When I had finished this film poem, I heard someone speak of visions in meditation, and what he said seemed particularly apposite: “Imagine a maelstrom,” he said, “made of imagination, swirling round and round, a maelstrom open at the top and bottom and bounded on the sides by the nothingness of the unimagined. A beggar imagines himself sitting at the edge of this maelstrom and imagines himself becoming aware that he is sitting at the edge of this maelstrom, looking inward at this vortex, observing beings – demonic forms, ghosts, animals, humans – first rising, and then falling through the vortex. These transient beings, the fleeting imaginings, he came to understand, have the character they do because of his evanescent mental states. The fleeting mental states that possess him determine whether these imagined beings will elevate his perceptions/imaginings or whether these phantasms will draw him down into the abyss.”
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