Aphantasia and Astral Magick

[thauma111]

Hello! New to wizard forums, humble seeker, lover of Magick. I have aphantasia and get hung up on practices that request visualisation. I'm getting further into some practices that keep pointing towards astral work and I can't wrap my head around astral work, visualization, out of body experiences, and the differences? Am I just always not going to be able to do any work that requests these visual components? Thanks for your insights in advance.

 

[Ohana]

Hmm I'm able to slightly visualize but its kind of more limited. My mind is void like then I can think of only one or two objects then myself in there.

The way I would try to do it is mainly use the other of the five senses to sense what is there. So maybe trying listening to music/noises or find good smelling candles could help.

 

[moonbow]

Am I just always not going to be able to do any work that requests these visual components?

The ability might appear by itself as your energy grows and your spiritual skills awaken and get stronger. I wouldn't know about specific techniques to restore/aquire this ability but that doesn't mean they don't exist or it's not possible. Maybe to your surprise some simple breathing exercise or AUM chant with the right mindset might "heal" you...
I also agree with the above. If you are still able to feel, touch, smell, hear etc you can use those instead at first. You can even astral project without seeing images. Try to project to places you know and instead of seeing just "know" what's there, try to feel objects and their weight and texture instead of seeing them.

 

[CuriousOrangutan]

I can't wrap my head around astral work, visualization, out of body experiences, and the differences?

Regarding astral work and visualisation:
Think its important to make a distinction between astral and mental planes.
Astral plane is a plane of emotions and feelings. Mental plane is the plane of....erm...mental models.
Noticed a lot of people switch those two and consider visualisation as some kind of mental modelling - when you visually model or imagine an object and then "react" somehow to that.
Which is somewhat right, but not in the beginning. In the beginning of practice it is wrong in its root and actually is the reason why oftentimes nothing works.

For mental sphere - modelling is the primary step (it is when you imagine an object in your minds eye in all the detail) which leads to the secondary step - reaction to the model (emotional or not doesn't matter).

In astral sphere - feeling/emotion first, reaction second, visual model third. So, astral meditation can be characterised as bright and vivd in terms of feelings and emotions followed by corresponding visual model. It is like when you listen to music you like and feel cool or like in the movie or in the music video - feeling comes first, then the necessary visual information is generated.

In a nutshell, it doesn't work cause you probably are concentrating on the wrong thing in your practice. For astral plane feelings come first and only then visual information, not vice-versa.