Sometimes
there is an element of precognition (the ability to foresee the future) in
visualization. The image the visualizer conjures up may not be from his
imagination, as he thinks; it may be a glimpse of an actual physical
environment or situation he will experience at some point in the future. Harold
Sherman, who frequently writes on the psychic power of visualization, recounts
the experience of a Pennsylvania couple of his acquaintance. Mr. and Mrs. B.
had lived in a large city for many years but had always wanted to move to the
country. After reading one of Sherman’s books on imaging, Mrs. B. decided to
apply the technique in a very specific way. She would
look out her kitchen window onto the city scene outside and declare, "The
apartment houses over there are really the Blue Mountains. I will look out over
the Blue Mountains while I’m doing my dishes." She went on
to describe more of the environment in which they would be living once they
moved to the country. Our house
will sit back off the road … It will be on a small hill or mound … and the
street down there will be an old dirt road," she told her husband. She pointed
to the spot where a brook would be and she went on to tell what the other
buildings on the property would look like. Every day I
visualized, every day I looked at the ‘mountains’ as I did my dishes," she
wrote to Sherman. "Every day I passed my ‘brook’; every day, coming home from
work on the busy street, I was really walking up my ‘road’ … My husband
and I pictured our home so vividly that it is EXACTLY what we got! They ended
up living in the Pennsylvania Dutch country. From her kitchen Mrs. B. saw in
reality the Blue Mountains just as she had "seen" them in her imagination. The
brook, the house on the hill, the other buildings were all as she had
"imagined." Every
evening I take my stroll around the beautiful valley; down the old dirt road.
In the city I had visualized the trip to the store in the evenings as I am
doing now. Parapsychologists
know that precognitive visions typically appear spontaneously from the
unconscious or manifest in dreams. The kind of experience Mrs. B. recounts is
unusual, although certainly not unheard of. The psychic forces that can be
unleashed in visualization often work in a surprising and astonishing fashion. |