Visualizations as a Method of Activating Matrices

As we have already discussed, active imagination, visualizations, and illumination are the ways in which the mind creates its reality. In other words, we live in an “imagined world” not in the sense of illusion and fantasy, but in the sense of the mechanism by which it arises. This is not the trendy claim that “thought is material” or that “wishes come true”; it is about the foundations of the world’s emergence as a description drawn from a homogeneous Medium — primal potentiality.

Such a vision lies at the foundation of the Magical worldview, which recognizes no reality other than the image, description born through the interaction of the mind and the Medium.

Accordingly, both the macrocosm and the psychocosm — the world we live in, and we ourselves as individuals — are products of description; in fact — they are visualizations grounded in the Medium. Therefore training in creative attention and in active, energetically charged imagination has always played a key role in the education and practice of Magic. At the same time it is very important not to rush to assert that “we simply made it all up,” because before that we “simply made up” this world and ourselves within it. One must learn to distinguish imagination as a cosmic creative force from fantasy as an energetically poor manipulation of empty forms, and, as in other areas of life, strive for maximum energetic potency.

The development of the mind itself, of course, is no exception. Active imagination is one of the foundations not only of Vision-Quest Rituals but also of Galdr, Goetia, Theurgy, and the “Yogas of the deities“.

For the latter, a long sequence of complex and detailed visualizations is generally a key tool (and also a skill to train).

In tantric practice the complexity and importance of visualizations reaches its peak. The precision of reconstruction not only in the mind but in relation to particular points in space or parts of one’s body — strictly defined images of symbolic figures — “seed syllables,” mantras, deities and their attributes — largely determines the practice’s effectiveness.

Scrupulous work on these images — their color, pose, and attributes — is a complex code by which the waking mind interacts with its depths, finding and activating the required states, experiences, and matrices. Yet despite this complexity, and at times occasional fancifulness, centuries of practice confirm the astonishing effectiveness of the tantric code. Each element of such a visualization is an appeal to a specific property, to a block of the mind’s energies; by stringing them along the ritual’s thread, a particular enlightened matrix arises.

In fact, such visualization is a figurative analogue of the spells and appeals of Nominative Magic; both methods, step by step, energy by energy, weave the pattern of new energies drawn into the ritual space and the space of the mind.

Modern Westerners, there is complete disregard for such “figurative” language. Yet it is precisely in that language that the subconscious addresses the mind in dreams and visions, and not knowing this language of inter-mind communication significantly narrows and impoverishes one’s existence, not to mention one’s prospects for development.

For the Magus, creative imagination is, above all, a tool to be developed and refined.