identify your "out of conscious" system. For this example we are of course assuming it is your visual system.

Part 1: Literal overlay

Sit outside and meditate on your output system (auditory in my case) then your secondary system (kinesthetic). Then lastly meditate on the out of conscious system (visual). What the hell does all that mean? Well for me that means first I close my eyes and meditate on everything I hear; then I meditate on my body and how I feel; lastly I open my eyes and flood my awareness with visual stimulus. So if you are primarily a kinesthetic person and not auditory then you just switch the order of the first two and still end with visual.

Part 2: Mental overlay (speeding up the process to access the visualization state)

Do the literal overlay process several times in reality.

Then shift to doing it in your head through imagination. (This is the point at which most hypnotists actually start)

Then repeat the process multiple times in your mind in a row at a quick pace. Speed up the pace as fast as you reasonably can. I am told you have to do 100,000 repetitions of this before becoming really proficient in your ability to access the visual state easily. By speeding up the process mentally you can accomplish ten repetitions in the time it took you to do one before though.