> I've got two points of curiosity and would like to hear from any
> researchers (official or other) about:
>
> Eidetic Imaging:
>
> A kind of heightened mental visualisation. From my limited reading and
> intermittent experience it can be described as the moment where mental
> images cease to be voluntary and tenuous and suddenly begin to paint
> themselves into sharper, intense and more luminous detail so that the
> image or series of images seem very suddenly to be more experienced
> than imagined. So suddenly that I wonder what threshold is being
> passed: chemical, electrical? Or whether this is simply a matter of a
> rapid re organization of consciousness into a kind of extreme inner
> subjectivity?
This sounds like what has been called 'astral travelling'. Check out a
book by Susan Blakemore (?) (I think it might be called 'Out of the
Body') on the subject. She's a good scientist who had this kind of
experience, and investigated it, taking in turn all theories about it
>from the wooliest magical ones to the most rigorous scientific, and
weighing up their pros and cons. The magical theories say the 'astral
realm' is genuinely independent, like physical reality, and kind of
connected with it, but there's no good evidence for this yet.
I would be interested if anybody else has some up to the minute research
info. on this. The phrase 'eidetic imaging' makes it sound like there's
a new branch of knowledge opening up, coming at the thing from a
cognitive psych angle.
'Astral travelling' (which is probably the same thing as 'lucid dreaming',
but while awake) has been practiced extensively in the Western occult
tradition, less extensively in Eastern traditions (except the Tibetan
Buddhist, which has a whole branch of yoga devoted to it).
It's conceivable that there may be some therapeutic value in the process
- it's like, you 'travel' through the 'realm' of your own personal
symbolism, which is grounded in your personal (perhaps also social/memetic)
history and your deepest desires (or society's/the species'), which you
engage in 'dialogue' in personified forms ('archetypes'?)
It's interesting that the reverse of this (external reality seeming to
be internal) is also a logical possibility - perhaps some forms of
schizophrenia and/or autism?
Guru George