As the familiar adage goes “There is nothing new under the sun”
This old saying holds true for the seemingly new field of visual imagery meditations.
The language of images is most commonly experienced as night dreams or daydreams. Anyone familiar with imagery learns almost immediately that we can work with this meditation language as easily as we can work with spoken language. Indeed, the ability to understand and communicate in the language of images probably precedes the ability to communicate with words. Becoming aware of the language of images essentially requires only that we turn our attention to it.
The medical use of imagery has existed in many cultures around the world for centuries, in Tibet, India, Africa; among Eskimos and American Indians. In some cases for millennia. In the Western world, as medical practice evolved from its ancient sources in Egypt and on into biblical times, imagery was an essential technique and sometimes the essential medical treatment for physical ailments, until approximately 1650, when natural science and modern medical thinking began to assume dominance.
The model for the healing function of becoming whole was portrayed more that five thousand years ago in ancient Egypt in the story about the god Osiris, who was murdered by his brother Seth. His body was dismembered into fourteen pieces, each piece buried in a different parts of Egypt. Osiris’s wife Isis recollected these hidden pieces and brought Osiris back to life by
re-membering him, by putting all the pieces together.
Remembering literally means to reconnect one piece of the body to another. The body means physical and mental and emotional. Putting ourselves together includes all three. Remember also means to recall. Remembering then, is to restore ourselves to wholeness by recalling our unity and putting our body-mind back together. Imagery is the mental way of remembering and recalling. The act of seeing in pictures is to see in wholes and is the mental analogy to physical remembering.
If heath and wholeness are associated with remembering, then it follows that illness is associated with forgetting. When we have lost our unity, which is what illness tells us has happened, then we have forgotten ourselves. Surgery may be an attempt to re-member on a physical level. Imagery is the analogous process on the mental level and can effect remembering on the physical level.