Saturday morning is not the time to be a little bored and wanna do something different to break the tedium of ingrained habits. I decided to see if I could find a video to watch on visualization, so I opened up Google video and searched for "art visualization religious" without the quotes. If I'd typed in more words the search would have gotten much more specific. Love that Google search engine.
The results page came up with an interesting mix about art and religious tenets. The one thing most of them had in common was the repetition of affirmations. My rather astounding (to me) conclusion was that affirmations are rules of conscience. Why am I always the last to know?
I came up with an interesting take on affirmations. Affirmations are the root stuff from which rules of conscience are generated. This is practiced all over the world by various cultures in various ways. The visualization of the Goddess Kali being one of the most written about, although in Sanskrit, and I don't think for the most post that Sanskrit transliterates into Modern English very well at all. It's probably because the translators are more scholarly than Hindu ecumenicals.
Affirmations become rules of conscience when they are practiced frequently over and over for a long time. A symbol for an adherent of this sort of practice of any culture is counting beads.
Repetition and redundancy is the real work, but the point is to create a rule of conscience that reminds you to practice what it takes to be-co-me with the life model you install via visualization. When you "be-co-me" it, you make it a part of your me, just as nay-me-ing something denies the object as part of your me.
The Hindu Goddess Kali is a good example for explaining the type of visualization I find useful. You would have to imagine a statue of this eight-armed goddess with necklaces of human skulls strung around her neck to understand what happens if you wanna become an adherent of Kali in the most powerful sense.
A student of Kali would attempt to recreate that statue of Kali in their mind's eye, and then the adherents who have mastered this art would question the student in detail to find out how their memorizing was coming along. The student would have to retrieve their answers from the statue of Kali they had recreated in their mind's eye to satisfy the teacher.
There is only one criteria by which it can be told that a student had completed their task. When the last detail of their visualization process is completed, the "statue" of Kali they created in their mind's eye takes a life of it's own, and does as the Goddess Kali wills whether it's in your interest or not.
Christianity has many visualization practices meant to make Jesus come alive in the practitioner's psyche. The process is the same, it's just not presented in such a practical fashion that it can be easily understood.
I create my own affirmations in the form of poetry. It's easier for me to recite them repetitiously. I made some of them into songs. It's the ones that I have recited the longest that seems to have the most power for me. Some of them I have recited on a frequent basis for nearly forty years. It's hard to look around at what it's got me and write rave reviews.
I disclaim knowing the truth about anything. I make up what I write here to amuse myself and to capture drifting thoughts with words. I'm pleased with some of my prisoners more than I am with others.
I do not attempt to tell the God's own truth here because I don't know what the truth is or hardly ever. I try to capture the drifting thoughts that randomly appear in my imagination for reasons I may not understand. I don't know if the content I capture with these words is true or false. The Comments settings are turned off to prevent me from having to defend what amounts to little more than fanciful, sometime crude speculation. Great moments in our lives never return.
