Insight: We don't have an inner eye.

[martins name]

We don't see the things we visualize, we feel them. 

As an example, look at this green square ? you see the color green with your eyes and you simultaneously feel/know/think the color. If you now close your eyes and try to imagine the color you get the exact same feeling but the sight is no longer in your field of view. Since the feeling is the same we trick ourselves that we actually see it.

The practical lesson here is that if you do visualization, yoga, meditation or problem-solving using your inner vision, know that you are really looking for a feeling and if you try to find an actual sight you will just spin your wheels.

Edited January 12, 2021 by martins name

[seeking_brilliance]

@Zigzag Idiot I wonder if feeling vs. sensing would be applicable here.

@martins name it can turn into actual vision if you are relaxed enough and the phosphenes form around what you "see" in minds eye. 

[martins name]

@seeking_brilliance that's besides the point but it's very interesting. Have you had personal experience of this and if so in how much detail did it appear?

[seeking_brilliance]

@martins name have you ever observed hypnagogia before falling asleep or when waking up? It can get crystal clear. 

Recall what you did two minutes ago. See yourself doing it. Visual memory and visualisation is the same thing in my opinion. There's a reason people have a hard time visualising something they've never seen. Even when you think you are visualising something new, it's typically just lots of visual memory stitched together to give the illusion of something new. 

But the phosphenes are like an inner light. Or at least they are the crystals that fractate the inner light into pictures. Or at least that's the physical explanation if you want to live in that world.  If you leave the physical world then visualisation is just what is arising, as it arises,if anything is arising at all, which really is isn't. ?

Edited January 12, 2021 by seeking_brilliance

[martins name]

@seeking_brilliance I haven't but our thoughts is our reality completely. Colors don't exist outside of our thoughts. The feeling we get from seeing green and thinking green are exactly the same so they are literally unintelligible. Even tho we really think we see something doesn't mean we have seen it. Don't underestimate how strong this illusion is. In dreams this is the case and so I assume it's the same for hypnagogia. 

I've seen things in dreams that were so vivid that I thought they appeared in my actual vision, but now I realize that it was all a very well ostracizated illusion happening in my thoughts.

[seeking_brilliance]

6 minutes ago, martins name said:

I've seen things in dreams that were so vivid that I thought they appeared in my actual vision,

I agree with you, except what is actual vision compared to what you see in a dream? 

 

8 minutes ago, martins name said:

I realize that it was all a very well ostracizated illusion happening in my thoughts.

 

[martins name]

@seeking_brilliance @seeking_brilliance in a sense non but in an other sense when things appear in our vision we necessarily have access to a high level of detail that we don't if it is a visualization. The two phenomena have some different properties, it is therefore useful to make a distinction between the two.

[seeking_brilliance]

I won't argue, just be wary of limiting beliefs. I have crystal clear hypnogogia sometimes. Also, with my eyes failing, dreams can actually be more clear and vivid. 

Edited January 12, 2021 by seeking_brilliance

[Zigzag Idiot]

7 hours ago, martins name said:

We don't see the things we visualize, we feel them. 

As an example, look at this green square ? you see the color green with your eyes and you simultaneously feel/know/think the color. If you now close your eyes and try to imagine the color you get the exact same feeling but the sight is no longer in your field of view. Since the feeling is the same we trick ourselves that we actually see it.

The practical lesson here is that if you do visualization, yoga, meditation or problem-solving using your inner vision, know that you are really looking for a feeling and if you try to find an actual sight you will just spin your wheels.

 

6 hours ago, seeking_brilliance said:

@Zigzag Idiot I wonder if feeling vs. sensing would be applicable here.

@martins name it can turn into actual vision if you are relaxed enough and the phosphenes form around what you "see" in minds eye. 

A relevant article comes to mind that I posted in Top Christian Resources. It draws on Eastern Orthodox Christianity and Sufism. Here is an excerpt from that article-

Crushed summary of the following article- The heart is an organ of spiritual perception .

Emoting is not the same of true feeling. 

When one is engaged in emoting, they are in a form of spiritual sleep.

 

The Way of the Heart, by Cynthia Bourgeault

From the Christian esoteric tradition, a path beyond the mind

Post authorBy Cynthia Bourgeault

Post dateJanuary 31, 2017

Photograph by Brandon Zierer

From the Christian esoteric tradition, a path beyond the mind

Put the mind in the heart…. Put the mind in the heart…. Stand before the Lord with the mind in the heart.” From page after page in the Philokalia, that hallowed collection of spiritual writings from the Christian East, this same refrain emerges. It is striking in both its insistence and its specificity. Whatever that exalted level of spiritual attainment is conceived to be—whether you call it “salvation,” “enlightenment,” “contemplation,” or “divine union”—this is the inner configuration in which it is found. This and no other.

It leaves one wondering what these old spiritual masters actually knew and—if it’s even remotely as precise and anatomically grounded as it sounds—why this knowledge has not factored more prominently in contemporary typologies of consciousness.

Part of the problem as this ancient teaching falls on contemporary ears is that we will inevitably be hearing it through a modern filter that does not serve it well. In our own times the word “heart” has come to be associated primarily with the emotions (as opposed to the mental operations of the mind), and so the instruction will be inevitably heard as “get out of your mind and into your emotions”—which is, alas, pretty close to 180 degrees from what the instruction is actually saying.

Yes, it is certainly true that the heart’s native language is affectivity—perception through deep feelingness. But it may come as a shock to contemporary seekers to learn that the things we nowadays identify with the feeling life—passion, drama, intensity, compelling emotion—are qualities that in the ancient anatomical treatises were associated not with the heart but with the liver! They are signs of agitation and turbidity (an excess of bile!) rather than authentic feelingness. In fact, they are traditionally seen as the roadblocks to the authentic feeling life, the saboteurs that steal its energy and distort its true nature.

And so before we can even begin to unlock the wisdom of these ancient texts, we need to gently set aside our contemporary fascination with emotivity as the royal road to spiritual authenticity and return to the classic understanding from which these teachings emerge, which features the heart in a far more spacious and luminous role.

According to the great wisdom traditions of the West (Christian, Jewish, Islamic), the heart is first and foremost an organ of spiritual perception. Its primary function is to look beyond the obvious, the boundaried surface of things, and see into a deeper reality, emerging from some unknown profundity, which plays lightly upon the surface of this life without being caught there: a world where meaning, insight, and clarity come together in a whole different way. Saint Paul talked about this other kind of perceptivity with the term “faith” (“Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen”), but the word “faith” is itself often misunderstood by the linear mind. What it really designates is not a leaping into the dark (as so often misconstrued) but a subtle seeing in the dark, a kind of spiritual night vision that allows one to see with inner certainty that the elusive golden thread glimpsed from within actually does lead somewhere.

Perhaps the most comprehensive definition of this wider spiritual perceptivity is from Kabir Helminski, a modern Sufi master. I realize that I quote it in nearly every book I have written, but I do so because it is so fundamental to the wisdom tradition that I have come to know as the authentic heart of Christianity. Here it is yet again:

We have subtle subconscious faculties we are not using. Beyond the limited analytic intellect is a vast realm of mind that includes psychic and extrasensory abilities; intuition; wisdom; a sense of unity; aesthetic, qualitative and creative faculties; and image-forming and symbolic capacities. Though these faculties are many, we give them a single name with some justification for they are working best when they are in concert. They comprise a mind, moreover, in spontaneous connection to the cosmic mind. This total mind we call “heart.”1

The purification of Muhammad’s heart by three Divine messengers. Bal’ami. Early fourteenth century

“The heart,” Helminski continues, is the antenna that receives the emanations of subtler levels of existence. The human heart has its proper field of function beyond the limits of the superficial, reactive ego-self. Awakening the heart, or the spiritualized mind, is an unlimited process of making the mind more sensitive, focused, energized, subtle, and refined, of joining it to its cosmic milieu, the infinity of love.2

Now it may concern some of you that you’re hearing Islamic teaching here, not Christian. And it may well be true that this understanding of the heart as “spiritualized mind”— “the organ prepared by God for contemplation”3—has been brought to its subtlest and most comprehensive articulation in the great Islamic Sufi masters. As early as the tenth century, Al-Hakîm al Tirmidhî’s masterful Treatise on the Heart laid the foundations for an elaborate Sufi understanding of the heart as a tripartite physical, emotional, and spiritual organ.4 On this foundation would gradually rise an expansive repertory of spiritual practices supporting this increasingly “sensitive, focused, energized, subtle, and refined” heart attunement.

But it’s right there in Christianity as well. Aside from the incomparable Orthodox teachings on Prayer of the Heart collected in the Philokalia, it’s completely scriptural. Simply open your Bible to the Beatitudes (Matthew 5:8) and read the words straight from Jesus himself: “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

[seeking_brilliance]

@Zigzag Idiot interesting read, thank you. I'll chew on it later when I'm not at work. 

[Tovius]

Is this heart in the same place as where we think the human heart that beats is, or is this a different kind of heart? 

[martins name]

The christian concept of dropping the head into the heart relates to the spiritual heart, not the heart chakra, but a place to the right in the ribcage. https://hridaya-yoga.com/hridaya-yoga-articles/what-is-hridaya-the-spiritual-heart/

Feeling is a function of the heart chakra, while passion and emoting is a function of swadisthana chakra.

[Tovius]

3 hours ago, martins name said:

The christian concept of dropping the head into the heart relates to the spiritual heart, not the heart chakra, but a place to the right in the ribcage. https://hridaya-yoga.com/hridaya-yoga-articles/what-is-hridaya-the-spiritual-heart/

Feeling is a function of the heart chakra, while passion and emoting is a function of swadisthana chakra.

Thank you for this valuable information. This is going to be the topic of my study for awhile. 

[Nahm]

Rupert has a great video on that as well. If memory serves he references Ramani Maharishi. 

 

[Zigzag Idiot]

Thanks @Nahm  I’ll watch,,,

I should have given a link to the full article. It’s down below. C. Bourgeault is in fact speaking of the physical heart.  
To paraphrase. It’s where the bridge is that we can use between physical and metaphysical. Joesph Chilton Pierce has written about this quite a bit in which he refers to the Menninger Institute studies. He makes a good case for the dramatic results stemming from a heart that beats in coherence. The Heart Math institute seems to be carrying the ball now and taking it even further. There’s an actual emf wave field put out by the heart that is measurable,,,

https://parabola.org/2017/01/31/the-way-of-the-heart-cynthia-bourgeault/

[seeking_brilliance]

@Zigzag Idiot @Zigzag Idiot I'll share something with you, it's silly but... A couple years ago an insight I received was to lay with a stethoscope on the heart and use the heartbeat as isochronic tones. In other words the alleged brainwaves should sync with it, or however that could be interpreted. 

In the very least, the act of it would be a type of spell casting. 

Edited January 13, 2021 by seeking_brilliance

[Zigzag Idiot]

@seeking_brilliance  I think you would like Joseph Chilton Pierce’s Biology of Transcendence. It’s been a while since I read it and I forget a lot of the particulars. Something like when the systolic pressure is in optimum rhythm with the diastolic pressure an activation of the prefrontal lobes kicks in and a measurable entrainment occurs.  He writes quite a bit of the how and why there’s an abundance of brains cells (neurons)  in the heart, that makes this entrainment or feedback loop between the heart and frontal lobes possible. 
You have good intuition!  I believe that actually may be a heart function and a forerunner of clairvoyance,,,?

[seeking_brilliance]

33 minutes ago, Zigzag Idiot said:

You have good intuition!  I believe that actually may be a heart function and a forerunner of clairvoyance,,,?

Haha. I don't know if you read my thread about my astral guide, 'blue', but back when I was experiencing all that I was getting practice after practice. In a way I think I split my clairvoyance into this manifested astral companion, so that I can still experience life as someone who receives the insights and can choose to ignore my own sage wisdom, which happens quite regularly ?  I'm still going through my old journals but I do think Blue told me he was my heart, so there ya go. 

I did buy a stethoscope but never stuck with it enough to see any benefits. Now I don't know where it is....

There's another option: download a sounds amplifier app on your smartphone. It sends the audio from the mic on the phone onto your headphones. Place the phone on your heart. It's not quite as good as a real stethoscope, but works in a pinch. 

Thank you for the recommendation. I covet your focused and analytical mind...I'm just not a very studious reader. I may look into it, but I also am gracious for Mr Zigzag who comes on here and condenses what he's learned for me. Thanks! (wait are you a tulpa? ?) 

Edited January 13, 2021 by seeking_brilliance

[Zigzag Idiot]

@seeking_brilliance I thought I had read most of your journals but It seems I’ve missed some entries. Sounds interesting for sure. Regarding your astral guide. I happen to have a stethoscope. May have to play around with it some,,,

I had to google Tulpa. I had never seen the word before. So,, I guess I’m not and to be honest, I’m going to have to reread it again to try and get it in my understanding.

Much appreciated are the kind words and also the light heartedness.

[Bodhitree]

On 12/01/2021 at 11:53 AM, martins name said:

We don't see the things we visualize, we feel them. 

As an example, look at this green square ? you see the color green with your eyes and you simultaneously feel/know/think the color. If you now close your eyes and try to imagine the color you get the exact same feeling but the sight is no longer in your field of view. Since the feeling is the same we trick ourselves that we actually see it.

The practical lesson here is that if you do visualization, yoga, meditation or problem-solving using your inner vision, know that you are really looking for a feeling and if you try to find an actual sight you will just spin your wheels.

Well, this is partially true in my experience. You can get pictures presented to your mind’s eye, and sometimes snippets of vision. But more often your immediate local perception is based on feeling, yes.