Aphantasia
how it has shaped my life and journey
Since I started my spiritual journey, I became aware I had this condition.
But I never knew there was an official name for it until now.
Aphantasia.
It is a relatively new concept in scientific and medical circles. According to this site, it means: “a phenomenon in which people are unable to visualize imagery. While most people are able to conjure an image of a scene or face in their minds, people with aphantasia cannot.”
“If you are like the estimated 1- 3% of the population with aphantasia, you may be unable to visualize any type of image in your head.”
“If you were to ask a person with aphantasia to imagine something, they could likely describe the object, explain the concept, and rattle off facts that they know about the object. But they would not be able to experience any sort of mental image to accompany this knowledge.”
Also, this matches my condition 100% that it’s shocking:
“People with aphantasia do experience visual imagery while dreaming. This suggests that it is only intentional, voluntary visualization that is affected by this phenomenon.”
The article proceeds to explain that this condition “the available studies suggest that having aphantasia does not necessarily hurt a person's success in life. People from all walks of life experience this phenomenon, including successful doctorate students, engineers, and other professionals.”
This statement, while encouraging, is also a bit of a generalization. I’m an engineer and hold a doctorate degree. By all accounts, I have the kind of “success” recognized by most of society.
However, in this blog post, I do want to bring to light, the ways in which my life and journey have been affected by aphantasia.
As readers of this blog are aware, I woke up fairly “late” in life, compared to most members of the spiritual community (especially the experienced healers and practitioners). There are many reasons for this, some of which I’m still trying to understand.
However, since I had my first “waking up,” the journey hasn’t been easy. While meditation has helped me immensely, it hasn’t always been a natural practice for me. The main reason is aphantasia. Most guided meditations out there revolve around imagery. Visualization. Going on these out-of-this-world, into-other-dimensions type of magical journeys.
But while I’m a super visual learner in my 3D life, I’m totally blind in other dimensions. This means when I close my 3D eyes, I see nothing but pitch darkness. When the spiritual guide says “imagine (or picture) a pillar of White Light coming into your Crown Chakra,” I see nothing. When they say “imagine yourself in a beautiful lush green garden,” I see nothing. When they say, “take yourself back to this or this past life and tell me what you see around you,” I have to say…sorry I see nothing.
Because I’m Claircognizant, I know all of these things are there. I know the pillar of White Light is there. I know this or that happened in my past life. I can do very psychic things like tuning into people’s relationships to money or family. I can hear answers very clearly and quickly when I ask questions. I can identify energetic blocks and find details in the Unconscious.
But because of aphantasia, I can’t see. What this means is I don’t get to have the immersive, fun, mind-blowing experience most people go into spirituality to have. This “escapism” from the 3D world.
What this also means is that when I participate in guided meditations, whether just listening on YouTube or attending in person, I get bored easily and feel left out. I’ve often fallen asleep (which is great in terms of relaxation, but not so great in terms of trying to get a certain magical experience).
Why am I saying this condition delayed my spiritual awakening? It’s straightforward: those who can see beyond the 3D, aka are Clairvoyant on some level, know that there is more to our existence than the 3D world. If you’re a child and you can see energetic blocks inside people’s hearts (like Paz), or see mermaids and unicorns or aliens, you will be actively questioning the “normal” things you are taught by mainstream society. You won’t be so easily plugged into “the Matrix” because seeing these “paranormal” things is a part of your normal day-to-day, whether you consciously want it or not.
But for those of us with aphantasia, there is no such luck. Even if our trusted family and friends say, “I can see this or that,” we wouldn’t be able to no matter how hard we tried. So, it’s hard to believe. Harder to have faith in anything outside of the 3D realm.
It took my life having all these health conditions come up, that no doctors could fix (pubis symphysis dysfunction, infertility, migraines, etc.), before I turned to energy work. It’s been 100% effective so far. I wrote about one of these cases in depth here. I’m a huge fan of energy work (especially shadow work) and a living testimonial in so many ways.
Spirituality is harder for me. I have to find the right meditations and I’m always so grateful when I do. Here is one.
OK. Back to this success in life thing…some folks are probably wondering: besides you not getting to have magical spiritual experiences, has it held you back in any other way? After all, not everyone is into spirituality. If they’re not, then it doesn’t matter right?
I had to think about that. It brought up alot of old trauma.
Most people would assume because I have a doctorate in Mechanical Engineering, that I was a stellar student. And because I was in high-paying jobs doing engineering work, that I was a pretty good engineer.
Neither one of those are really true. I have suffered hard from inferiority complex in grad school, and again in the workplace. Most people would assume it’s because I was a female, a minority, or some other “diversity and inclusion” issue. For the longest time, I even convinced myself that was the case as well. It was easy to just fit myself into an already approved and popular narrative.
There are two main reasons I almost failed out of grad school. And that I could never produce the kind of hardcore, elegant, and/or super effective engineering designs that seemed to come to others so easily. In product design and research, those are the fundamental criteria of a good engineer. I tried and tried, and managed to get by with my designs in a passing way, but they just weren’t anything worthy of praise. In grad school, I got a lot of C’s.
The first reason is lack of energy. The world belongs to the energetic…is not just a saying. It’s true. I had enough energy to get into grad school, and land a good job, but I didn’t have the kind of energy required to excel in those and rise to the top. Once I got in, it took all my energy just to get by each day and “finish my assigned tasks.” While others around me were pulling all-nighters, working offshore for weeks without a day off, hitting the company gym at 5AM, and going above and beyond accomplishing so many things, I was exhausted and “needed a break” at 5 PM. Obviously, I wasn’t going to be able to shine. More on this topic of energy in a later article (because it deserves at least one).
The second reason…is aphantasia.
The ability to visualize is not just a “cool, nice-to-have.” It is an integral part of manifestation. Yes…it can work both ways. Those who see dark beings and entities get negative manifestation. It’s not a joke. In that sense, I haven’t had to go through that. But those who can visualize what they want, can materialize it much easier as well.
Specifically in engineering (and I imagine this applies to other professions too), graphs, charts, and multi-dimensional visualization literally drives innovation and problem-solving. The best designers visualize what they want to design first. Mechanical engineers visualize water flowing through a complex system of mechanical passages, and visualize the exact spots where it may get stuck or pinched. Then they would design around it, and visualize again. Electrical engineers do the same with electrons traveling through wires, circuits, switches, etc.
In grad school, my classmates could visualize solving complex equations in their mind. They pictured topological structures and found inflection points and other “solutions” as they rotated the structures around, slice and diced them, and even traveled inside to have a look. It was a whole experience that made mathematics, topology, tensor calculus, perturbation theory, and all of those subjects fascinating and divine for them.
I couldn’t do any of this. For me, it was pure torture.
As the scientific articles would say: there is no cure for aphantasia. Heck, we barely even understand it. Just count your blessings and be grateful for what you have and move on.
But that’s also what they said for my PSD (pubis symphysis dysfunction).
That’s also what they said for my infertility (after two rounds of failed IVF, and every diagnostic test under the Sun including the experimental ones).
See the patterns here? And yet, I’ve overcome both.
I don’t think these are miracles in the religious sense. They are an accumulation of active energy work that crossed over certain thresholds into the realm of physical materialization and success.
What is active energy work? It’s a healthy mix of alchemical Addition and Subtraction. More than 95% of people in this space practice Addition consistently. But they stay away from Subtraction, much less practice it consistently. I’ve written about this before here.
This post was intended to be a “bookmark” for myself. Once I heal my aphantasia with energy work, I’ll write about it again. Sometimes these things can take years of little to no progress, followed by a rapid and sudden breakthrough.
Hey…space and time are not linear, fixed, nor static. It all begins with awareness.
Rachel,
I just came across this term today. I have been doing much of what you have with regards to trying to visualize with no luck. The strange thing is, that I've always had an incredibly vivid ability to visualize things in my mind's eye.
Now, it gets stranger... I asked my wife to do it, close her eyes and visualize an apple - nope, our son - nope, anything - nope. I asked her father when he came by, and had the same result.
As my learning has taught me, there are no coincidences. I also believe it statistically impossible to have all three of us not be able to visualize anything.
My mind takes me to the idea that there is something happening on a much larger, cosmic type scale. I am going to continue to ask those I know, but my gut tells me I'm going to get the same results.
Thanks for sharing your story. I have been googling like mad since discovering I have aphantasia. I am on my "spiritual" journey and an on the hunt for resources that might be geared more towards people like us. I am also a science based person. It took me a long time to come to terms with the existence of things that "science" doesn't accept. The world is being to make a little more sense in some ways. I'm a GIS/spatial analyst. So makes to me that I am drawn to that field now.
I have asked around, and of the 30 or more people that have done the apple visualisation with me, only 4 had nothing. One of those being my mum. From what I have read there is likely a hereditary aspect to this.