Visualization; Within The MInd's Eye

Before there were words, there were images. Most people perceive reality as something outside of themselves. But, if you close your eyes you find within the mind's eyes that images and thoughts seem to appear. These inner events are expressed by Jung as psychic reality; the immediate objects within consciousness. The sensitive attunement to such inner reality is captured by Ken Beittel in what he calls the experience of "the qualitative immediate present". This is the alpha and omega of art. Samuels & Samuels (1975) see two levels of inner mental processes, verbal and visual thought. They recognize that with the human development of language and written systems, rational thought has come to dominate most of the world's way of perceiving reality. Language enables the speaker to distance and externalize experience which seems to remove the immediacy of everyday encounters. This has overshadowed the more primal aspects of visuality within consciousness, and the awareness to the aesthetic nature of being. While there are many scholars who see myth, narrative, and metaphor (Campbell, Barthes, Brunner, Lakoff, Becker) as fundamental processes of the visual mind, these still emphasize language and the representational. Yet, in the creative process, in the experience of the qualitative immediate presence, there is a non-representational aspect that seems it can not be transferred into language. This makes it extremely difficult to explain it. It simply must be experienced and lived in order be graspable. As the Zen Tenet states, "Living processes and words about it are not the same and should not be treated as equal". Dewey and the pragmatists began to point to this, but it seems we need to move beyond the idea of process to the experience of consciousness within process. This is where deep knowing of reality exists.