Images and Visions in Meditation: How Not to Fool Yourself

People see a great deal of the spiritual worlds — they simply don’t understand that these are spiritual worlds: the world has told them these are hallucinations. How should you relate to images and visions in meditation, when can you interpret them and when not, and how do you avoid deceiving yourself?

In this conversation with Olya, I look at why the desire to prove and interpret what you have seen is the ego trying to stand out, why you should treat spiritual vision as calmly as what you see with your eyes, what vision is for at all, and why spiritual vision in itself says nothing about whether a person has developed.

People see spiritual worlds without realizing it

– In the previous video, you said that a person can see spiritual worlds, images, some kind of visuals — and not even realize that this is what they are.

– There are moments when you need to close off visual perception in order to immerse yourself a little more in living through what is happening. People see a great deal of the spiritual worlds. They simply don’t understand that these are spiritual worlds; they don’t know what they are. The world has told them all that these are hallucinations, yet everyone sees them all the time. It’s just that if they start talking about them, they’ll be told it’s time to go to a psychiatric hospital. And in fact, when a person closes their eyes, they very often cannot calm the stream going on before their eyes — visually or in their thoughts.

When can you interpret what you see?

– The question is: when can you interpret what you see in meditation, and when not? For example, someone has started meditating and shares their reflection: “I was sitting in meditation, I had visuals, and it was as if I were traveling to another city.” To what extent can this be spiritual vision? Or is it just fantasy? I still don’t understand how to find the balance — whether to interpret or not, how to trust what you see. I’d like to get to the bottom of this.

– Look, the main situation that arises for a person in terms of different kinds of perception is the desire to prove that you see something, or to offer an interpretation of what you see, in order to tell yourself and others and assess a certain quality of your development.

A person tries to stand out through perceiving something, to make their ego stand out within their ego system. And this is where you need to put on the brakes.

Just as an ordinary person in life doesn’t go around saying that they can see a hundred meters away, doesn’t show off that sight, doesn’t say: “You know, I can see this screen, this light bulb, I can see that door.” That isn’t some kind of sign. I don’t sit with you and say: “Olya, I just saw a plane fly past the window, or a huge bird, a hawk.” You would say: “So you saw your hawk. What difference does it make to me that you just saw a hawk?” It’s the same with your vision in the spiritual world. First, you need to learn to see patterns in it for yourself and simply observe it, without any desire to evaluate it.

I have four children, for example. Of course, they grow and change, and you perceive them as they are now. My youngest periodically comes and asks: “What does this word mean? I don’t understand.” Why does he want to figure out this word? He doesn’t want to figure it out in order to earn more money or to put something on his diploma. Agreed? It’s because he is genuinely interested in what was meant, what was being said. He simply wants to learn about what he has seen: what kind of snake it is, what kind of tree, what kind of flower, what that sound was that he heard.

It’s the same here: a person saw some city and said: “I saw some city.” They saw some city — great. Keep observing. And you tell them: “Well, I didn’t see it, so I don’t know what it is.” But if I, Olya, told you right now: “I just saw something flash by. Do you know what it was?” — you would say: “No, I don’t.” That doesn’t frustrate you. But if another person tells you: “I saw a city in the spiritual world,” you start wondering inside whether they really saw it or maybe just imagined it. You want either to support them somehow or not. And if they said something flew past, it would make no difference to you that they saw something. So you calmly tell them: “I don’t know what you saw; I didn’t see it. Keep observing.”

And here it is very important that this does not become an end in itself. A child doesn’t make knowing a number of words a goal in itself. It isn’t built into a child to feel cooler for knowing more words. Children perceive words and learn them naturally. It is the parents who hang points or ratings on a child for how many words he knows — many parents, not the child himself. And a child can be given an upbringing in which he too begins to judge himself and other people by how many words they know, how they swim, run, how they shoot a ball into a basketball hoop.

Who is better, who is cooler: the one who shot the basketball fifteen times in a row without missing once, or the one who didn’t? Society says the one who scored is cooler. But maybe the one who didn’t score is cooler.

Two sides of spiritual vision

So, in terms of observing the spiritual world, there are two very big sides. The first side is not to devalue what you see, not to reject it, not to try to tell everyone so that everyone understands it, not to want to interpret it in order to look cool to others. And the second is to look cool to yourself.

All the people who perceive more broadly in the spiritual sense do not perceive that way because they wanted it through the ego system. Can you start perceiving more through this system? You can. But you must understand that you are getting into a very bad cycle. This can happen: certain energies or dark worlds can help you see more. But usually you shouldn’t expect anything good from it.

Now the next story. In the world there are descriptions saying that people who see something spiritually are cooler. This is written about everywhere. People say: “We see Atlantis, we can scan past lives, we can do something else too.” And people who see nothing say: “That’s all complete rubbish and nonsense. You made it all up. It’s schizophrenia.”

It’s the same in life: there are people who feel, “This is my wife,” and someone else makes a mistake. Someone feels that these stocks should be bought, and someone else gets it wrong. And everywhere there exist side by side both rubbish and genuine, very clear, real perception: “I needed to take this action.”

People mix up spiritual vision with something unreal, with some kind of fantasy.

The first thing to do — or, as you might put it to your friend — is to treat spiritual vision as ordinarily as what you see with your own eyes. Because even what you see with your own eyes you don’t fully assess, don’t fully realize, you draw wrong conclusions, you distort it. People can’t even recognize a mask on another person that is visible to the ordinary eye — just a mask on the face, a kind of psychophysical tension. Or they can’t tell by ear when someone is lying. And yet there is a certain timbre of voice, a structure of speech, in which you can hear or understand such things.

Spiritual vision should become ordinary

You need to treat spiritual vision very calmly. It should become ordinary.

I remember being in a world where there was a great deal of determination to see some spiritual elements, spiritual beings, or to sense, for example, the energy centers in a person — those were the kinds of words used there. Or to sense various spiritual elements present in the space. And what mattered there was the very fact of seeing, not why it was needed and what to do with it. The fact of seeing was needed in order to use it later: to improve, through vision, your state, your relationships with someone, the amount of money you have, your influence in society, your health. That is, to improve something, to change your life through vision, to make use of it.

On the one hand, it is natural to develop your perception in order to live for real. But here is the question: how do you live for real?

Suppose you saw that a person will die in two years. Did you see it in order to help them not die? Or in order to realize and study why they will die in two years? Those are different approaches. Or suppose you saw that you will go bankrupt and lose all your money. Did you see it in order not to go bankrupt, or in order to understand the process and be ready for it? Not in terms of money, but in terms of your state, of living through it. Not to deceive yourself, not to lie to yourself in advance. Those are different things.

Imagine you saw that you would be fired. Did you immediately stop working, stop going to that job, start working worse, treating other people worse? Or did you simply see the cycle of your life in advance — how and what will happen? Do you then try to make up for something while there’s time — I don’t know, steal something, for example? Or do you simply have certain information in advance and live with it? You simply have this information, but you treat everything exactly as you did before.

Imagine there is some plant growing in my garden, some flower. It is blooming now for half a year, but next season it will die — for some reasons of its own: I don’t know, animals will eat it, something will happen to the soil, it will be overwatered and rot. We can keep being in the beauty of this flower and keep caring for it for the next six months. Or suffer because of it — or what will we do? Then what is the information for, and how should we relate to it?

You need to be able to live with any vision

People, of course, want to behold something, to see something, in order to make basic use of it. Imagine a person saw their past life, part of it. They cannot grasp all their past lives with the brain — the brain is not made for that. They lived through some piece, some part, or felt some particular state — some joy, trauma or something else — and linked it to a past life. What did they really see, what did they really learn? They saw some events — so what? How is that different from my telling you that the day before yesterday I went to the ocean? In that you went to the ocean in another life? How is that different for you now? Not at all. When I tell you that I went to the ocean, you can get far more impressions, states and life in general than from realizing that you went to the ocean in another life. Even if in this life you have never been, say, to the Pacific Ocean.

Have you been to the Pacific Ocean? Say you haven’t — so what difference does it make? You realized: “I have been to the Pacific Ocean.” So what? What does it give you? Does it somehow make you bigger, elevate you? Open a video, look at the Pacific Ocean — you’ll see the Pacific Ocean. What will change from that? People try to interpret it somehow, link it to their own state and somehow make use of it. There are many things that are meaningless. It’s just some information.

And the layers of these perceptions are endless, Olya. They are so endless that, believe me, if certain worlds were opened up to you right now, you would get tired of this series. You’d get tired of it, because at some point your ego system would say: “Why do I need all this?” That is exactly why we see so many people not engaging in their own self-knowledge. Because as soon as they learned the truth, as soon as they were told fifty-six times that it was their ego, they go: “We won’t go in that direction anymore. Let’s go where they’ll tell us it isn’t ego.”

Seeing does not mean developing

Recently a man was visiting me who had also come to see me about a year ago and told me about his business back then. With my whole system I tried to show him that his business would not work out. I asked some leading questions, but he was so immersed in his ego space that he didn’t want to listen at all. It didn’t matter to him at all. Because he is an egoist, neither you nor anything else matters to him. And now he tells me that the project didn’t work out, that they stopped funding it, and that now something else is going on. And all of this is told as if from the position of naturally living one’s life. But that is not naturally living one’s life — you were deluding yourself.

Why does a person need vision? Someone gives them a vision from the outside and tells them. When I reveal something to him from the outside — that is exactly the same vision, Olya. Whether another person told you something or you beheld it yourself — it suddenly came to you from another realm. And you are told: “It won’t work out for you.”

“It won’t work out for you” is said not so that you won’t do it, but so that you treat it with an understanding of causes and effects. For real. So that you don’t deceive yourself and the people around you with it.

Because an enormous number of people also endlessly deceive the people around them with it. You look at him and think: “Never mind. He didn’t want to hear it then, and he doesn’t want to hear it now. That’s his choice.” So he did see it, Olya.

So what I’m getting at is this: the fact that a person sees something in the spiritual world does not at all mean that they have somehow developed or grown stronger.

There really are abilities where a person’s spiritual being is at a certain stage of development and they can perceive more. But that does not mean the person is in a healthy system of perception. They simply have a strong spiritual system. So what? They can just as well make an endless number of mistakes. They can even be falling — simply falling fast.

🎥 Video for this article