Why I suspect I’d make a lousy Tibetan Buddhist meditator
[ by Charles Cameron — where the blind spot of aphantasia meets the beauty of Avalokiteshvara ]
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Perhaps sadly, perhaps not, I suffer from aphantasia.
It’s a great relief, actually, to have found someone who doesn’t laugh at me when I say I can’t visualize — a researcher, no less, Prof. Adam Zeman, with a paper on the topic in Cortex.
I have tried on occasion to find metaphors for my condition. The best way to explain what does happen when someone asks me to visualize something is to say I can see it “as if painted in water on glass” — or “as if it’s behind me, out of sight, but I can remember roughly what it was like when I last looked.”
Sources:
Grurray:
May 18th, 2016 at 9:12 pm
Suffer? I was going to congratulate you. Who cares about counting sheep.
You may be blind in the mind’s eye, but you have full faculty of the eye of the soul.
Grurray:
May 19th, 2016 at 1:37 am
Not to belittle your condition. If it is a burden, I’m sorry. I have the opposite problem where I have to concentrate my attention away from too many stray visualizations. I’m constantly trying meditation, physical exercise, fishing, etc. to clear my mind.
Charles Cameron:
May 19th, 2016 at 8:28 am
True, there have been occasions when it’s frustrated me, but not very often — mostly, I just take it for granted. So no need to worry about belittling my suffering, suffering was just a word for “having a condition” in this case.
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Lion’s Roar, the Buddhist news page, has invited me to write it up in a little more detail, so I’ll save further remarks for that occasion, and post a link here for any who are interested.
Go well, stay well, my friend.
Piercello:
May 19th, 2016 at 3:31 pm
Interesting, Charles.
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I have always “seen” things internally in abstract _structural_ terms, often as “the patterned evolution of architecture through space and time” (as applied to musical phrasing, woodworking design, or societal dynamics). After reading this post, I now suspect that that this is because, like you, I don’t (or can’t) “visualize” them in the strict sense of internally recreating a visual picture.
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Fascinating.
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Off to explore the links next.