Visualizations, guided imagery and meditations through an external authority corrupt your senses and manipulate your mind.
The leader-teacher gives you guided visualizations and imagery, and affirmations which creates your experience. The language and images used “seed the experience” and validates your belief in the external authority.
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What I mean by “seeding the experience” is: the teacher guides practitioners in a reinterpretation of bodily sensations, feelings, or imagination. The teacher and his teachings interpret the student’s sensations or feelings. Practitioners then attribute their experiences and perceptions as defined by the master-teacher. There is, then, no self-realization. These experiences are merely what the external authority has framed them to be for us. Student-disciples therefore credit their experiences as proof of the master’s teaching. They keep practicing, keep committing time and money to the teacher-master and his organization. Students believe falsely that their experiences are their “own”, their “self-realization”. This process of suggestion occurs gradually. Like the frog that slowly and unknowingly is boiled by sitting in a pot of water as the flame continues to heat up.
Practice of guru-given visualizations or guided meditations, over many hours or years, tends to produce brain-washed followers. That is, the practitioner’s perceptions of reality are corrupted. The teacher undermines the self-trust of students. Disciples are taught to distrust their senses. The master then supposedly has the correct, enlightened interpretations of reality. When the student’s ability to perceive reality of the world as it is through the senses gets corrupted, then it’s fairly easy for the spiritual teacher or enlightened master to manipulate followers.
Here’s an example of “seeding the experience” through guided visualization.
Visualizing Tunnel to Eternity
A visualization technique I learned and practiced while I was a monk of Self-Realization Fellowship, the organization founded by famous Yogi Paramahansa Yogananda, was[1]:
Practice the meditation techniques of Self-Realization Fellowship and get yourself into a deep meditative state (e.g. put yourself into a self-hypnotic state where your mind is passive-suggestive, uncritical, non-analytical). Then concentrate (will and imagine) by focusing your attention at the point between the eyebrows and visualizing you are inside a 30 foot diameter white tunnel. Then imagine yourself racing through this tunnel of white light. As you race forward through the tunnel see at the end of the tunnel a blue light about 1/2 the diameter of the white tunnel.
Race even faster through the center of the blue tunnel. Speeding through the blue tunnel surrounded by the outer white tunnel, visualize at end of the middle of the blue tunnel a tiny five-pointed gold star. Merge yourself into the center of the gold star and feel yourself expanding into the gold light. As you visualize and feel yourself in this gold star in the center of a blue circle surrounded by a halo of white light feel, imagine that your body, the room, house, city, country, all countries, the world, the vast cosmos is engulfed and pulsates with this light within you that is expanding and radiating at the point between your eyebrows.
This Tunnel to Eternity visualization is an example of “seeding the experience”. Students imagine in a suggestive, passive frame of mind that meditation and the master’s words are real, more real than their sense experiences. By regular practice of meditation, visualization, and affirmations students may periodically see colored lights (e.g. purported to possibly be the astral or spiritual-eye, a sign of spiritual progress) and an imagine to feel themselves expanding in spiritual consciousness.
When students have spiritual experiences (see lights or images or divine feelings) their seeded experiences are entirely implanted by the external authority. There is no self-realization as the student is controlled by the language and interpretations of reality espoused by the external authority. Actually, nobody may be able to escape the conditioning of external authorities. However, when we admit this fact at least we may momentarily see the machinations and manipulations of external authorities who claim to know what is best for us. Beware of teachers who prescribe visualizations, affirmations, and guided imagery as a way to know self. We naturally have our senses and an innate ability to interpret reality from magical thinking.
Notes
I’ve paraphrased a guided visualization exercise from SRF Lesson 153, The Tunnel to Eternity Path to Eternal Light.
Watch Steve Hassan, a mental health counselor and author of Combating Cult Mind Control, discuss Hypnosis, Guided Meditation, Deep Visualizations–Consumers Beware!