ex-l, Not wanting to detract from your post in any way, but I think your opening line mistakes what I was intending in my previous post, and proceeds to talk about visions generally rather than predictive ones.
You wrote
ex-l wrote:I think I separate visions from visualisations, imaginations and dreams for the purpose of this discussion.
I agree that these generally are separate terms.
Visions which are had
during an intentional mind-altering practice (be it meditation, drugs, hypnosis, auto-suggestion, hyper-ventilation, whatever) - is a huge topic in itself.
This topic is about visions people had - of Shiva Baba & BB -
before encountering the BKs. That is, the aspect of
foresight, prediction, prophetic seeing, precognition of a face, person, place that then (they say) eventuates.
My line (that I think prompted your opening sentence) was
A carpenter will have a vision of the product he is building and goes about realising it consciously.
A person can unconsciously envision which way their life is heading or a situation that’s yet to arise if things proceed as they are, then, lo and behold, are amazed when it turns out that way!
Here I differentiated conscious and unconscious forms of visioning "
ahead of time". The unconscious ones can be had in, daydreaming, dreams, reverie, meditation, vagueing out, triggered by some catalyst (eg smell or sensory incongruity ...)
I believe we are both pointing out different positions of this phenomenon on a broad spectrum or axis.
Even in everyday, life we mistake things we see, sometimes they are corrected, e.g. as we get closer to something, sometimes, what we (think we) see reflects our psychological bias (e.g. life is a Rorschach test !).
Foresight (in the usual sense) is a kind of precognition. Some people do ”see” what’s about to happen better than others. How "spooky" that is considered is dependant on how pronounced that foresight is - how far forward, how specific, how different to what others’ assumed. Personally, we often bury/ignore signals that our "animal instincts" are picking up - which may emerge as a vision of an eventuality - and we wonder where that came from.
Psychics (ones that are not outright frauds) seem to have some intuitive skill to attune to another’s inner self-knowledge that the other person themselves are out of touch with, and piece together much which may turn out quite precisely. (Much of it is reading body language, expression, putting together clues from age, clothing, concerns, etc).
Likely in days past, some may’ve been burnt as witches or sorcerers! These days I think we should burn all those politicians who lack basic common sense foresight!
In this subject of ”precognising” Shiva Baba & BB, we've also mentioned the aspect of psychological priming/ripening and linked to archetypal functioning - which you also refer to.
For spiritually concerned people, archetypal images such as light (whether a point, candle flame, rays radiating, concentric rings etc), or of a father-figure, are far more likely to be ”prophetically seen” than this same person, for example, ”seeing” a late night car crash involving a red sports car, bus and girlfriend in miniskirt and stilettos lying on wet ground with reflected neon lights flashing* (...
Unless the spiritually inclined person owned a red sports car or had such a girlfriend and liked catching late buses to go nightclubbing. A ”prophetic” daydream that came true that I've read about).
Slightly on a tangent, I wonder how many events previously had their own ”predictive vision/flash of foresight” which was forgotten or never consciously remembered , or even predictive visions that were had but which (for whatever cosmic or mundane reason) never eventuated and are ignored? What if we imagine/get a vision of a violent attack in a dark street we normally walk down, so we don’t go there for a long while? How can we know whether we avoided something pre-cognitively?
So, without getting off-track here, I was indicating that the lines separating mundane ”foresight”, inference, prediction and precognition is blurry. So, too, the lines between ”vision”, projection, what is current or past or future, innocent but subjective interpretation in hindsight (like a false memory of the memory) and so on.
There is an aspect also to be explored, what Drs. Pauli and Jung together named ”synchronicity”; two separate events linked only by meaning (usually understood by most to mean "occurring coincidentally" but they need not be).
In this case, one event is the original ”vision”, the other is the encounter in the BK centre with the same imagery. The meaning is likely added, injected, invested
after the second encounter. Another personality type might just say ”that's curious, I saw that exact same face two weeks ago while daydreaming on the bus” and not think it more significant than a "time anomaly”, or deja vu.
If someone feels it ”significant” at the same time of having a vision - of a radiating point of light or a spiritual Father -figure - and from it is inspired to investigate so goes to some (
not BK) group or spiritual ”centre” to learn, and
invariably finds similar images there (patriarchs, radiant flame or light etc), that can ”coalesce” their memory and their belief in the significance of the vision.
In summary, I am not dismissing anyone’s visions, feelings, insights as false. Had many of my own and know of others but don't want to bore people. Every experience is subjectively true, and subjectively significant or insignificant.
I am only saying there is very, very much complexity upon complexity.