Images and Visions in Meditation: How Not to Deceive Yourself

OLOlya

In the previous video, you said that people can see spiritual worlds, images, or visual impressions without even realizing that is what they are.

AVAlexander Volchek

Sometimes you need to close off visual perception to become a little more immersed in the experience of what is happening. People see a great deal of the spiritual worlds; they simply do not understand that these are spiritual worlds. They do not know what they are. The world has told them they are hallucinations. People see them all the time, but if they start talking about them, they will be told it is time to go to a psychiatric hospital. In fact, when people close their eyes, they often cannot quiet the stream of images before their eyes or the flow of thoughts.

OLOlya

Here is the question: when can you interpret what you see in meditation, and when should you not? Suppose someone has begun meditating and shares a reflection: “I was sitting in meditation and moving around. I had visual impressions, and it was as though I were traveling to another city.” To what extent might that be spiritual vision, or is it just imagination? I still do not understand how to find the balance: should you interpret it or not, and how can you trust what you see? I would like to understand this.

AVAlexander Volchek

Look, the main issue that arises with different kinds of perception is the desire to prove that you see something, or interpret it so you can tell yourself and others and assess the quality of your development. People try to stand out through what they perceive, to distinguish their ego within their ego system. That is where you need to slow down. An ordinary person does not go around boasting that they can see something a hundred meters away: “You know, I can see this screen, this light bulb, or that door.” It is not some extraordinary sign. I do not sit here with you and say, “Olya, I just saw a plane fly past the window, or a huge bird, a hawk.” I do not tell you that. You would say, “You saw your hawk. What difference does it make to me that you saw a hawk just now?” The same applies to what you see in the spiritual world. First, learn to notice patterns for yourself and simply observe, without wanting to evaluate it.

Think of a child coming to ask, “What does this word mean?” I have four children, for example. As they grow and change, you relate to them as they are now. My youngest periodically comes to me and says, “What does this word mean? I do not understand.” Why does he want to understand the word? Not to make more money or put something on his diploma, right? He wants to understand because he is truly interested. He wants to find out what was meant, what was being said. He simply wants to learn about what he has seen: what kind of snake, tree, or flower it is, or what that sound was that he heard. He just wants to discover things. It is the same here. Someone sees a city and says, “I saw a city.” All right, you saw a city. Wonderful. Keep observing. You can say, “I did not see it, so I do not know what it is.” But if I came to you now, Olya, and said, “I just saw something flash past.

Do you know what it was?” You would say, “No, I do not.” That would not upset you. But if someone says, “I saw a city in the spiritual world,” you start wondering whether they really saw it or only imagined it. You want to support them somehow, or not support them. If they say something flew past, it makes no difference to you that they saw something. So you can calmly say, “I do not know what you saw. I did not see it. Keep observing.” It is important that this does not become an end in itself. A child does not make knowing a certain number of words a goal. Children are not inherently wired to feel superior because they know more words. They perceive and learn words naturally. Parents assign points or a rating based on how many words a child knows. Many parents do. The parents, not the child. You can instill a way of thinking through upbringing so the child begins judging themselves and others by how many words they know, how well they swim or run, or how well they shoot a basketball, and so on.

Who is better or more impressive: someone who makes fifteen basketball shots in a row without missing, or someone who does not? Society says the one who makes the shots is better. Perhaps the other person is better. So there are two major aspects to observing the spiritual world. The first is not to devalue what you see or reject it, not to try to tell everyone so they all understand, not to interpret it in order to impress other people. The second is trying to impress yourself. Spiritual vision will never arise from a desire to satisfy the ego. Never. People whose spiritual perception is broader do not perceive that way because they wanted it through their ego system. Can you begin to perceive more through that system? You can, but you need to understand that you are entering a very unhealthy cycle. That can happen. Certain energies or dark worlds can help you see more. They can. Usually you should not expect anything good from it. Then there is another idea: descriptions everywhere suggest that people who see spiritually are superior. People say, “We see Atlantis. We can scan past lives. We can do this and that.”

People who see nothing say, “That is all complete rubbish and nonsense. You made it all up. It is schizophrenia.” In ordinary life, too, some people have a feeling that a particular person will be their wife, while others get it wrong. Some feel they should buy certain stocks, and some make a mistake. Everywhere, falsehood and genuine, very real perception coexist: the sense that I needed to take that action. People confuse spiritual vision with something unreal, with fantasy. The first thing to do, or to tell your friend as you put it, is to treat spiritual vision as an everyday thing, just like what you see with your own eyes. Even what you see with your eyes is something you do not fully assess or understand; you draw mistaken conclusions and distort it. People cannot even distinguish the masks on another person's face that are visible to the eyes, a mask that is simply a psychophysical tension. Nor can they hear when someone is lying. There are qualities in a person's tone of voice or speech structure through which you can hear or understand such things.

Approach spiritual vision very calmly. It should become ordinary. I remember being in an environment where people were very intent on seeing spiritual elements or beings, or sensing energy centers in a person—those were the kinds of words people used—or sensing different spiritual elements in the surrounding space. Seeing itself was what mattered, rather than why it was needed or what to do with it. Seeing was wanted in order to use it afterward: to improve your own state, your relationships, your finances, your influence in society, or your health. To improve something or change your life by seeing, to take advantage of it. On the one hand, it is natural to develop your perception so you can truly live. But what does truly living mean? Suppose you see that someone will die in two years. Did you see that so you could help them avoid dying in two years, or so you could understand and study why they will die in two years? Those are different approaches. Or suppose you see that you will go bankrupt and lose all your money.

Did you see that so you could avoid bankruptcy, or so you could understand the process and be ready for it—

Ready for it not financially, but in terms of your state as you live through it. Not deceiving yourself, not lying to yourself in advance. Those are different things. Suppose you see that you will be fired. Do you immediately stop working at that job, stop showing up, do a worse job, or treat other people worse? Or have you simply seen a cycle of your life in advance, how things will unfold? Do you try to catch up on something while there is still time, steal something, for example? Or do you simply have some information in advance and live with it? You have that information, but relate to things just as you did before. Suppose a plant or flower is growing in my garden. It will bloom for six months, but next season it will die for some reason. Animals might eat it, something might happen to the soil, it might get overwatered and rot, or something else. We can continue to share in that flower's beauty and care for it over the next six months. Or we can suffer over it. What will we do? What is the information for, and how should we relate to it?

You need to be able to live with any information or vision. You need to be ready to live with that information. Of course, people want to see something so they can make use of it in a basic way. Suppose someone sees their past lives, or part of one past life. They cannot comprehend all their past lives with their brain; the brain is not made for that. They experience some piece, some part, or feel a particular state, joy, hurt, or something else, and associate it with a past life. What does it mean to have seen or learned something? You saw some events. So what? How is it different from my telling you I went to the ocean the day before yesterday? You went to the ocean in another life. What difference does that make to you now? None at all. My telling you about going to the ocean can give you far more impressions, states, and life itself than realizing you went to the ocean in another life—even if you have never been to the ocean in this life, the Pacific Ocean, for example.

I do not know: have you been to the Pacific Ocean? Suppose you have not. What difference does it make if you realize, “I have been to the Pacific Ocean”? So what? What does it give you? Does it make you greater or elevate you somehow? Open a video and look at the Pacific Ocean. You will see it. What changes? People try to interpret it, connect it with their own state, and make use of it. Many things are meaningless in that sense. There is no point; it is just information. The layers of perception are endless, Olya. Endless. So endless that, believe me, you will get tired of the series. If access to certain worlds were switched on for you now, you would get tired of that series. At some point your ego system would say, “Why do I need all this?” That is why so many people do not pursue self-knowledge. As soon as they discover the truth, as soon as they have been told fifty-six times that it is their ego, they say, “We are not going in that direction anymore. Let's go somewhere they will tell us it is not our ego.” Someone recently visited me who had also visited about a year ago and told me about his business.

With my whole system, I tried to show him that his business would not work out. I asked leading questions, but he was so immersed in his own ego that he did not want to listen at all. It did not matter to him. Because he is selfish, neither you nor anything else matters to him. Now he tells me that the project did not work out, that they stopped funding it, and that something else is happening now. He tells it as though it were the natural course of life. But it was not the natural course of life; you were deluding yourself. Why does someone need vision? Someone on the outside gives them a perspective and tells them something. When I reveal something to them from the outside, that is vision too, Olya, just as when someone tells you something or you perceive it yourself, when it suddenly comes to you from another realm. You are told, “It will not work out.” You are not told that so you will stop doing it, but so you will approach it with a real understanding of causes and effects, without deceiving yourself and the people around you. An enormous number of people deceive others in this way too.

They deceive other people endlessly. You look at him and think, “All right, he did not want to hear it then, and he does not want to hear it now. That is his choice.” There he is: he has seen it, Olya. My point is that seeing something in the spiritual world does not mean a person has developed or grown stronger. There are real abilities: a person's spiritual being may be at a particular stage of development, allowing them to perceive more. But that does not mean their system of perception is healthy. They simply have a strong spiritual system. So what? They can still make endless mistakes. They may even be falling, falling very fast.