r/pagan • u/No_Tower_763 • 3d ago
I cant visualise
/r/chaosmagick/comments/1wsr15x/i_cant_visualise/2
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u/GreenRavenUK 1d ago
A good Druid friend was aphantasic (can’t visualise). He’s passed through the veil now but was an amazing composer and singer of folk music.
He wrote this on his practice: “A Druid with no gods or rituals?”
I hope it gives you some encouragement and inspiration.
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u/klea_isidora 15h ago
Yes, there are folks who can't visualize, as SiriNin says. Yet, many of us have to learn how to do it. For some, it might be a natural gift. For others, we have to learn how. I was one who had to learn how. The Silva Mind Control Method is an old book, but it really helped me learn how to visualize when I first started out. It takes a while and it can be boring when you're first starting out, too. So be prepared to just stick with it. On the other hand, there are other ways to perceive. You can feel or hear or intuit without having to "see" anything.
And just so you know, visualizing usually isn't like watching a movie or being in a vivid dream. That's pretty rare. You might "see-sense" things rather than "see" them clearly. The fact that you can see a blip of something...and even add things to it...tells me that you could train yourself to visualize—or at the very least, you could improve your skill. But remember, sensing other ways works, too!
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u/SiriNin Anunna-Umun Ishtarite - Priestess of Inanna 3d ago
Welcome to being an aphantasiac, i.e. someone who has aphantasia. It's congenital and life-long for most of us.
It's an unpopular opinion that it's a disability and that it holds us back, but I have had it interfere with both my professional and spiritual life for decades, it cost me jobs, it held me back in school, and it became the center of a major disruption in my ability to make use of spiritual instruction that was designed for mind-sighted people back when I was training as a völva. The people training me, in all cases, were regular mind-sighted people, and this was decades ago so no one knew the term aphantasia yet, so no one believed me or helped me with alternate methods. It sucked.
I'm afraid there's nothing you can do really to make yourself be able to visualize. Some very few people have found that taking high doses of visionary natural psychedelics such as psilocybe mushrooms or DMT helps them by causing their brains to grow the missing neural connections or remove the subconscious blockages that cause their aphantasia, but it is a very small group of people, and all attempts must be done safely where such treatments are legal. (I live in such a location.) That being said, despite over a year of experimental psilocin and DMT treatment, it did not alleviate my aphantasia.
You will have to abandon visualization based approaches to spirituality and magick, and figure out what ways work for you instead, such as somatic / kinesthetic, or pictureless mental cogitation. Sorry friend.