Inner Space Essay

Inner Space

A glimpse into the actual architecture of inner space

and redesigning our interiors

to find better inner spaces to live out of.

What is your view of inner space? What do you sense inner space is like? How do you picture it? How do you relate to it?

How does the idea of looking in to your consciousness and seeing your inside story make you feel? Do you look forward to it with fascination? Or not? Why not?

Before I learned eidetic imaging, I had a very dim sense of what inner space – mine or anybody else’s – is. And I thought inner light was just an idea. When I began writing poetry in college I often felt I was rummaging around in a dark, jumbled, largely abandoned attic hoping for one of the rare crystalline treasures of consciousness to come to me, as occasionally happened.

But now, as I find my face all scrunched up even thinking about it, I realize that I largely shrank back from looking in. I was not expecting to find something good there. I was expecting trouble, which was reasonable enough, because I’d seen a lot of trouble in my family, and that was the baggage my consciousness kept carrying. Until I doing eidetic imaging I did not know my consciousness was carrying anything else. I had no idea that the Garden of Eden is alive within us, and a space, among many others, that we all need to see how to get to for our health.

When I was coming to consciousness, or self-consciousness, during high school in the nineteen fifties, nobody knew that Akhter Ahsen was at that time discovering a new way to look into ourselves that makes getting to know ourselves both fascinating and instantly gratifying as well as profoundly rewarding in the long run. Ahsen found that certain inner motion pictures, while playing like movies in front of our minds eye, are also playing upon our bodies, their instrument. These images actually touch us and move us in infinitely subtle and forceful ways, while also illuminating the darkness of our interiors. They show us not only what’s with us. They let us see the source of our difficulties clearly enough to root them out and outgrow them.

The videos, transcript, and poems from my Transformational Autobiography on this site, show you, in thoroughgoing detail, how I let my eidetic images not only show me to the source of a problem but also engage me in a dramatic, transformational soul progression that shows me out of trouble.

At this point I want to highlight some of the surprising features of inner space that eidetic imaging brings to light. Once we get in touch with them, our inner spaces turn out to be more real to us than reality. Sometimes you can even see how blatantly a person will let the image in his or her mind’s eye override the reality in front of his or her naked eyes.

A person who gets to know inner space eidetically sees that inner space is no blousy idea. It’s a fascinating place full of fascinating places that you can see and hear and smell and be touched and moved by. It’s a hall of mirrors. It’s a succession of dolls within dolls, such as the Russians make. It is more layered than skin, or muscle tissue, or tree rings, or mica, or the Grand Canyon. It casts and sheds many lights around. By exploring it systematically, following Ahsen’s approach, an imager keeps on revealing further reaches of his or her own inner topography and architecture and physiology, gaining an ever clearer and stronger sense of personal substance and all the dynamic structures that influence and shape his or her life.

We all have some remote sense of being players on a global stage. Eidetic imaging gives us an immediate, close up, familiar sense of the many-layered dramas of positioning we are always in, and can get out of when we need to

People often say, “That’s where I’m at,” or “This is where I’m coming from,” when they’re declaring their position on something. They understand, more or less dimly, that their position and attitude in space will determine where they’ll arrive, just as surely as the position and attitude, plus the velocity, of a space ship determines where it lands. In other words, they have a dramatic understanding that we are always involved in a drama of positioning. Eidetic imaging makes this drama transparently clear, showing, in no uncertain terms, that the better we understand the plays in motion, and the more we see where they’re coming from, the clearer we are likely to be about the outcome of those plays.

Early on in my eidetic imaging journey, I saw a coconut floating in and rolling off a wave onto shore. From then on I became increasingly aware of how eidetic imaging was renovating my inner landscape. I understood that I was coming in off the high seas of consciousness that I’d grown up in.

A while later I saw a large, flat, promontory-like boulder rise up in front of me inviting me to step up on it. Setting foot on it, I realized I was transitioning from aquatic to terrestrial life, and I liked the feeling of that firmer footing.

After a while my images showed me going through a terrible childhood crisis on the swings. As I was standing on the swing seat pumping, my quite contrary mother issued some order that flipped me around so swiftly it felt as fatal as a car being flipped over. At this point my eidetic father – who has more magic to him than my historical father – saw that I was in dire need and came to the rescue by throwing Eagle in my face. Thereafter I saw Eagle as my power animal. I knew instantly that this meant I had to fly my way out of the trouble I was in. But I had a lot of rubble to wade out of before I could take off.

Out of the immense confusion and despair I was in, my eidetic images gradually pieced together a more livable housing for my consciousness to emerge through. I hope these few excerpts of scenes from the transformational evolution of my inner life give you a good idea of the fact that each one of us has within us a transformational inner landscape to discover and explore. Unfortunately the habit of mind in our society is to let this inner landscape go largely unseen, as if we can do just as well without it. We cannot.

It is our undoing to think we can do without knowing where we’re coming from, and without seeing our way clear of the same old stories we think we’re stuck with. By staying in memory consciousness exclusively, we remain stuck on replay. By entering the eidetic level of our consciousness we discover what is always new and fresh within us, and see ourselves in action making the new moves that show us into the better places and positions we need to be in.

Eidetic imaging enables us to explore our inner landscape well enough to discover the deep order of the inner resources it has in store for us. It lets us allow any original tectonic plates that have parted company to come together again, if such a move is needed to provide an imager with a more secure and happier psychic foundation to operate from. For instance, my divorced parents gradually moved into positions on my mind in which they can now be seen cooperating in my well being!

Becoming aware of and working with this inherently healing momentum in consciousness means that conditions now treated barbarically – with electric shock, or manacles and straightjackets and debilitating drugs; treatments that fail to go to and remove the source of the problem – can be ameliorated and eliminated. Were it not for eidetic imaging I would still be manic depressive, living on drugs that did not agree with me, and possibly heading for a straightjacket such as my fathered suffered. By following this far more civilized, beautiful and fascinating approach I discovered the inner trampoline of images that enable me to find and keep my balance, and show others into a socializing process of exploring their inner landscapes to find better places within them that they can operate out of.

What I have just said may sound too fantastic to wrap your mind around at first, but it does correctly describe the potential for inner reconciliation and harmony and promise that eidetic imaging brings out in us. Long before I could say what I am saying here, I felt the move towards healing that eidetic imaging was releasing in me. In fact, I felt hopeful during my first session with Ahsen. Unlike all the other therapists I’d ever seen who opened with “There are no guarantees,” he showed that he had plenty of reason to feel confident that eidetic imaging would show me out of a life of depression.

This inherently healing momentum one discovers inside oneself through eidetic imaging is especially useful to the many of us who are children of upheaval, of divorce, or parents whose consciousness was not fully together, or not in touch with the inner reality we as children needed them to be in touch with. It is also extraordinary helpful to people who have been subject to and effectively disappeared by the narcissism of one or both parents exhibiting the distinguishing trait of narcissists, being blind to the reality of the people they are engaging with.

Since our culture prevents or distracts us from looking into our inner reality, by making our interiors seem so utterly disagreeable or hopelessly confusing that no sensible person would really want to look into them, almost everybody has trouble with knowing their own inner reality well enough to see accurately what’s going on with other people. Eidetic imaging makes knowing thyself and getting to know you an inviting, exciting, and adventurous proposition. You can even look forward to going into a problem when you know you’re looking into it in a way that is sure to get you out of it sooner rather than later.

Once the inner wisdom of my eidetic images landed me on terra firma, they kept showing me whatever I needed to learn next about standing on my own two feet. This was quite a task because I was tremendously shy and phobic. One day I saw myself as a child working up the courage to peek around a huge boulder I was hiding behind. The lure was a beautiful, chocolate colored moose batting his eyes on the far side of the boulder. He just stood there showing all the patience in the world as he kept on waiting for me to get around to looking him in the eye, which I did do eventually, gradually realizing that he, and my father for whom he stood, was not what I had to fear.

Over the years, I went through a number of scenes where powerful upstanding masculine images stood by seeing me through heroic struggles to wriggle my way out of the deep deep shyness and fears and dreads engendered in me by my Mother’s furies, and my Father’s failure to stand up to them, as well as their narcissism. As I was finally getting on top this situation, my images made my essential problem dramatically clear to me. I was in double trouble. Double decker trouble. As soon as I got out from under her fury I stuck my neck into their quarreling.

Since I was always properly housed, fed, clothed and schooled, most outsiders could think I was as well brought up as a child of divorce could be. Who could know a family scene better than the piano teacher who came to the house weekly to give two kids piano lessons? She thought my parents’ marriage was the best marriage in town. My images tell the child’s eye view of that scene, and will, I hope, as other children of divorce reveal their inner circumstances, give people in our society pause to see what our acceptance of and even expectation of divorce is doing for us.

One day an image of mine showed me how my sister saw it. It was a living movie of a day I’d forgotten all about, the day she took me to her fort under the mesquite tree way out on the desert to show me the tins of food she had buried there. Seeing the image I understood for the first time that she did this as a child because she was so scared of starving because of frequently being sent away from the table without dinner. While my parents agreed on not spanking us, other methods of control they chose were sufficiently violent to do lasting damage to both their children.

What my images made clear to me will, I hope, give you some idea of what getting to know our inner spaces thoroughly clearly can mean to us. I cannot overemphasize how important it is for all of us to start looking into inner space thoroughly enough to see our way clear of the problems that our blindness to it forces us to carry around unnecessarily for life. If my parents and teachers and friends and colleagues knew what I show in my Transformational Autobiography, my life would have been a life more like living and getting somewhere, instead of an endless struggle to right myself from being thrown.

I am grateful that my mother was willing to do some imaging with me so that I have a few glimpses of her inside story as she saw it. One scene she told me stands out. She was seeing her mother sobbing while dragging her through the streets of Chicago to escape another of my grandfather’s frequent temper tantrums; and seeing herself trying to keep her hat on. Hearing that let me see so deeply where she was coming from; it “explained” so much about her. Her father’s explosiveness did not escape her; it came out through her, bringing me to my knees as a child.

The first time my images presented me with this situation I saw myself on my knees under my bed, playing all alone in the shadows there. My lovely nursemaid, Lena – a beautiful, tall, elderly Swedish woman, who cared for me in my early years – saw me out from under by luring me up onto the bed to play with her there, with her arm around me. Then – in a dramatic sequence of images I would like to see Meryl Streep star in – Lena stood by me as we stood up to one of my Mother’s clean up frenzies together.

Later I saw an image in which I was dancing as proudly as a Rockette on the kitchen table. While my Father, sitting in his usual place by the toaster, was looking up at me admiringly and enjoying the show, my Mother sitting opposite him, was gnashing her teeth and saying to him, “She’s none of your business, she’s mine!” Whereupon, the image showed a huge black bite being taken out of my back.

Subsequently my images kept showing me brought to my knees under the kitchen table by my mother furiously standing over me, grimacing, shaking a long pointy arm down at me and chewing me out.

Knowing, as an eidetic imager, that there’s no need to take such a scene lying down, I kept looking at this image repeatedly, getting more in touch with the horrible, crunched up, down-in-the dumps feeling that the sight of me brought to my knees gave me. Each time I asked myself to see another me jumping out of that stricken me and face the situation another way entirely. By repeatedly making that move – called emanation in the practice of eidetic imaging – I gradually saw the me who had been brought to her knees heist herself up onto the kitchen table.

But, the moment I got out from under-the-kitchen-table consciousness I realized I was not in the clear. I was getting out of the spell that Mommy’s glaring and pointing fury put me under; but I was sticking my neck out into the atmosphere of my parents’ quarrelling, which slowly, over the first eleven years of my life, led to divorce. Suddenly I saw why it had taken me so long to shed the dread I needed to shed. It was two stories high, and eleven years old.

Mommy and I did not leave this quarreling house behind when she divorced my father and moved me fifteen hundred miles away from him. I was still carrying that quarreling house around in my head. It was the house I lived in, in my mind’s eye, until, through imaging, begun after turning forty, I surfaced some happier images of my parents.

One day my images in their infinite wisdom took the roof off my dreadful house, opening my being to the clear blue skies of happiness for the first time. Before that, as I had recognized in my teens, I always felt doomed to live forever in partly cloudy weather.

What difference does it make that my images let me see my way clear out from under the table where my Mother’s fury had been keeping me down for decades; and then out from under the ceiling of quarreling that enclosed me in the inflamed air of impending divorce for my first eleven years?

As soon as my images took the roof off that house of divorce, leaving my consciousness wide open to the blue skies of happiness for the first time, I found that I was living in a condo with standing water and therefore mold in the basement, which was giving me headaches, chest pains and fatigue and disturbing my gallbladder. And then I found that I was unable to get any effective action to properly remedy the situation.

One morning as I woke I felt the deepest fear overtaking me. I looked to Shiva and he stepped forward briskly, heading straight for center stage, and took command with panache. He was showing me the next step I needed to take, the commanding act I needed to take on.

This image made me appreciate that although I had already taken command far more than I would have in my more cowering days, I had not yet become the top executive that Shiva was now authorizing me to become so I would be authoritative enough to survive this situation without going under for good.

Seeing Shiva step out it that brisk commanding way showed me how far I’d come, how far my images had taken me, as they released me from what had been my central operating position in life: being stuck with operating under the influence of the cowering and cringing child self-image huddling in terror under the kitchen table. Gradually my images showed me getting on top of the situation I’d lived under all my life. In this fearful waking moment the residue of my old underlying position was still ready to sneak in on me and take over, until I left myself open to letting another self-image show up and show me exactly what I needed to do to handle this situation effectively. It is hard to say how enormously effective Shiva’s brisk step has been, playing in the back of my mind to keep me in the right form for dealing with this crushing situation effectively.

“You’ve got to want,” Howard Nemerov – later to become our poet laureate – told me one day as he drove me around the airport during my tutorial time since I was too depressed to sit in a small room with. I was profoundly impressed that anyone was wise enough to know that it is hard to want. It was over two decades later that Ahsen showed me how to handle the images that could make wanting work, and liberate it from being in bondage to the terror that held sway over my inner house.

It took practice for me to establish such a good network of inner communications that when I want help, I know where to go and who to turn to in order to get just the help I need. I write my exploits up hoping to help many other people realize that they can start doing as much for themselves simply by getting into practice doing eidetic imaging. Through such practice they can develop soul tone that improves their body tone at the same time.

Imaging is simply a matter of using your powers of imagination as skillfully as your level of practice allows. When you want the help imaging offers, you practice to get the results you want, instead of letting your problems have their way with you. With practice you become confident that your images will be there to help you anytime you need their help: and can help you more and more instantaneously the more you approach them skillfully, knowing how they operate.

By stepping out briskly in the way he did, Shiva showed me what to do to prevent myself from slipping back into my old cringing and cowering position and my hiding ways, even though the circumstance I found myself in rendered me more homeless than the child under the kitchen table. Thanks be to the god I’ve gotten to know and understand through eidetic imaging that kept me in touch with the growing inner strength that was, and is, all I have to go on.

As soon as I began seeing the exact nature of the hole I’d been in all my life, my images kept showing me making the right and necessary moves to get out of it. Before seeing the hole, I could only keep stepping into it again and again since it was so deep and central to my being.

What eidetic imaging enables us to see is the pictures our bodies took of the house or houses we lived in as children, as well as of the parents or guardians who lived there with us when we were most impressionable. For better or worse, we carry these impressions around on our minds as surely as turtles carry their shells on their backs, and go on living in the houses these images build within us. My inner house was so loaded with difficulties that one of the first images I saw was of myself as a child hovering near the lintel of the kitchen door dying to get out of there.

I had to get out of there in order to see the cooperative sides of my parents come alive in my imagination sufficiently to bring out the happy cooperative capabilities of my being. When an imager starts experiencing these magic parents, they do not seem unreal or fantastic. These eidetic parents seem like the real parents, the true parents, the parents your parents always wanted to be in their heart of hearts. Certainly the image showing me huddled in the lower chamber of my Father’s heart is, for me, one of the most powerful instances of how true this is.

Eidetic imaging enables you to discover that these magic, caring, protective, wise parents are very much alive within you, and can be there for you any time you need them, open for consultation and games. They always have your best interests in mind, and behave the way anyone wants their parents to behave. These magic parents are not just fantasies; they do real work; they are actual helpmeets

throughout your born days.

As you get in touch with the trouble your historical parents gave you, you simultaneously see what elements of their history threw them off course, preventing them from showing you what you wanted to see, but can now experience from them through imaging. You soon find compassion for and understanding of your parents replacing the harder feelings you may have had towards them before you could empathize with them.

At first glance this account of the helpful eidetic level of reality that is ready to come alive in all our imaginations may sound like it’s too good to be true. But it is, in fact, a transformational level of reality that is built into and available to all of us so we can balance our inside stories out. It is always at the ready to go to bat for us, and show us how to enter into it, in order to see all we can do for our own good.

What does it mean to me that I went to the trouble of going on the journey that showed me out of the house of dread I’d been living in for decades? It means that I am now ready to enjoy the happiness I’ve long wanted. I have shed my dread, my double dread, my double trouble, that has made me seem so burdensome to others who didn’t know or want to know or deal with the consequences of the trouble I’ve seen.

This means I no longer have to drop down into that awful state of being brought to my knees at the point of fury. The upstanding figures in my life – Lena, Daddy, Shiva, and eventually my mother – have come home to roost peaceably in my mind, so I can now find peace where havoc reigned.

One of the most useful things eidetic imaging enables us to see is the triangulating situations we get caught in and can get out of.

We are not even good at seeing our one-to-one relationships with our parents, but who even looks to see the crunches we get caught in between them, which eidetic imaging reveals so clearly. Look at the position I’m in dancing on the kitchen table. I’m caught in the riptide of Daddy’s admiration and Mommy’s damnation. I am caught up in their fight, given Daddy’s inability to stand up to her and put her fury in its place; and her inability to get out of her grasping possession. Neither one of them is seeing the position I’m in. Or seeing what they’re obliviousness to their effect on me is doing to me.

I am dancing away beyond the walls of their blindness to me. This is an excruciatingly lonely and lost position to be in; a position so many people are caught in today, and putting their children in, and come to think of as the normal human condition. It isn’t. And it can be remedied.

Through eidetic imaging we can see clearly what positions our parents put us in, the extent to which we are mirroring them, and how we can bounce out of debilitating replays so we no longer do unto others what was done unto us.

Eidetic imaging gives us the gift of seeing the extent to which we can free ourselves from the tortuous positions we feel stuck in as long as we fail to look into the inner drama of inner positioning that is shaping our outer lives.

Would you own a house and never look into all that’s going on in the basement to keep you warm and clean and healthy? Living without knowing the drama of positioning taking place in our inner lives is like living in a house without going to the basement, or the attic or the roof. Now, because of Akhter Ahsen’s research, anyone can look forward to entering the basement of consciousness and liberating the mechanisms of consciousness to free up the ease we need in our inner lives. The more you learn the ropes of exploring inner space by following your inner motion pictures, and letting their language of light in action play the wrinkles out of your system, the more you will see your way clear of rather than stuck with trouble.

I hope these glimpses of inner space, as it can now be seen eidetically, present you with a new sense of direction or guideposts that help you see the inner spaces described in passages of my Transformational Autobiography. I am always seeking to understand and grasp the drama of positioning and repositioning I’m going through as I let my brilliant inner motion pictures show me out of the elbows and stalemates in my consciousness pipeline.

Many of us so dread the thought of our inner lives that we never look into them. This dreadful attitude is immensely unfortunate, not only because it causes so much misunderstanding, confusion, grief and violence. It also deprives us of enjoying to the utmost the familiarity and intimacy with all our relations – with our bodies, with nature, with our families and friends and colleagues and strangers and the divine – that is most thrilling to us.

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