Why This Is Not Imagination or Visualisation

If there is one question that must be handled with precision, it’s this: “Is this just imagination?” The reason it matters is not to win an argument. It matters because confusing imagination with perception destroys trust, ruins training outcomes, and leads people into fantasy, self-deception, or cynicism.

Imagination is a real human faculty. It’s powerful. It’s useful. It’s how we plan, invent, rehearse, and create. But imagination is not the same category as perception. They can influence each other, and they can overlap, but they behave differently.

Imagination is internally generated. It can be vivid, but it is not constrained by the environment unless you actively constrain it. It tends to drift, morph, and respond to suggestion. It is highly shaped by expectation, desire, fear, and memory.

Perception is externally anchored. It may be subtle or unfamiliar, especially early on, but it is constrained by the environment. It stabilises around real spatial relationships. It does not have unlimited freedom to change, because it must remain aligned to what is actually present.

Here are practical differences that matter in training and testing:

Consistency under change. In imagination, if you “picture” a room and someone quietly moves an object, your imagined scene will not update on its own. You might guess. You might revise your mental image. But imagination doesn’t automatically track real-world changes without cues.

In perception, if a person is genuinely oriented, something about their experience remains responsive to the real environment. Again, this must be handled carefully and ethically, but the principle is simple: perception is constrained by reality; imagination is constrained by the mind.

Spatial coherence.Imagination often lacks stable geometry unless a person is highly skilled at maintaining it. Corners warp. Distances feel inconsistent. Orientation resets when attention shifts.

Perception tends to preserve geometry. Space behaves like space. Distance behaves like distance. Left and right remain meaningful in relation to the body. This doesn’t mean the experience is “perfect,” but it behaves more like orientation than storytelling.

Dependence on suggestion. Imagination is easily steered by leading language. If you tell someone what you think they should be experiencing, imagination will often produce matching imagery.

A serious training environment must avoid suggestion and avoid teaching people what to “see.” Good training supports curiosity and regulation, not performance.

This is also why our culture gets stuck. Many skeptics assume all non-standard perception must be imagination because they’ve only ever encountered vague claims, symbolic dreamlike language, or overconfident spiritual storytelling. On the other side, many believers reinforce imagination by praising any subjective report as proof. Both sides miss the same point: the issue is not whether imagination exists. The issue is whether you can distinguish imagination from perception in a disciplined way.

So what do we recommend?

We recommend treating imagination as a known variable to manage, not an enemy to suppress. People don’t need to “kill imagination.” They need to recognise when it is operating, and keep it separate from claims about the external environment.

We recommend training language that reduces performance pressure. When people feel they must produce results, imagination becomes a coping mechanism. It fills the gap to meet expectations. This can happen unconsciously, even in honest people.

We recommend building a culture of “I don’t know yet.” That sentence is a superpower. It keeps inquiry clean. It protects the participant from inventing, and it protects the researcher from reading too much into noise.

And we recommend keeping outcomes tied to clear, observable tests rather than poetic descriptions. Not because poetry is bad, but because early-stage perception must be grounded in reality constraints if it’s going to mature into something reliable.

This page is not here to dismiss anyone’s experience. It’s here to keep the field honest. If what we are studying is real, it will survive careful distinction. And if it’s not real, then this distinction will prevent the institute from building on sand.