Why Is Visualisation Important? Options

Is it possible to manipulate some energy flows through visualisation only?

If so, what's the direct effect of visualisation?

Does it somehow land onto the subconscious which makes out of the images a rouhly matter thing?

Or does it somehow land into the astral? or is there something else?

sorry for my silly questions

visualization is a 'facilitator' for energy manipulation. it is not itself 'literal', but it can serve as a framework for the mind to work with forces which it is not really wired to comprehend or perceive clearly.
I really very much liked vagrant's comment about stripping away every visual element in the visualization, and realizing that the 'something more' that remains is the actual substance of what you're doing... that's a really excellent way to describe it.

here's an excerpt from an essay I wrote a while back :
(please respect it as copyrighted material)

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What is "visualization"?
by: Kathryn

Visualization is the practice of using a familiar format (visual) to attempt to work with an aspect of yourself and the reality around you, which (in it's natural state) does not directly correlate to any of the familiar 5 senses. You could just as easily use any of the other 5 senses, but the simple fact is that sight and sound are the 2 primary senses of the human brain. Sound is also popularly used, but it tends to appear in a more physically vocalized format than visualization (which occurs abstractly in the dojo of the mind).

Imagine you've been in a coma for a couple years, then you wake up. your body will be stiff as a board, your muscles will have lost flexibility, your strength will be nearly nonexistent, and worst of all, your motor cortex will have forgotten much of what it knows about 'how' to move. So for the next year or two, you'd end up learning how to move again, and rebuilding strength & flexibility. You'll have a long hard uphill battle against the atrophy you've suffered. For the learning how to move again part, you will likely be coached to use visualization to help the process. visualize you grasping an object, etc. until you find a state of mind where you're not *just* imagining it, and your fingers move...

Now imagine you have a part of 'you' which you are largely unaware of, a part of you which is not 'physical', and not 'physically' wired into your nervous system, and so it has been left mostly idle for your entire life. that'd be a LOT of atrophy, and in many ways learning to move such a part of yourself would be even harder, because its something you don't have past experience with (at least that you are consciously aware of). So learning to move this part of yourself, increasing its flexibility and strength, and just getting a feel for actually consciously applying force with this part of yourself... it's a long and arduous process.

Using visualization for the purpose of energy manipulation is the most common approach. It's just a simple way to present what you're trying to do, to your brain, in a format which it is naturally more capable of comprehending. It is NOT literal. Instead it is an interpretive format. For example, spiritual energy is not basically visible (setting aside the use of spiritual energy to manifest, it is not basically visible in it's static state). So if you try to work with it in a visual way, you are entirely applying this visual imagery to the energy, it doesn't actually have a 'look' per say. The visual content is like a make-believe image, which you are (hopefully) tying to the actual energy in a very direct way, such that the visual elements of your mental image directly correlate to the actual elements of the energy you are working with.

Visualization is meant to be a 2 part process. Only the first part of it is "picturing stuff". If you picture a pink elephant having tea... that's fine & all, but you haven't actually *done* anything energetically speaking. The goal of visualization is to both picture a form or movement or state change, and then tie that 'imagined' visual imagery to an actual etheric movement. It's exactly like using visualization to help rehabilitate an atrophied limb. just picturing it is not enough, you have to tie that to an actual "ooomf" which actually effects your limb and moves it. This is a difficult process to grasp, since the defining bit, the actual process of tying thought to action, defies explanation. It's like the difference between thinking about what you're going to type, and typing it. there's a different state in the brain between the two, and that is the definitive difference between using visualization as a energy manipulation facilitator, and just picturing stuff.

Moving energy, shaping it, changing it's state... these are the 3 basic processes by which you will impact energy with your Will. Everything else you do will be based on these basic building blocks. Eventually you will learn to be able to work with the energy in question directly, without imagining a visual framework for your Will to work with. But it is instrumentally useful to use visualization to get to that point. A key to direct energy manipulation is that energy innately responds to thought (which opens up another whole avenue of study, into the nature of 'thought' itself). But the important thing to remember about this, as a someone new to direct energy manipulation, is that by way of energy's responsiveness to thought, you can bring Will to energy.

Bear in mind that spiritual energy seems to tie into a sort of fractal omnipresence, so 'shaping' energy is itself a bit of an abstraction. Distance and Form are two concepts which simply work very differently than what we are familiar with on a physical level. Spiritual energy simply exists in a spatial dimensional state which is other than our familiar 3-D volume based space. It will take a "lot" of practice to get a feel for this aspect of energy, but once you do, it will open new doors in terms of how to actually use it. Likewise, learning to get 'out of body', by way of intentional astral projection, will open a new world of possibilities for your energy manipulation based work. It will also help you to gradually come to understand the illusory nature of 'distance' and 'form', and 'separation' (or more accurately the lack thereof). Which will be instrumental in moving the mind/will closer to a more direct faculty with energy manipulation. But visualization is a great place to start. Until fairly recently, I still tended to lean back to visualization when I was 'trying something new', at least until I got more of a sort of clairsentient 'feel' for what I'm doing. I guess I could be described as having just recently stepped away from still relying on visualization as an energy manipulation 'crutch'.

Most tend to feel that learning energy manipulation is 'easy'... but for the most part what is 'easy' is learning to wiggle your etheric pinky toe. Many see some sort of perceptible effect and assume 'aha, i've done it!' and then later after learning to move all of their toes on one foot, they think "now I am an expert!". Without never even realizing there is more to their etheric body than toes. It IS relatively easy to practice direct energy manipulation until you achieve some sort of perceptible effect. It is also very easy to assume that once you can do a few useful things with it, and learn to perceive energy directly, that you've "graduated" and know all there is to know. But learning to actually be 'muscular' or have true 'dexterity' or 'savvy' with energy manipulation is a very long and difficult process that takes many years of concerted determination and effort in my opinion. And I have not personally found a true 'upper limit' to one's growth potential in this field. I have found many stages which might feel like 'ok, that's all there is', but by wielding a stubborn refusal to submit to such a boundary, they always give way and reveal still more capability and room for growth. I guess it might be more useful to view it in a positive light, and say that it is easy to get started with energy manipulation and there is an astounding amount of room for growth in the field. I tend to characterize it as 'hard' in the sense of trying to conquer the immensity of all of that 'room for growth', because it's simply an aspect of my personality that monumental challenge only arouses my will and determination. Look at it in whichever light better motivates you, but do know that it is a huge field, and that just because you've mastered all the basic practicing forms which people write about, only means you've scratched the surface. There is so much more that is simply difficult or impossible to put into text.

All of the visualization descriptions I have used to describe energy workings, are simply 'models'. They are, in and of themselves, arbitrary and imaginary in nature. I have tried to make them 'easy' to correlate to actual effects upon energy, as well as perhaps interjecting a slight bit of drama to sharpen focus. But you could use almost 'any' visualization to perform almost 'any' actual energetic effect. The crucial bit is not the specifics of visualized content, but the actual action upon energy which your Will effects. Please regard all visualization content as not being a 'formulaic' recipe, but merely as examples which try to encapsulate the specific energy effect being described.
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This post has been edited by Kath: Nov 15 2009, 03:56 PM