đŸ–Œ A Picture is NOT worth 1000 Words — the Buddha Dharma is a Tradition of Words — A Guide for Those Who Can’t Visualize (Aphantasia)

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One of my pracitces involves visualizing a tibetan letter, which has a certain complex form. At the beginning I couldn’t visualize it at all.
What worked after a couple of days was using the “after-image” of looking at it on the screen, then closing my eyes for a few seconds. “Flashing” back and forth and then trying to “redraw” parts of the image with eyes closed helped a lot.
At a second stage, I noticed that the shape (or even parts of the shape of the letter) had a certain “feel” to it. This “feel” can be connected to and recalled.
I recommend to try for a couple days and take small steps.

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This worked for me too. It seems to involve creating new pathways in the brain and then reinforcing them. I find as I get older I forget that I can still learn, but then I read a post by KhyungMar or Steve_Gleason and remember that I can.

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Cost/benefit analysis unfavorable, doesn’t seem worth the bother

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For what it’s worth:

https://boardgamestips.com/popular/can-you-self-diagnose-aphantasia/

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really great article, thank you for sharing it

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Pretty cool this would pop up. I 100% have this and just in the past two days I’ve been discussing it with my mom because I believe she has it too.

Will have to search through this for things that will better help her understand aphantasia.

I discovered having it after having a conversation with my wife regarding visualization. To my surprise after 30+ years i found it was abnormal to experience 100% blackness.

To me it was similar to when I first discovered glasses in my teenage years. I have -0.7 vision so it was not bad enough that I went to the doctors as a child but when I went to an eye doctor seeing though their corrective lenses was surprising.

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I dont think its a coincidence


I wonder if people who have this have more vivid dream states?

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Really like this article, thank you for sharing that.

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Great advice! Its like hitting the gym to get the mind in shape.

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Thanks Barry this is very helpful

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In High school, in my prime, I would say I was close to a 1 or a 2, but initially I was at a 4 or 5.

The thing that dramatically changed this scale was finding a book at the library on memory techniques that involved visualization, and working for many hours on these techniques.

Not sure if you can remember being a child and playing with toys like legos, dolls, stuffed animals, or trucks, but if you can remember the toys you used to play with, odds are you may have been using some level of visualization and imagination back then. If you were, then with lots of practice, you may be able to get those skills back.

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Let’s face it, the modern electric, online, virtual world fosters visual stimulation with little in the way of mental imagery advancement. I remember growing up having people talk about how great radio was because it really stimulated their creative memory, and how TV did not.

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You absolutely read my mind, I was going to mention that to @ArthurG as well, that the millenial generation, and generations younger than that practically grew up with mutliple screens in their faces every day of their lives.

Being an older millenial, I feel very blessed to have not have had access to a cell phone or smart phone in high school.

I like the visualization advice @KhyungMar gave to @ArthurG . I would also reccomend doing this with an colored object against a contrasting color background: Like a yellow banana on a blue placemat, or a green apple on an orange piece of papper. The sharp contrast can really help make the outlines of the image stick in the memory, even if the color does not transfer over at first. Lookijg at the object, then closing eyes, and repeating this over and over, kind of gives the outline of the object a ‘ghostlike’ presence in your mind, (invisible, but with a subtle outline) where its there and not there at the same time, and at first made of the same coloered material of the minds eye, but has some subtle shape of that material, and very subtle contrast, almost none.

Difficult to describe. But if you can get the shape to form in the mind material, you can then with practice work to color it in. At first the color will only last for a few miliseconds, but with time and lots of practice, it will start to stay colored for a few seconds or longer.

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I have joined Night Club just recently after reading “Dream Yoga,” and started a thread on my throat chakra and inability to have vivid imagination here. @_Barry suggested this thread, thanks _Barry!

So I have a few questions for all who have aphantasia.

Do you have a throat ‘issue’ or tightness there?
I do; it started about 13 years ago. Throat tightness as if I have a ball stuck in my throat.

Have you had aphantasia since birth, or did it set in later in life?
With my throat issue/thightness came lack of visual imagination. On the scale above, I used to be a vivid 1 (in dreams and daydreams), now I am an absolute 5. 100% pitch black when I close my eyes. Also, I do have vivid dreams from time to time, but mostly I remember that I had a vivid dream; details fade fast. Dream Yoga gave me some insight into this, and your comments in this thread. Thank you!

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It may be something relating to your throat. I have noticed a decline in visualizations in my own life as I age, but I think that may also be due to the fact that I was not practicing as much as I did backmwhen I was in school, and my mind was doijg much more rigorous mental workouts.

One way to test your theory, may be to pick up a good book (a classic?) that is fictional and easy to read like The Great Gatasby or Farenheit 451, and see if when you read it, your mind gets engaged and can visualize some of the scenes as you get lost in the words.

I think the placebo/nocebo effects are very real, as is the self forfilling prophecy, so if you believe that you can no longer do something, it may severely limit you. Might be more profitable to believe that your imagination/visualization abilities are dormant, and need some stimulation and invigoration.

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Beloved Arthur,
Thank you for sharing.
I’m an intuition teacher since 2017.
As you can imagine, I have heard some people saying “I don’t see anything” when their eyes were closed.
I took this into my heart and it was a long process.
Then I watched a brilliant video from António Damásio (neurologist) and “a-ha”! I confirmed his explanation with my experience:
Our MEMORIES come most of the times through imagetics.
memories are stimulus: the positive ones we want to find, the negatives to avoid.
In the IMAGINATION process we recover and manipulate those “images” (memories) and these are our main source of CREATIVITY, which is our ability to represent memories.
Some people FEEL their memories and that’s their way of accessing and playing with them.

After grasping this I started doing an exercise that made the “I don’t see anything” disappear!
I asked the person to visualize the door of their house opening.
And even though they would not SEE it as if they were watching TV (I came to realize that this was the main misconception people had - they expected to see things as they see it on TV), they could indeed push the memory and play with it.

Wanna try it?

  1. close your eyes;
  2. breath profoundly three times and relax deeply;
  3. bring the memory of your home’s door opening. and imagine a bright light coming in to your home;
  4. now bring the memory of someone you love dearly and imagine that person smiling or speaking;
  5. now bring the memory of a place in nature and its smells;
  6. now bring the memory of coffee - the taste and the smell.

With the extra memory exercises (4, 5 and 6) you can learn if you are more a person who brings memories with smell or sound :wink: I learned in NLP (Neuro-Linguistic Programming) that we have FIVE main ways of receiving our memories: seeing; listening, feeling, smelling and tasting.

How was that for you? Curious to know :slight_smile:

Blessings :slight_smile:

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Really great advice.

Not too long ago a man with Aphantasia shared with Andrew an experience of a vision, where a Goddess showed him true love. I think the man had never been able to visualize anything in his life, and this vision was crystal clear, and apparently pretty long, almost like a dream. (She had sex with him, it wasnt carnal sex, but something deeper and much more spiritual).

@BlessingsDeers what are the top books you can reccomened on cultivating intuition?

I asked Andrew this before and he said meditation. I agree, but I got to believe there are other exercises that can be done as well that help it grow.

Thought about you while out camping during the week of the last full moon. I saw 2 female deers with 2 very young baby deers in an empty forest preserve parking lot on july 4th. They were so beautiful and captivating and peaceful. That coupled with seeing the most beautiful petroglyph of a deer I have ever seen, close too a 1000 yrs old, was a very meaningful synchronicity. Will try to post pics later.

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please post the pics of the deers
 wonderful :slight_smile:

Amazing dream :slight_smile: wonderfully explained how we capture memories - everyone in his unique way. True love is a delightful memory/energy to bring :slight_smile:

the most important recommendation is the one that I shared for overcoming the “visualization insecurity syndrome” :slight_smile: also for sure meditating is wonderful for sharpening your intuition :slight_smile:

some books:
» mine “Poder Intuitivo” (intuitive power) :smiley: (it’s only published and written in Portuguese, ups) it explains the whole context of exploring intuition:
Being able to Relax;
Being Human;
Exploring your inner world - and being conscious of the inner archetypes and how to balance them;
Facing the gifts and shadows;
Unifying different intelligence: child like wisdom and the adult structure together;
Playing the social game - enjoying the masks when needed and letting them go in intimacy;
Seeing beyond the masks;
Inquiring on who we truly are;
Wisdom in the hands (I share several researches that empower our hands as collectors of information);
Techniques where you don’t see the object, or questions and intuitively guess what it is, or the answer to the question - inspirations on this one:
Artofliving.org - Kids Do Amazing Things - Intuition Process | Art of Living - YouTube

» there’s one wonderful book from Patricia Einstein (from Brazil) but it’s not published anymore and I don’t think it was translated into English;

» there’s this article from AntĂłnio DamĂĄsio that might be helpful: https://www.science.org/content/article/brains-behind-intuition

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Reminds me of a school I used to work at many years ago, now called The Circle School, it is one of the Ashoka Changemaker Schools..

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Thank you so much for providing all this great information and resources.

Wish I spoke Portuguese, :pensive:

Pics are not the best quality, wasnt able to photograph them in the parking lot, was too caught up in the momemnt and by the time i remembered to pull out and turn on camera, a strangers car pulled up and spooked the girls into the woods.

Mama and baby drinking:

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(Shes sniffing air for my scent I think)
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(thats not a Bulls Eye)

Really love how they were able to depict the face and tale, its unmistakably a deer,

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the babies were so little and beautiful.

I had completely forgot until today that the second or 3rd night I was hiking back to my site at night, and it was light out enought that i didnt need a flash light, but dark enough for the lightning bugs to come out. Wish I had a camera on me. The forest was flickering with multiple glows all around ever 1 second, no joke, no hyberbole, I have never seen lightning bugs so active in my entire life! “The Whole forest is light up light Christmas time, in like some crazy psychadellic way”

It was a treat that words dont do it justice.

I just googled “lightning bug swarms” and these videos are exactly what I saw. My jaw dropped when I learned the name of this very special species of Lightning bug,
Jung I think would really dig this species of beatle, what a crazy SYNCHRONICITY!:

I wasnt in the Smoky Mountains, but the terrain was very similiar:

Pretty cool to see a visual manifestation of mother nature communicating, and awe inspiring Her showing just how much life was in the woods, and this was just one speciies of insect. “you cant explain it, you have to see it”

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