Visions Have Always Guided Us
We’re supposed to pretend like the world we live in isn’t the product of visions. We’re supposed to pretend like having visions is unusual, something that only ancient prophets and epileptics experienced. We’re supposed to pretend like visions are spiritual curiosities, something best left to new agers and monks.
Which is all a little insane to me.
Peter Kingsley makes a convincing case that all of western culture is downstream of Parmenides, and Parmenides’ work was based off of shamanic visions. When Plato reinterpreted his work and spread it further, a lot of that got stripped out and left behind, but it’s inseparable.
One of the most consequential events in western history was St. Paul’s vision on the road to Damascus. Hard to overstate just how much that shaped the world for the past couple millennia.
Another historically consequential one, Constantine’s vision of the cross. His vision and conversion to Christianity are hard to overstate, in terms of how they shaped the world.
Kekule discovered the structure of Benzene from a dream.
Modern psychology is based on Jung’s visions where he descended into the unconscious and learned from the archetypes.
The periodic table of elements took shape in one of Mendeleev’s dreams.
The city of Hanoi was made the capital of Vietnam when the emperor had a vision of a soaring dragon there.
Muhammed’s visions of the angel Jibreel, Joan of Arc’s visions of leading soldiers to war, Blaise Pascal’s night of fire, William Blake’s lifetime of visions poured into art and poetry, the visions of Our Lady of Fatima, Ignatius of Loyola’s strange series of visions that led to him founding the Jesuits, on and on and on and on.
Visions have always guided us — individuals and cultures have always been shaped by strange and ineffable visions. We try to brush that under the rug or pretend like it’s a relic of the past, but it just isn’t. We all know Einstein’s imaginal explorations, chasing beams of light, and how they gave him the theory of relativity. We’ve all heard of Ramanujan’s equations gifted from the Goddess. I guarantee you there are companies whose names you know, right now, that were founded based on visionary experiences. I guarantee you that there are political, economic, global decisions that affect your life and that were made based on dreams and visions.
Visions are a very normal part of human experience, they’re happening all the time. We’ve all been trained to close ourselves off to them, to ignore that entire side of human capacity, but it doesn’t take that much to get back to it, especially if you’re a vision-prone person in the first place. Imaginal inner work is making a comeback, coming out of the woodwork, breaking into the sunlight like flowers through cracks in concrete. People are recognizing something important here, more and more every month it seems.
A majority of the people I’m closest to have visions pretty regularly. Sure, that says more about my social circles than the world at large, but it does say something about the world at large. I don’t really hang out with the type of people you might think, based just on the fact that they’re visionaries. You wouldn’t be able to pick them out on the street, mostly. They’re not new-agey mystic types wearing prayer beads and smelling of herbs. They’re just people who found a natural area of experience and expression and stopped suppressing it.
I’m a little sick of trying to keep to polite fictions, when I’m talking in the world at large, where visions are rare or strange or not around anymore.
I’m also sick of the sister idea, that every vision is important or consequential or true in some literal outer-world sense.
Visions are like any other perception, any other sense faculty. Some things you hear are deeply important for the path your life will take; some things you hear are very important at the moment, but won’t matter much tomorrow or the day after; some of them don’t matter at all.
The same is true of visions. They’re just there. Some of them are deeply important to you, right now — but they don’t apply to anyone else’s world or actions. Some of them are more about the collective, and other people can and should hear them; some visions want to move through the world and nudge things in certain directions. Others are incomprehensible or useless. Some are actively harmful. Some may seem incomprehensible or harmful for years and years, and then suddenly one day something shifts, you remember the vision, and it reshapes your life from that day forward.
Trying to talk about visions with people, it’s hard to find ways past their reactions. Sometimes they cringe back and protect themselves. Sometimes they think that you have some attitude of prophetic certainty about them, rather than an exploratory curiosity. Sometimes you can watch in their eyes as they immediately drop you into a file marked Lunatics - Do Not Associate.
I don’t like the conclusion I’ve come to, but it’s the one that keeps coming up: for people to act normal about visions, we kinda gotta start talking more about visions. People who have them need to share them more, and they need to Be Normal About It.
This comes with its own trickiness, in that some visionary material — I don’t know how else to put this — doesn’t want to be talked about.
Sometimes something comes up, and you call up a friend to talk about it, and there’s this strong feeling of “nope, don’t talk about that one, that one’s only for you, at least for now.”
So talking about visions is also a matter of finding which ones do want to be shared, or at least don’t mind being shared, and sharing them in a normal way, without crossing boundaries into ones that want to be held close.
…I’m not always sure how to do that.
But I can try.
And so can you, if you recognize what I’m talking about in any of this — which I know for a fact a lot of you do.