Perception vs Imagination?
March 3, 2009
From Jellocrunch:
i’ve got a question for you that’s also about reconciling the physical and spiritual worlds. as a recent initiate into the b&s of light, i’ve been exposed to some ideas, meditations and rituals that are designed to work directly with non-physical forms, entities, energies, structures, etc. On an intellectual level for me, it’s been very rewarding, enlightening and profound. but on a spiritual level, i don’t feel i’ve made much of a change.
so i’ve always had a particularly vivid and active imagination. i’ve never had any problems visualizing or pretending about things that aren’t in the observable, physical universe. when it comes to the new information i’ve been exposed to, i find it equally easy to imagine, say, a glowing green orb embedded in my chest, or an energetic force field that i create with my fingers, or what have you.
thing is, i feel with most of these rituals, meditations and such that imagination is about as far as it goes for me. so i can visualize that green orb, but i don’t feel it spinning there in my chest. i can imagine having a conversation with this Higher Self guy that lives in a room at the back of my skull, but i perceive that as pretend – not real. i might have an equally-enlightening conversation with the imaginary purple bunny who lives in my silverware drawer. or by sitting down and journaling.
and in a semi-agnostic way, i kind of believe in all of this stuff, but don’t feel like i have any frame of reference to ground it in reality. i mean, i don’t think these beliefs and traditions have been passed-down through the ages because of a long string of good pretending skills. but at the same time it’s sometimes hard to suppress skepticism about folks having a real exchange of ideas with energies and entities that don’t exist in our physical reality.
and perhaps because i do have such a vivid imagination, i wonder sometimes if maybe this visual or that idea didn’t originate in my imagination, and is, in fact, my ability to percieve something outside the physical realm? but then how would i know the difference?
so i’m not all that concerned about whether spiritual energies exist in some kind of reality, but rather how to perceive those realities? and once perceived, how to distinguish them from imagination?
Jellocrunch
Inspirations from Binah:
Let me first congratulate you on your initiation. Not only did you take the first step, you are actively working to incorporate all that you learned into your daily reality.
I am often asked to define magick and my answer is always the same: if I have an object and I set my intention to move it from one side of the room to the other, it doesn’t matter if the object floats on its own or someone comes by and moves it, the end result is that the object ended up where I wanted it. I manifested the move… I performed magick!
When we first begin communicating with our higher self or beings from other dimensions, it is easy to think we are just playing an elaborate game of pretend. Sitting in meditation when you can still sense the outside world may feel like you are cheating, yet you must remember that we are all beings of light encased in flesh, and therefore there is no such thing as just pretending. Imagination is a term created by fear to remove the need to admit that there is an unknown world beyond comprehension. For those of us that have been able to maintain our childlike wonder, we realize that the world of pretend we have been living in is actually communion with what lies behind our physical reality.
It is important to remember that the reason for mediation is to reach deep inside ourselves, past our physical reality and pull out nuggets of information lost in the noise of daily existence. Travel on the Astral plane gives us a chance to tap into the collective consciousness to learn from others what we can not learn from ourselves. Either way, you are the gatekeeper of the information. You alone can determine whether what you are receiving is wisdom or useless chatter. Trust in yourself and over time you become a finely tuned filter receiving information and easily discarding that which is not in your highest and best good.
Good luck on your journey…
