The Value of Visions

 by Jay Paul

Last week on this blog I distinguished between psychiatric hallucinations and visions. The former entail a confusion between what the hallucinator sees or hears and what is commonly taken to be reality. For instance, I once hallucinated that I could converse with people who were reading my thoughts through the intermediary of a medical device I believed was put in my head during a diagnostic test. I believed I was really communicating with people. I was not. I was making it all up.

A vision, on the other hand, does recognize the bounds between what is considered conventionally real and the actions in the vision. A visionary can end the vision at any time by focusing elsewhere;  hallucinators cannot get away from their pictures or sounds because they believe them to be reality. To do so would, in the hallucinator's mind, be the same as trying to get away from gravity. On the other hand, visionaries know that their visions take place in an alternate reality from our everyday one. Some visionaries may believe this alternate reality has more ontological weight than the conventional one, but the distinction is made.

I went to great pains to make this distinction for two reasons. One is that I have had both hallucinations and visions and wanted to account for my experience. The second is that I believe visionary experience is given very short shift in our contemporary culture. As I point out in that blog piece, cultures the world over have believed that visions hold some epistemological value. However, in our contemporary culture, a visionary is often simply called mentally ill.

I used the example of Moses seeing and hearing God in the form of a burning bush. I speculate that the ancient Hebrews—Moses' culture—believed in visionary experience, and that it would have been clear from Moses' report that he was relating such an experience. In the everyday world, no bush burned. It was in a visionary world, separate from the everyday one, that Moses saw the bush burn and heard God speak. And this visionary world, to the ancient Hebrews, was more full of truth than the everyday one. Today, I emphasized, Moses would be considered psychotic if he made such a report. 

We contemporaries impoverish our world by denying the value of the visionary experience. (We also may impoverish our world by denying the value of the psychotic experience, but that is another post.)

What is the value of the visionary experience? The traditional answer in most cultures is that the visionary communicates with the spirit world—as in the case of Moses communicating with God through the vision of the burning bush. However, as I point out in that post, I don't believe in spirits. Such a position makes me an unusual human. Most of humanity believes in spirits. My not believing in them has nothing to do with superior knowledge. It is an accident of my birth and upbringing, including my education. My life experiences simply don't allow me to believe in spirits. I can't force myself to believe in them. Instead, I need to find another value for visions other than communication with spirits.

That said, I can see why people believe that visionaries commune with spirits. Just yesterday, I lay down on the floor and recounted a 23-minute vision to a recording device as it happened. In one section of the vision, I was walking down a wet, spongy trail in a dying wood. I came across a translucent old man with a long white beard and long white hair who wore a long white robe. He told me he was water in human form, and that excess water was killing the woods. The conversation went on from there, but the gist of it was that the man, as water, had no intention or control over the killing of the woods. When the conditions dictate, water just rises.

This was an extraordinarily powerful encounter. The vision of this old man was vibrant and vivid. He seemed as real to me at the time as any human being. The quickest and simplest explanation is to say that he was a spirit visiting me. But I don't believe in spirits. What was it? What is the value of seeing such things? What do I learn, and how do I impart what I learn in my long, sprawling poems that I write out of these visions?

Visions seem to be cross-cultural. For instance, I have visualized being eaten by wolves, and this is consistent with some of the visions Siberian shamans have during initiation, according to Mircea Eliade in Shamanism. I have also frequently visited a lake of fire ringed by walls of fire under the earth. My guess is that a vision of this sort was the origin of the Christian hell. (It was not an unpleasant place to me. I didn't feel the heat of the fire. It was just very interesting.)

Because many visions are cross-cultural, I believe that they reside in certain nooks and crannies of human consciousness. Is the seat of this consciousness the human brain? I don't think so. My September 17 post deals with my thoughts about why the brain should not be considered the seat of consciousness. Briefly, I believe, along with many poets going back to the ancient Greeks with their muses, that my poetry does not come from "inside" me. Rather, I am struck by and act as the conduit for energies dispersed throughout the world.

What are these "energies"? I believe they are consciousness. With the panpsychists, a view that is becoming respectable within the academy, I believe that consciousness is a part of matter, albeit a small part in the case of a glob of mud. The things of the world are more or less conscious. This consciousness of other things we sense. Just as the heartbeat of two lovers begins to sync up, and the vibrations of various particles in a pile of sand begin to sync up, our consciousness syncs up with the things in the world around us. We sense what is going on around us through our bodies and mind. We can be attuned to what is happening or we can be out of tune with it. This happens in a level of consciousness that is usually below our awareness.

But not always. I wonder if mystics and zen masters are particularly attuned to the ways things sync up. Most claim to have seen that all existence forms a great unity, a Whole. I would argue that what we call "things" are just evanescent forms emerging from a Universal Consciousness. Part of this Consciousness moves through us as we create, subject to, of course, the specific cultural traditions we work within.

Just as poetry comes from outside us, I believe these visions do, too. I don't believe they come from me because events I could never anticipate and even tried to avoid nonetheless happened. Being eaten by wolves and then walking in my bloodied, dead body was one of them. I once asked a figure in one of these visions what such experiences were good for. I wanted to know if they wanted me to do something in the everyday world. This spirit said no, that the visions were to show me the truth.

These figures have, on occasion, lied to me, so it could be possible that this one was doing just that. But I don't think so. I think these visions are a way of seeing into realities obscured by our everyday world. They do offer a glimpse of the truth. Perhaps they come as a particular form from the Universal Consciousness, of which everything is a part. And what do they say to me? They show me that we change all the time, that the form we have today is not the form we will have tomorrow. They show me that time and space are relative to my particular standpoint, that they are the creations of the everyday world and do not accord with deeper realities. They have shown me that death, as the absolute cessation of consciousness, is itself an illusion. They have shown me that living and dying and eating are a part of a grand Whole.

I say this because I keep getting eaten in my visions, yet I live. I don't believe in a soul, so I don't believe my soul survives the death of my body. Rather, I believe that the temporary conscious form that is now my body and mind will live on in the memories of the people who knew me and in the influences I have created throughout my life. I will also live on in the bodies of the mites who eat me both now and after I die (bacteria eat me right now as I live as do mosquitoes and other insects),. Perhaps death is just the greatest transformation we go through, but it is not different in kind from the transformations in the rest of life.

Did I need visions to know this? Well, yes. They presented me with stark, dramatic, and unforgettable images that seared these realities into my being. It's one thing to simply know something. It's quite another to sense it with the fullness of your being. This is what visions have done for me. I share them in my poetry, which will be published under my real name in 2022.