The Tree in Action: Visualisation

Visualisation is the art of training yourself to see images vividly in your mind’s eye. As such, it is one of the most important skills you can develop for future work with the tree, because it will make your meditations significantly clearer and more absorbing. It requires no preparation. Make sure you’re not going to be disturbed for five minutes and make yourself comfortable physically, sitting or lying down as you prefer. Close your eyes and take several slow, deep breaths. Concentrate on your mind’s eye, and imagine the number ‘2’. Picture it in your mind’s eye, in white, as if it was written in chalk on a blackboard. Just concentrate on it, and keep it in mind.

When you feel that you have a fairly firm mental hold on it, add another digit next to it. You can pick one at random, or select digits from a number that has meaning to you, like your telephone number. Remembering to keep the ‘2’ vivid, hold the second number next to it. When it is stabilised, add another number, and then another, and keep going until you can no longer hold the whole number simultaneously in your mind’s eye. At that point, start back from the first ‘2’, and try building back up.

During your first attempts, you may find that even the initial ‘2’ is wavering and difficult to keep hold of. That’s perfectly normal; visualisation is not something that many of us practice. Keep at it, and you’ll find that you quickly improve. When you can hold an entire ten-digit phone number steady for minutes at a time, expand your horizons a little. Imagine the surface of your mind’s eye really is a blackboard, complete with chalk dust and a wooden frame. Rub a number out and replace it with something else. Fill in the rest of the classroom that the blackboard is in. Finally populate it with attentive, polite, quiet little children.

If you can hold the image of an entire class – with individual children in specific places – and still retain the numbers you started with, then you’ve mastered visualisation. You can move on earlier though if you are impatient to give up visualisation training, but make sure you can at least envision the blackboard and the wall it is mounted on. This is likely to take several weeks.

You’ll find that visualisation is easier some days than others. Factors such as fatigue, when you last ate and even the moon’s phase may play a role. Look back over your notes and see what correspondences you can identify. As well as the critical benefits your meditations will receive from well-trained visualisatory ability, be aware that when you work with images in your mind’s eye, you are painting pictures with the very fabric of Yesod itself. It is the essence of everything that Yesod is.