1. Each person perceives the world marginally differently at each successive point in time and each generation of persons perceives the world collectively in a way different from other generations. To hold a truth from past experience as self-evident is absurd. New conditions create new truths and all conditions are, in some respect, new conditions.
2. Experience is more than language. All our senses and our sense of being are engaged in knowing the world. The word spoken is only a part of knowing and scarcely the most dominant or reliable part of it. The word written is more distant still from the word spoken in its representation of the true state of affairs in the world.
3. How we use a word and the context of the word is more important than the word itself. The text tells us nothing without the context in which the text is used. The text in itself is a false friend. Our use of the text is what matters.
4. Words can never capture the totality of human experience. Words are a simplification of experience and so of being in the world. To use a word is immediately to begin to tell a lie.
5. When we say that two things are the same, we are not able to say that they are the same, we are merely saying that it is convenient that we treat these two things as the same for our purposes and our purpose only derives from words if we choose to make words our purpose. Knowing our purpose beyond and behind words is a more valuable purpose than inventing a purpose from the words to hand.
6. The space that we exist in is a space in relation to our perception of that space. There are as many worlds as there are persons perceiving a world in which they perceive themselves as existing.
7. To define a thing is to remove it from its existence as experienced by a person in the world - definition is the begining of the process by which lies are told.
8. Existence is not logical. It merely exists.
9. Metaphysics cannot exist in words. It can only exist in experience, if it exists at all - which is to be doubted.
10. We are what we do in the world in the flow of time. We have no essence beyond our act in a moment of time and personality is an accumulation of such acts under conditions where the next act will not be precisely like any act ever done before.
Position Reserved - amateur philosophical and political news and reflections ... "Qui non intelligit aut discat aut taceat"
Saturday 6 September 2014
Saturday 30 August 2014
Freedom = Science + Rebellion
"The map is not the territory, the word is not the thing defined"
Some things that are obvious might need careful re-stating or else there will be misunderstandings between us that could prove fatal. After all, in a time of economic and political troubles, people do kill each other over misunderstandings.
All sense perception is an approximation of that which it senses. Since each person has a marginally different biological structure to their senses and of the brain that orders the senses, then each person is:
- i) approximating objective reality (on terms by which no person can ever know that reality except as an approximation expressed through mathematics or language which pre-suppose that a community of persons have agreed on rules that 'level out' personal perceptions into a pragmatic 'normality' that need not be identical with objective reality at all),
and,
- ii) constructing reality in a marginally different way from every other person so that the reality that is pragmatically effective socially is not necessarily either objective reality or the reality of the person whose situation is (possibly radically) different from other persons.
Practically (or pragmatically), a 'social reality' (a working tool for the ends of the majority of persons in a community for the majority of the time or for the ends of a minority which has managed to command the conditions of the majority) is possible.
However, such a reality is never 'true' except pragmatically i.e. its contingency is in-built by the very biological basis of sense impression and the braibn's ordering of data. Social reality is the most contingent of the three forms of reality (objective or mathematical, individual and community) because it is vulnerable to:
- a) the varying numbers of individual realities that enter into it at any one time;
- b) the degree to which such minds are willing to suspend belief in those aspects of their own reality that do not fit with the community's reality;
- c) the power structures by which some individual persons can impose their realities in a value hierarchy against other minds' realities;
- d) changes in internal objective realities (the waxing and waning of biological strengths) and their effect on minds;
- e) changes in external objective realities (facts of nature) and in the realities of members of the community as they individually face not only changes in internal and external objective reality but ...
- f) shifts in the ability of other minds to manipulate their reality, communicate those shifts (not necessarily verbally), and become aware of their own learned experience of socialised reality and of its degree of dissonance from their own individual reality.
In other words, we must start our analysis of reality not by distrusting the relationship between our reality and objective reality (which is an individual construction derived from the interaction of our own objective biological reality with physical reality) but by distrusting the relationship between socialised reality and our own reality.
Whereas our biology and our physical world set certain absolute limits on our perception and on our ability to create a framework for our perception, socialised reality sets limits that are contingent and constantly changing in a way that is far more volatile than 'natural' reality.
This instability of the social can be summarised thus:-
- a) limits set by our own lack of awareness of our situation: the limitation of blind acceptance or irrational understanding of the degree of choice and risk involved in asserting our own reality (often based on anxiety, fear and the deliberate withholding of knowledge by others);
- b) limits set by the 'imperial' aspirations of other minds whose own realities involve the attempt to dictate their victim's reality through the use of custom or habit (see c)) or a command of physical reality (the bending of physical reality to ensure the ability to deploy 'force' or 'manipulation' [i.e. in regard to sense impressions]);
- c) as a corollary of a), the acceptance of custom or habit, what might be called the 'drag of tradition', especially strong where tradition has become part of the armoury of 'imperial' minds with a stake in promoting conservatism;
- d) the limits set by language which is a social tool and not an individual tool (except for the purposes of wilful managing or manipulating social reality) and which, therefore, defines the person, especially in the form of 'shared texts', by reinventing reality for the sake of what is 'average' or 'dominant.
Ergo, individual freedom (i.e. a right state of individual reality) requires a right relationship with physical or objective reality (including the biological underpinnings of sense perception and idea-formation) and a right relationship with the social, which is one of permanent questioning criticism of the social's functioning value to the individual.
The right relationship with objective reality is a questioning respect which encompasses a right relationship with natural laws where they are scientifically and mathematically valid and with observable social phenomena where they take on mass characteristics (such as the flocking of humans in terms of the market or the community).
This right relationship also requires a right relationship with the individual's own abilities to perceive the world correctly and to analyse it. To know what one cannot or may not know because of the conformation of one's own biology is part of this right relationship. Some distrust of the senses, within reason, is wise.
The right relationship with socialised reality is one of permanent and questioning distrust. To understand social phenomena, including the social use of language and of texts, and the use by those skilled in language, texts and the manipulation of sense perception and brain operations of their tools, is not to be construed as acceptance.
The operations of humans en masse (likened to the flocking of birds or the herd behaviour of wildebeest or the pack actions of wolves) must be understood but not taken as necessary conduct for the free individual - the aim is merely not to be sent awry or be eaten, indeed, to be cleverer than the flock, the herd or the pack.
Similarly, the superior 'fire-power' (control over objective reality) or skills of the few who command the many are worthy of no intrinsic respect but are simply taken to be a 'fact in the world' which must be worked around, undermined or defeated as suits the individual reality of the person observing a social reality that is out of kilter with itself.
It may be that an individual reality is in perfect accord with the flock or with the interests of those with 'fire power' but this can only be meaningful if a person chooses with knowledge to be a conservative or the servant of a master.
Otherwise, the individual reality (the person) has become little more than an adjunct of a socialised reality. They have ceased to exist as a person. They have become socialised reality - a passive component of it like the Borg. They have reduced themselves to the level of the animal.
Conservatism and serfdom are not irrational options. They may be objectively sensible relations if the command over objective reality by the social (either as herd-like community or as a community of betas ruled by alphas) is a fact but the 'victim' in such cases should know their vulnerability and should show their teeth as soon as objective conditions allow.
To internalise socialised reality without needing to do so is asking to be the conscripted soldier, the cheap labour, the bored congregation member ... and so the struggle to preserve a right relationship to objective reality (a respect for science and power) and to socialised reality (a resistance to its claims) is the basis of all human freedom.
Some things that are obvious might need careful re-stating or else there will be misunderstandings between us that could prove fatal. After all, in a time of economic and political troubles, people do kill each other over misunderstandings.
All sense perception is an approximation of that which it senses. Since each person has a marginally different biological structure to their senses and of the brain that orders the senses, then each person is:
- i) approximating objective reality (on terms by which no person can ever know that reality except as an approximation expressed through mathematics or language which pre-suppose that a community of persons have agreed on rules that 'level out' personal perceptions into a pragmatic 'normality' that need not be identical with objective reality at all),
and,
- ii) constructing reality in a marginally different way from every other person so that the reality that is pragmatically effective socially is not necessarily either objective reality or the reality of the person whose situation is (possibly radically) different from other persons.
Practically (or pragmatically), a 'social reality' (a working tool for the ends of the majority of persons in a community for the majority of the time or for the ends of a minority which has managed to command the conditions of the majority) is possible.
However, such a reality is never 'true' except pragmatically i.e. its contingency is in-built by the very biological basis of sense impression and the braibn's ordering of data. Social reality is the most contingent of the three forms of reality (objective or mathematical, individual and community) because it is vulnerable to:
- a) the varying numbers of individual realities that enter into it at any one time;
- b) the degree to which such minds are willing to suspend belief in those aspects of their own reality that do not fit with the community's reality;
- c) the power structures by which some individual persons can impose their realities in a value hierarchy against other minds' realities;
- d) changes in internal objective realities (the waxing and waning of biological strengths) and their effect on minds;
- e) changes in external objective realities (facts of nature) and in the realities of members of the community as they individually face not only changes in internal and external objective reality but ...
- f) shifts in the ability of other minds to manipulate their reality, communicate those shifts (not necessarily verbally), and become aware of their own learned experience of socialised reality and of its degree of dissonance from their own individual reality.
In other words, we must start our analysis of reality not by distrusting the relationship between our reality and objective reality (which is an individual construction derived from the interaction of our own objective biological reality with physical reality) but by distrusting the relationship between socialised reality and our own reality.
Whereas our biology and our physical world set certain absolute limits on our perception and on our ability to create a framework for our perception, socialised reality sets limits that are contingent and constantly changing in a way that is far more volatile than 'natural' reality.
This instability of the social can be summarised thus:-
- a) limits set by our own lack of awareness of our situation: the limitation of blind acceptance or irrational understanding of the degree of choice and risk involved in asserting our own reality (often based on anxiety, fear and the deliberate withholding of knowledge by others);
- b) limits set by the 'imperial' aspirations of other minds whose own realities involve the attempt to dictate their victim's reality through the use of custom or habit (see c)) or a command of physical reality (the bending of physical reality to ensure the ability to deploy 'force' or 'manipulation' [i.e. in regard to sense impressions]);
- c) as a corollary of a), the acceptance of custom or habit, what might be called the 'drag of tradition', especially strong where tradition has become part of the armoury of 'imperial' minds with a stake in promoting conservatism;
- d) the limits set by language which is a social tool and not an individual tool (except for the purposes of wilful managing or manipulating social reality) and which, therefore, defines the person, especially in the form of 'shared texts', by reinventing reality for the sake of what is 'average' or 'dominant.
Ergo, individual freedom (i.e. a right state of individual reality) requires a right relationship with physical or objective reality (including the biological underpinnings of sense perception and idea-formation) and a right relationship with the social, which is one of permanent questioning criticism of the social's functioning value to the individual.
The right relationship with objective reality is a questioning respect which encompasses a right relationship with natural laws where they are scientifically and mathematically valid and with observable social phenomena where they take on mass characteristics (such as the flocking of humans in terms of the market or the community).
This right relationship also requires a right relationship with the individual's own abilities to perceive the world correctly and to analyse it. To know what one cannot or may not know because of the conformation of one's own biology is part of this right relationship. Some distrust of the senses, within reason, is wise.
The right relationship with socialised reality is one of permanent and questioning distrust. To understand social phenomena, including the social use of language and of texts, and the use by those skilled in language, texts and the manipulation of sense perception and brain operations of their tools, is not to be construed as acceptance.
The operations of humans en masse (likened to the flocking of birds or the herd behaviour of wildebeest or the pack actions of wolves) must be understood but not taken as necessary conduct for the free individual - the aim is merely not to be sent awry or be eaten, indeed, to be cleverer than the flock, the herd or the pack.
Similarly, the superior 'fire-power' (control over objective reality) or skills of the few who command the many are worthy of no intrinsic respect but are simply taken to be a 'fact in the world' which must be worked around, undermined or defeated as suits the individual reality of the person observing a social reality that is out of kilter with itself.
It may be that an individual reality is in perfect accord with the flock or with the interests of those with 'fire power' but this can only be meaningful if a person chooses with knowledge to be a conservative or the servant of a master.
Otherwise, the individual reality (the person) has become little more than an adjunct of a socialised reality. They have ceased to exist as a person. They have become socialised reality - a passive component of it like the Borg. They have reduced themselves to the level of the animal.
Conservatism and serfdom are not irrational options. They may be objectively sensible relations if the command over objective reality by the social (either as herd-like community or as a community of betas ruled by alphas) is a fact but the 'victim' in such cases should know their vulnerability and should show their teeth as soon as objective conditions allow.
To internalise socialised reality without needing to do so is asking to be the conscripted soldier, the cheap labour, the bored congregation member ... and so the struggle to preserve a right relationship to objective reality (a respect for science and power) and to socialised reality (a resistance to its claims) is the basis of all human freedom.
Saturday 23 August 2014
On Kundalini, the Serpent ...
Our Tantric series has been designed, in part, to transliterate an Eastern way of thinking into Western philosophical language. We do not think it useful to mask phenomena with obscure terms derived from exotic languages and faraway cultures - what I call the namastisation of language.
Not 'Namaste', please, but 'Yours Sincerely' at the end of a communication ... and yet the concept of Kundalini remains useful because there is no Western equivalent. The Qabala perhaps expresses the same concept to a degree but with an excess of intellect involved.
Kundalini, a serpentine Eastern goddess, conceptually represents the flow of psychic power coursing through the body from root to perceived transcendence far better than anything that has emerged out of late nineteenth century Vienna or mid twentieth century California.
We do require some term to describe how it feels to have an energy flow from Will in the mind down through the body and back up to the brain as a sensation. This serpent goddess and the identification of nodal body points called Chakras is the best that we have at this time.
Exactly what is a Chakra and what is not is disputed by the 'authorities' but the matter is probably best considered expansively as what nodal points seem to work for each person regardless of doctrine.
What flows of energy are felt between nodal points are equally a personal matter. The point is only that there are nodal points and that there are flows.
The consequent process of psychic management is essentially one of 'visualisation' - a mental concentration on nodal points and on flows in order to work inner change. We will return to visualisation later because not everyone can visualise easily and 'pure' visualisation overlaps with narrative dreaming.
The traditions might best be regarded as teaching methods but a certain autodidacticism is reasonable once the principles are established. Sometimes one has to accept a weak theory from a 'guru' in order to get access to the technique but one should always be cynical about theory. Ideologies rarely reflect all reality.
Let us demystify the chakras by translating the six widely established nodal points into language we can all understand:-
The concept of Kundalini as an unwinding serpent captures this process conceptually as libidinous energy operating beyond thought and reason as one's very core in action. All the attempts to conceptualise this process analogically and allegorically come down to variations on this theme.
We have the earthiness of our arse and the liquidity of our libido working through the furnace of our gut to float free in our heart and into the sound-space of our throat - whatever! The symbolism is all very well for teaching but it obscures the path for the natural 'adept' who simply feels what is true in the core process.
The Nath sect's simplification into sexual organs, heart and head is equally intuitively right even if simplistic - libidinous drive, emotional somatic response and thought all driven towards the transcendent point that makes life more than just the drudgery of duty and social obligation.
The root or point between arse and genitals, the earthing point, is the threshold between being human and being unconscious matter, effectively between life and death. The Kundalini is cthonic, not accidentally a serpent, coming out of the Ground of Being to become transcendent from the death to which we will return.
What is being said here is that transcendence is the precise opposite of death, the counter-point where, albeit briefly perhaps and sometimes accidentally, the human being experiences the life-changing illusion of immortality, the eternal and the absolute - in a rewiring of the brain that permits new ways of seeing reality.
This brings us on to technique. Each of the traditional techniques is fundamentally physiological rather than spiritual (unlike, say Christian prayer). This gives us a clue to what is going on here. This is not an attempt to seek help from outside as in the Christian tradition but an active attempt to manipulate one's own matter.
This is not to say that 'prayer' does not work to achieve some desirable ends - including the suspension of disbelief to effect healing - but only that transformation of mind, rather than of body, requires a transformation of body through an aggressive engagement with it.
Physical re-positioning (yoga) and breathing exercises (pranayama) are rigorous, potentially dangerous, techniques that manipulate physiology in order to trigger biochemical change.
The rousing of the Kundalini through pranayama (and the equivalent Taoist exercises) are proven techniques for driving the sense of 'flow' upwards through the body. The surrounding analyses of what is going on may be absurd but that something is going on is a fact from the ground.
If symbolism and ritual enter into the process, this is based on the suggestibility of the body to the mind (as of the mind to the body). Pure visualisation can achieve transcendent ends as can pure physical technique while combinations of both may be regarded as 'pure'. What floats your boat is all that is required.
Different body/minds (aka persons) will have different abilities to 'think' somatically and conceptually. Most minds tend to fall on either side of dead centre of the continuum between the two.
The truth is that the body/mind is variably pre-geared to the possibility of transcendence and that it is the will to technique that is more vital than the precise method. Some literally 'yearn' for transcendent experience and other have no interest at all - neither type is superior to the other, simply different.
One might be aroused by sounds or words (which have physical aspects as sound waves), by mental images, by sexual excitation, by asceticism but the central point is that, by whatever means, a flow of energy is ready to roll and it just needs the trigger that suits that person.
The central question is always - who am I? Am I centred on the physical or the mental, on mind-emptying or mind-filling or on some combination of both? Katon Shual (Mogg Morgan) has a useful mental model, derived from Eastern practice, reproducing one's own body/mind as a visualised external temple.
Part of the success in this and other visualisations lies in the fixedness of perception inwardness away from external sensory distraction. All models - physical and mental - rely on a reduction of sensory inputs and their replacement by repetitiveness of function (stillness or concentration) or a fixedness of internal imagery.
It is the removal of the mind from the process of editing out extraneous data (including memory data) that permits that same mind to turn inward towards the body and so allow the flow of internal energy to start to work the 'non-magic' that will eventually result in the transcendent experience or such near-analogues that make the hard labour worthwhile.
This is also close to 'pathworking' in the neo-pagan community and is a technique that extends far beyond the usual tantric suspects. Or it is 'guided imagery' for those who see it as a technique for life without any attempt to add a spiritual gloss. Intensity of the experience can build up into a trance-like status of perceived non-magical 'magical' power.
A real adept at visualisation can construct whole worlds that are coherent, meaningful and perfectly reflective of specific personal issues, constructing a flow that mimics the 'goddess' Kundalini. She can create 'gods' or 'goddesses' integrated with herself to reflect and express aspects that are hard otherwise to articulate.
Personally, I have a set of separate coherent worlds all accessible through a defined portal and each framed by a narrative. There is a physicality about these worlds that can take them to the edge of and even over the line of alternate reality, usually with some symbolic starting point or core image.
As I get older and resolve conflicts, I need the narratives less and the process centres on a 'state'. But the given task of the narrative is to reproduce those aspects of the unconscious that are not merely stress-relieving but permit psychological machinery to emerge which can face fears or uncover truths.
Ultimately, while the narrative visualisation process is never likely to trigger transcendence in itself, it can create the conditions by which other things can trigger transformation.
Whether managed through a therapeutic or self-managed engagement with the body or through an imaginative re-ordering of the mind, something can be done to sense and manage the flow of energy within the body that can result ultimately in individuation or transcendence - which is really self-possession.
Although Wilhelm Reich may have identified the disease of blocked flow in the West, the best therapeutic cures still remain Eastern - as adaptations, without the cultural baggage, of Taoist and Tantric technique. And we still have no better alternative to Eastern terms, Kundalini or Ch'i, in describing the experience and the process.
Not 'Namaste', please, but 'Yours Sincerely' at the end of a communication ... and yet the concept of Kundalini remains useful because there is no Western equivalent. The Qabala perhaps expresses the same concept to a degree but with an excess of intellect involved.
Kundalini, a serpentine Eastern goddess, conceptually represents the flow of psychic power coursing through the body from root to perceived transcendence far better than anything that has emerged out of late nineteenth century Vienna or mid twentieth century California.
We do require some term to describe how it feels to have an energy flow from Will in the mind down through the body and back up to the brain as a sensation. This serpent goddess and the identification of nodal body points called Chakras is the best that we have at this time.
Exactly what is a Chakra and what is not is disputed by the 'authorities' but the matter is probably best considered expansively as what nodal points seem to work for each person regardless of doctrine.
What flows of energy are felt between nodal points are equally a personal matter. The point is only that there are nodal points and that there are flows.
The consequent process of psychic management is essentially one of 'visualisation' - a mental concentration on nodal points and on flows in order to work inner change. We will return to visualisation later because not everyone can visualise easily and 'pure' visualisation overlaps with narrative dreaming.
The traditions might best be regarded as teaching methods but a certain autodidacticism is reasonable once the principles are established. Sometimes one has to accept a weak theory from a 'guru' in order to get access to the technique but one should always be cynical about theory. Ideologies rarely reflect all reality.
Let us demystify the chakras by translating the six widely established nodal points into language we can all understand:-
- The root of the system is where we start. It is basically the near-arse where all the tension lies that needs exploding upwards. It is as if one shits one's liberation upwards. Waste out, enlightenment. up.The root, where we expel waste, is our link to the matter of the world through our adding to it. The metaphorical link with money and stress, or rather to our need to eat to add to a messy matter which takes us away from ourselves, is apposite.
- The sex organs are the driver for enlightenment. It is our actual unconscious and libidinous centre. It is from where we may decide to move no further. It is the bit of us that we are socially and unconsciously (and incorrectly) inclined to see as monstrous and inchoate. Ordering this towards individuation and self is the necessary precursor to the next stage
- The third chakra is the navel - rather it is our centre and our gut. It can be lower down in the abdomen in some and higher in the stomach in others but it is our bodily material core when we bother to think about it
- The heart is not the beating life-giver but where we feel high stress and emotion. It needs to be calmed for the next stage psychotherapeutically when our relationship to matter, the unconscious and to our 'root' have been dealt with.
- The throat is the place from which the sounds arising from our heart are made real. It is the place of communication with existence, a connection with being. It is perhaps the hardest to understand.
- The 'third eye' is the expression of that mind as pure power, a surge of ultimately libidinous energy that not so much commands the world as makes the world irrelevant except in the light of the mind's command. Its action is non-magical because the world of matter itself is not changed but the view of the world is transformed - and so the world is transformed insofar as the world is imagined and magic returns by the back door.
The concept of Kundalini as an unwinding serpent captures this process conceptually as libidinous energy operating beyond thought and reason as one's very core in action. All the attempts to conceptualise this process analogically and allegorically come down to variations on this theme.
We have the earthiness of our arse and the liquidity of our libido working through the furnace of our gut to float free in our heart and into the sound-space of our throat - whatever! The symbolism is all very well for teaching but it obscures the path for the natural 'adept' who simply feels what is true in the core process.
The Nath sect's simplification into sexual organs, heart and head is equally intuitively right even if simplistic - libidinous drive, emotional somatic response and thought all driven towards the transcendent point that makes life more than just the drudgery of duty and social obligation.
The root or point between arse and genitals, the earthing point, is the threshold between being human and being unconscious matter, effectively between life and death. The Kundalini is cthonic, not accidentally a serpent, coming out of the Ground of Being to become transcendent from the death to which we will return.
What is being said here is that transcendence is the precise opposite of death, the counter-point where, albeit briefly perhaps and sometimes accidentally, the human being experiences the life-changing illusion of immortality, the eternal and the absolute - in a rewiring of the brain that permits new ways of seeing reality.
This brings us on to technique. Each of the traditional techniques is fundamentally physiological rather than spiritual (unlike, say Christian prayer). This gives us a clue to what is going on here. This is not an attempt to seek help from outside as in the Christian tradition but an active attempt to manipulate one's own matter.
This is not to say that 'prayer' does not work to achieve some desirable ends - including the suspension of disbelief to effect healing - but only that transformation of mind, rather than of body, requires a transformation of body through an aggressive engagement with it.
Physical re-positioning (yoga) and breathing exercises (pranayama) are rigorous, potentially dangerous, techniques that manipulate physiology in order to trigger biochemical change.
The rousing of the Kundalini through pranayama (and the equivalent Taoist exercises) are proven techniques for driving the sense of 'flow' upwards through the body. The surrounding analyses of what is going on may be absurd but that something is going on is a fact from the ground.
If symbolism and ritual enter into the process, this is based on the suggestibility of the body to the mind (as of the mind to the body). Pure visualisation can achieve transcendent ends as can pure physical technique while combinations of both may be regarded as 'pure'. What floats your boat is all that is required.
Different body/minds (aka persons) will have different abilities to 'think' somatically and conceptually. Most minds tend to fall on either side of dead centre of the continuum between the two.
The truth is that the body/mind is variably pre-geared to the possibility of transcendence and that it is the will to technique that is more vital than the precise method. Some literally 'yearn' for transcendent experience and other have no interest at all - neither type is superior to the other, simply different.
One might be aroused by sounds or words (which have physical aspects as sound waves), by mental images, by sexual excitation, by asceticism but the central point is that, by whatever means, a flow of energy is ready to roll and it just needs the trigger that suits that person.
The central question is always - who am I? Am I centred on the physical or the mental, on mind-emptying or mind-filling or on some combination of both? Katon Shual (Mogg Morgan) has a useful mental model, derived from Eastern practice, reproducing one's own body/mind as a visualised external temple.
Part of the success in this and other visualisations lies in the fixedness of perception inwardness away from external sensory distraction. All models - physical and mental - rely on a reduction of sensory inputs and their replacement by repetitiveness of function (stillness or concentration) or a fixedness of internal imagery.
It is the removal of the mind from the process of editing out extraneous data (including memory data) that permits that same mind to turn inward towards the body and so allow the flow of internal energy to start to work the 'non-magic' that will eventually result in the transcendent experience or such near-analogues that make the hard labour worthwhile.
This is also close to 'pathworking' in the neo-pagan community and is a technique that extends far beyond the usual tantric suspects. Or it is 'guided imagery' for those who see it as a technique for life without any attempt to add a spiritual gloss. Intensity of the experience can build up into a trance-like status of perceived non-magical 'magical' power.
A real adept at visualisation can construct whole worlds that are coherent, meaningful and perfectly reflective of specific personal issues, constructing a flow that mimics the 'goddess' Kundalini. She can create 'gods' or 'goddesses' integrated with herself to reflect and express aspects that are hard otherwise to articulate.
Personally, I have a set of separate coherent worlds all accessible through a defined portal and each framed by a narrative. There is a physicality about these worlds that can take them to the edge of and even over the line of alternate reality, usually with some symbolic starting point or core image.
As I get older and resolve conflicts, I need the narratives less and the process centres on a 'state'. But the given task of the narrative is to reproduce those aspects of the unconscious that are not merely stress-relieving but permit psychological machinery to emerge which can face fears or uncover truths.
Ultimately, while the narrative visualisation process is never likely to trigger transcendence in itself, it can create the conditions by which other things can trigger transformation.
Whether managed through a therapeutic or self-managed engagement with the body or through an imaginative re-ordering of the mind, something can be done to sense and manage the flow of energy within the body that can result ultimately in individuation or transcendence - which is really self-possession.
Although Wilhelm Reich may have identified the disease of blocked flow in the West, the best therapeutic cures still remain Eastern - as adaptations, without the cultural baggage, of Taoist and Tantric technique. And we still have no better alternative to Eastern terms, Kundalini or Ch'i, in describing the experience and the process.
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