Modern psychology might have strict views as to the nature of reality. It rests firmly in the “common” sociopolitical construct and uses frameworks like self-image. Deviation from normal becomes an illness or disorder. Having a vision could be seen as a hallucination, something not real. Yet visions and religion are entwined, entangled even. There is a disconnect where psychology might see “religious” vision as psychosis, prophets could be deemed mentally ill in retrospect.
In the limit of Buddhist philosophy, the entire sociopolitical construct held as normality is, suffering. Attachment to status and possessions causes dissatisfaction, apparently many are unhappy about how they look. Is your cognitive assimilation of appearance reality? One could suggest that modern psychology encourages samsara. Whereas Buddhism works at the eradication of the notion of self, psychology seeks to prop it up.
You pay your money and join the club that suits.
I’ll comment that I have had a number of visions, waking dreams if you like. None of these have completely removed the physicality of what might be called physical plane material reality. Though the event flow in vision was markedly different from the event flow on “earth”. I perceived them as an extra overlay with a very different sense of spatiotemporal perception.
I have always been able to visualise, to hold and build images in my “mind’s eye”. I can do this, as I am now, and continue to type reasonably accurately on a different subject. In terms of the Toltec aphorisms on dreaming. I am dreaming and typing at the same time.
As a rule of thumb, I am open minded. I have been meaning to thank someone {on LinkedIn} who nearly forty years ago helped me to open my mind. Initially I thought he was a pretentious prick, it turned out it was me who was the pedant and knobhead. He did me an enormous favour in introducing me to David Lynch.
Writing a business plan could be said to be a visionary practice. In order to plan one has to have, at least in my case, a picture or vision of how things might work or look. It has to be en-vision-ed. A patent application can be seen to be a vision of something not yet real. By concretising it into text and diagrams, one starts to materialise a vision or dream. Is something subjective and not yet real like a patent, a hallucination?
Some of these visions I have had are not of the same time as when I am having them. These visions with a sense of “ago” are explainable by invoking the notion of past life recall. Some come in full smell-o-vision. Of course, you could just say that I was hallucinating. My awareness of surroundings, though slightly reduced, remained operable. I was able, for example, to walk along Upper Tulse Hill to catch a bus for work. I did not get run over or walk into a lamppost.
When I dream passively at night, I know that I am dreaming. When I en-vision during the day, I am in control. Some of my visions were not that well controlled but I knew where I was and that something “else” was taking place.
If we call the common sociopolitical construct a samsaric dream, I am aware that I am dreaming it and can participate roughly along the lines of the “rules” of the construct. I have a whole lot less fear of missing out, FOMO, than most people.
In the desire to overly categorize and rationalise things, it is possible that humans “throw the baby out with the bathwater”. Concrete mind can be very concrete and fixated. It can be very wrong, group insanity like Brexit can seize the minds of millions.
I’ll develop this a little more using the same subject header at another time.
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Dreamyoga 