Objectively speaking, visions often serve as signs that can point to higher realities. People often have few signs to indicate their progress. Visions can be that needed indication.
From a certain perspective I can see where people look to this is as some sort of validation of progress. That's understandable, as it is a tendency of the ego to say, "hey look!, I have these experiences, I'm doing okay!". Though understandable, it misses the point. The progress is not measured by the phenomena experienced, but by the change in heart and life lived. These things are there to help open us to something greater, which in turn opens our heart to an internal realization.
It's not in experiencing angels and beings of light in meditation, but in becoming a being of light in the world. We open our eyes, and we see God in every living thing. We experience the depth of that infinite compassion within ourselves. We are at peace, without visions of angels ascending and descending on ladders to heaven. That progress is measured in every moment of our lives, not in how deeply we entered into the inner chambers of the Holy Divine in our meditation. As powerful and as important as that is, it is not the Goal itself. This is. Here.
What concerns me is not someone, say, seeing a light and understanding it as a corporeal manifestation of a deeper attainment reached in their meditation that appeared in the form of a light because that was the closest visual approximation to it but rather becoming attached to the vision to the extent that one grasps the vision rather than the reality that lies behind it and thus becomes waylaid.
You know, there is something that comes to mind as you point this truth out. It's called "spiritual avoidance". People can actually use spiritual phenomena as a distraction from that actual inner work of opening themselves to that transformation in themselves beyond ego. Jesus got it right, that we must die to ourselves. And that is the harder path. To 'wave jump', surfing from peak experience to peak experience, is like a thrill-seeking avoidance of the deeper work of self-emptying. People fool themselves saying they are on the spiritual road because they have visions, and whatnot. If not understood as a vehicle, as a tool to help them to transcend themselves into higher reality in all of who they are, then they are to be blunt, a mere form of self-gratification. "What's wrong! Where's God today!", and so on.
I admit that I am often "too safe" when it comes to visions. My negative experiences are the cause of this.
I'm curious about what you see as negative experience. Does it relate to what I just said, or something along the lines of a 'frightening' experience?
However if a person loves the "sign" to much it can cease to be a sign anymore and instead become a road-block serving as an intermediary between them and deeper insight.
In the same sense, Jesus in the hands of religious dogma, can become an idol instead of that intermediary.
Early on in meditation, I had an experience of Jesus, where my understand saw him be more as a brother. That it was to teach me to be in myself, that which was in him. It is good to have a teacher, a guide, but another to never become a teacher yourself, to inhabit within yourself that which the Teacher would have you to be. It is a far higher truth to become that which we are drawn to be, than to be merely obedient to a set of externalized rules of 'do this and don't do that'. That is the child's first steps to walking. We are to learn not just walking, but to walk upon water, my brother.
There is a form of contemplation in which no intermediaries are present, rather the person grasps the truth intuitively and directly.
Oh yes.... :bow:
It not so much the "emptiness" or "stillness". That too can become an idol to be broken. Its the fullness that arises from the emptiness that I find crucial
Amen, and amen! It is not just the heart of God, but the breath of God in the world, in all that arise from that emptiness, in Love. Living, breathing, vital, Love. Radiating in all. In every molecule of air. In ever soft touch of wind. In every light ray from the sun upon the face of the earth. In every human face. In every soul born into the vibrant and radiating world!
I cannot express this in words that would begin to describe this. And this, I speak from living experience. It is the Goal of all of this.
I can't really describe it with words, except almost that when one finds the soul or self as it is in itself, in its bare emptiness without the phantasms of the thinking, rational mind, then something is "born" there - bears fruit, so to speak. One is not left with emptiness but a resplendence and fullness that arises from the emptiness and gives everything meaning.
Oh yeah. We know the same.
For me, being a theist, it is the direct consciousness of the Presence of God in the citadel of the soul, where there is no distinction of persons. That is merely an interpretation of something I can't understand, of course.
I enjoy the expression panenthiest better, as it takes theism and give it more the reality of which we speak. It is however, ultimately, the nondual of which we speak.
