Visions and Symbols - II · Letters on Yoga

When you see Light, that is vision; when you feel Light entering into you, that is experience; when Light settles in you and brings illumination and knowledge, that is a realisation. But ordinarily visions are also called experiences.

Usually the visions precede realisation, in a way they prepare it.

The vision of the higher planes or the idea of what they are can be had long before the transformation. If that were not possible, how could the transformation take place—the lower nature cannot change by itself, it changes by the growing vision, perception, descent of the higher consciousness belonging to the higher planes? It is through aspiration, through an increasing opening that these visions and perceptions begin to come—the realisation comes afterwards.

Yes, it [the higher consciousness] can come down into the mind plane bringing peace, wideness, the cosmic consciousness, the realisation of the Divine, the sense of the cosmic forces and other things—without any breaking of the veil through vision. Ordinarily, however, with most people the inner vision comes first.

I said the realisation of the Divine in the mind. If there is to be the total realisation, the breaking of the veil is indispensable.

Sometimes a vision accompanies an experience and is as it were a visual rendering of it or accompaniment to it, but the experience itself is a separate thing.

That does not follow. By going deep a person may see visions, another may fall in deeper consciousness and see no vision and so on. The result varies with the nature.