Aphantasia

Aphantasia is the inability to visualize. Otherwise known as ‘image-free thinking’.

I will not go into the medical (and other theories) about it, the Internet is full of stuff on that topic, just Google it!

It's honestly fascinating, I promise!

Here and now, I just want to share my personal experience about it and some bits of realizations on my path of learning how to embrace this 'condition' to its fullest potential in my life.

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Back in 2016, I was reading one of those articles on BBC about new scientific 'mystery' in the brain domain that has emerged out of nowhere and that we now call: Aphantasia.

It made us ask ourselves some serious questions about how our brain actually works and that maybe, just maybe, there are some things that we actually don't understand yet.

In the way we were mapping brain activity (especially its functions related to memory and imagination before this 'condition' was (re)discovered), human mind proper functioning required mind visualizations to be a mandatory part of human experience. This is how we were understanding the brain... until now.

But apparently, it's not! Ha, what a boom.

Apparently, being 'blind' in the mind was possible and was uncovering some very interesting things about our brain in general.

The brain science field is literally blooming right now about all sorts of mind-blowing discoveries related to this weird 'anomaly'.

We can be Aphantasiac without even knowing it and never realizing that other people are not!

This is fascinating just to think about it.

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While reading all of this, I have discovered that I had this 'mysterious' brain condition since I was born!

And in my mid-twenties, I am realizing that this is not how it works in their head for most people I know.

This realization has created a very confused state inside of my being.

What?

People don't experience the reality and the relationship with their brain the same way I do.

Really?

How is it even possible? Am I disabled or something? Is there is something wrong with me? Is it because of this that I sometimes feel like I am not on the same page then most people when I interact with my Reality?

I feel deeply misunderstood and questioned on my ways of thinking… it’s because of this? Do I have a brain problem? Is my 3rd eye blocked? Am I dead?

Should I find a 'cure' for it or something?

I am confused now. I feel great, happy and usually ‘normal’…but now I feel a bit WTF at the same time.

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This confusion has brought me on a very long and very exciting journey of self-discovery and self-fascination of my own mind, my brain and how my nervous system works in general.

So much gratitude for this unfolding understanding and wisdom inside my own body! (Thanks Nature)

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Even under the wave of profound confusion, I instantly gained a lot of clarity on some aspects of my experience.

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Oh, this is why the ‘So now, visualize a quiet beach…’ kind of meditation literally never made sense to me.

Why a fuck would you talk to me about the beach and the sea? I want to meditate now, not thinking about my good times in Greece…

What a fuck? Why does everybody seem to think it’s ‘revolutionary’ to imagine them in ‘secret calm gardens full of flowers’ in their own Heads? Where is the actual Fun in it? How is it supposed to help them to deal with their anxiety and/or mentally unstable boss at work?

Oh, this is also Why when I talk about concepts that people can’t visualize in their mind, they seem very confused and even a bit scared of me.

When I talk about concepts that can’t fit in the 3- or 4-dimensional reality, their brain goes off. Literally.

(And sometimes they even ask me if I have a good therapist to talk too…).

Or maybe I should do some shamanic 3rd eye opening procedures...or maybe a proper high-tech brain scan would help me?

What? How a fuck is this related?

I am talking to you about the pure basics of maths and physics and how our world if governed by those principles on all of the scales (and ALL the realities) of your experience... and you think I am the crazy one here?

Where am I? What is going on? … Wait… maybe even, who am I?

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It can only make sense (or don’t) make sense to you. You either ‘feel’ it, or you simply don’t. You CANNOT see it, hear it, touch it, smell it or taste it.

You can never have a quite accurate ‘image’ in your head (to be 100% sure) that what you feel and what you are 'seeing' is the same thing.

Physically speaking, it CANNOT be the same thing. There is always a small gap in the perception. This is how this world is created and how it works.

You cannot create an image in your head of something you have not yet experienced or already seen with your physical eyes.

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There are some exceptions to this statement.

People working with some advance subtle energy technic and/or psychedelic processes seem to better ‘understand’ and navigate in those invisible realms and conceptualize ideas beyond 3- and 4- dimensional reality quite easily and with an impressive (almost ‘perfect’) precision.

It’s important to notice here, those realms are actually (and truly) INVISIBLE. The only visible Reality is the one you SEE with both of your eyes wide open (and with both of your feet on the ground)!

I am not saying the Reality you see cannot be altered in some way and become completely different from what you used to see until now, BUT, the only Reality that truly exists, is the one that you actually SEE with your physical eyes (and not the one you create with your mind-eye in your head).

Every angel, demon, Ganesha, Jesus, gnome, vampire, Pleiadean you see in your mind-eye lives only there… in your mind and in your head.

Your mind creates a ‘movie’ of the energy frequency you find yourself in to help you process it. That’s it.

If you are vibrating at the same frequency that the idea of Ganesha is associated in your head with, this is what you will imagine and see in your mind-eye.

The other person (sharing the same energy field with you and capturing the same frequency) can see a happy caw in the forest eating grass instead of Ganesha. And it would not make either of those experiences more or less true to neither of you.

It will say absolutely nothing about the spiritual advancement of anything and no one. It simply does not work this way.

You just have not constructed the same associations in your brain for the same range of frequencies. This is why, what you see in your mind-eye belongs only to you! This is your Dream, not a shared Reality!

It is only an Approximation of Reality that your personal operational system (aka your brain) creates for you.

It is simple like that.

What we imagine in our head can NEVER be the same that what the other person has in their own head. Because no one has the exact same analysis and database of information in their personal operating system of life experiences and personal memory.

This is the true and simple Beauty (and the Fun) of the shared reality we create and share all together!

The only constant of the Universe is Change.

So, the Now is never like something you have seen before and that you can construct a mental movie about it in advance to try to ‘predict’ it or plan for it.

And the imagination of the Future in this scenario is simply Impossible! You can be ‘close’ enough…but never exactly on the point! This is the realm of quantum physics and chaos theory 101.

This is why the Aphantasiacs seems to be ‘natural’ in more unusual, unorthodox, and even ‘weird’ brunches of physics, mathematics and even Arts. This is why for mind-eye ‘blind’ people, the meditation is actually what happens every time they close their eyes…with literally zero effort or concentration.

You could even say the meditation is their natural state of being in most of the cases. What a fuck would I want to 'heal' that kind of power? Why a fuck would I want to open my 3rd eye?

Maybe… jus maybe… it’s kind of already Open for all of us... And it always was.

So, every ‘clairvoyant’, that is trying to tell what colour your future house would be, could be ‘close’ to the truth (if you are a very predictable and boring person) but, she cannot be 100% sure of it. It’s simply mathematically, physically, and even spiritually IMPOSSIBLE!

Because our mind can’t generate that kind of image (or movie) beyond space-time reality we know and can experience with our senses, when someone starts talking about the 5-dimensional reality (and beyond...) we usually lose them there! We want to leave, we want to eat, we want to sleep, etc.

This kind of information can’t be pictured or imagined in their head with their usual tools. We can’t actually SEE the 5th dimensional reality with our usual way of perceiving and with our 'normal' senses. Our eyes have not yet evolved enough for this (at least, not for most of us).

But we can live and experience ALL the dimensional realities at the same time.

And we already do!

This is the real fun of mathematics and physics. It’s already All Here. And it always was and always will be.

It’s simple.