He talks about all of the magical things that come to him during meditation. He’s a visionary, he says, piercing the veil between worlds in the multiverse and bringing back magical practices, which he spells, “magickal”. He says all of the right things, the things his listeners want to hear, but he does so trepidatiously and without confidence, for he is no confidence man. He is an honest man to the extent that he has had these experiences and wants them to be true. For them to be true, he must have retained his waking state consciousness whilst traveling and communicating with others in his mind’s eye. What he relates, however, has all the earmarks of dreamful sleep, but the powerful claims he makes hold no currency to his followers if he’s asleep.
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Why do we go to great pains to appear powerful? What are we holding onto? Is it for ourselves or for the other? Who benefits?
We all do, when our goal is to remain as we are, ego intact, as we seek this great and powerful claim of ultimate enlightenment. And make no mistake: that is our goal. We tiptoe toward what we already are or else we rush to it. But since we are already that, there’s nothing to approach; no speed necessary to get there.
Sometimes meditators fall asleep during meditation. They may dream many fantastic, vivid, and lucid things, but these are not the same as visions of varying quality experienced during meditation. Discerning dream and dream types from vision and vision types is healthy; reducing them all to the same thing the way so many scientists try to reduce the transcendent to physical processes is unhealthy.
Discernment is not judgement. Discernment is integral with understanding. Arguably there’s no bigger need for discernment than when understanding what and whom is speaking to you from within. Most of the time it is you in communication with yourself. Your dreams are telling you something you need to hear. This is no less magickal than the rarer occurrences of another quality of consciousness communicating with you, or seeing a vision not born of your brain is it? Such rarer occurrences only feel special because our culture denies them.
When we share what’s happening with us to be somebody, to be a visionary, we’re lost. Lost in a dream of visions, where the only communication is an echo of our voice.