Is there a difference between imagining something which is not there, and a psychic or intuitive perception of what is really there?
I have long wondered about this question without finding a satisfactory and logical answer. Is there really a difference between imagination and reality?
Of course, it is easy to reply that an imaginary object or incident exists only in the mind, without necessarily having a corresponding external physical reality. I may, for example, imagine holding a delicious red apple in my empty right hand, or kissing a beautiful woman who is not in front of me. One is purely mental, whereas psychic perception corresponds to the objective physical world, whether we think of it or not.
But what if, what we merely thought of as imaginary, really existed physically outside our mind, and far from our field of vision? And what if what we had imagined actually happened either in the past, or in the future? What then?
If what ancient Buddhist mystics and masters say (and now, what modern quantum physicists are also saying) is true—that this physical world is our mental creation, that everything is just an illusion (or maya)—then what happens if I imagine a brick wall to be a soft pillow and bang my head against it? Will I feel no pain, or will I have a lump on my head?
The reason this question has become a big philosophical dilemma is because of some incredible experiences in human psychic perception and imagination I have witnessed during my seminars on extrasensory perception and intuition development.
In an exercise on how to establish psychic reference points, I ask participants to imagine standing several feet in front of their house and to scan it with eyes closed from top to bottom, and left to right slowly, as if they are reading a book. Many are able to tell what’s there without knowing it before.
For example, an executive of a large international oil company in the Philippines saw at the right eaves (the underside of the projecting roof) of his new house a bunch of green leaves, grass and twigs. There were no tall trees nor grasses in the yard. He was puzzled by this.
Telling the difference
When I asked him to go and check that part of the house, he was surprised to see a bird’s nest consisting of dried leaves, grass and twigs. He thought he merely imagined it.
Another participant in the seminar, when told to imagine entering his house, immediately smelled chicken adobo being cooked. He was surprised because it was too early for his wife to be cooking lunch when we did the exercise. He asked me what that meant; I said, “I do not know, but why don’t you call your house and find out?”
When the husband asked his wife what she was doing at that time, she said she was cooking chicken adobo. Why so early? She replied that some relatives suddenly arrived from the province and were hungry. The husband couldn’t believe his ears.
Therefore, whatever we think to be merely imaginary can be a real psychic perception of what is outside of us. But how can we tell the difference?
It is not an easy question to answer, especially at the beginning, or when we first experience it. In time, perhaps, we will be able to subjectively tell the difference between the two.
Another explanation may lie in the “holographic theory” of the brain by Stanford University neuroscientist Dr. Karl Pribram. In a hologram, the part contains the whole. In our subconscious mind, everything is connected to everything else—past, present and future.
We live in a multi-dimensional, holographic universe. Therefore, every bit of information can be accessible from somebody else’s mind, or from the outside environment.
We don’t have the final, conclusive answer to this question yet, but we may be coming closer to it.
An American psychic in Los Angeles told me years ago that if what you sense or imagine is real, you will have a strong feeling of certainty that you are correct. But if you feel or doubt even for a second, then what you perceive may only be imaginary.
From a neurological standpoint, intuitive perception and imagination come from the right side of the neocortex, whereas analytical or rational perception comes from the left hemisphere of the neocortex. In practice, we can’t tell whether it comes from the left or right.
The world-famous Israeli psychic, Uri Geller, during a telepathy exercise in his hotel room in Düsseldorf, Germany, in 1994, told me that if an image that is being transmitted to him stayed in his mind for 20 seconds without changing, then he had the correct image of what was drawn by his partner. During that experiment, he duplicated my drawing perfectly, although his back was towards me when I was drawing it.
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