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Visions
In
spirituality including religion, visions comprise
inspirational renderings, generally of a future state
and/or of a mythical being, and are believed (by
followers of certain religions) to come from a deity,
sometimes directly or indirectly via prophets, and serve
to inspire or prod believers as part of a revelation or
an epiphany. Many mystics take the word vision to be
synonymous with apparition.
Religious visions are generally categorized as miracles.
Like speaking in tongues and unlike raising the dead,
visions can be readily forged.
In the Eastern Orthodox Church, in addition to the
religious visions mentioned above, the term vision (theoria)
can refer to the experience of the "Energies" of God, as
the result of the purified nous.
Artistic inspiration may provide a special category of
the ecstatic vision: traditionally in such cases the
semi-divine Muses may transmit the visioning to their
loyal followers.
Visions generally have more clarity than dreams, but
traditionally fewer psychological connotations. The
psychological mechanism to engender visionary perception
and trance phenomena is focused intention and attention.
Entheogens (such as peyote) have traditionally assisted
in the generation of visions among diverse cultures, as
well as in modern western culture.
Some could consider visions to be a manifestation of the
'aha' (light bulb going off) type of learning associated
with Picture thinking or Visual Spatial thinking.
Some
information above courtesy of wikipedia: |
