When Meditation Produces Visions: Why Mystical Experiences Deserve Caution

There is one question I receive more than almost any other. Someone felt their body lift during practice. Someone saw light behind closed eyes. Someone heard what sounded like a voice. And they want to know what it meant.

Usually there is an answer they are quietly hoping for — that it was a good sign, that they are ahead of other people.

I do not give that answer. I walked that road myself, and I stayed lost on it for a long time.

I had them too

I have been practicing for nineteen years and teaching for fourteen. In that time I had a number of experiences that would qualify as mystical — the sensation of leaving my body, states that felt like contact with something else, and unusually vivid visual scenes.

I will be honest about what happened next. I thought those experiences were significant. I felt, in some private corner, like someone who had been chosen. I wanted to tell people. And mixed into that was plain arrogance.

I know better now. Those experiences were not important.

What an experience mostly produces is hierarchy

After a mystical experience, a quiet thought tends to arrive. It is the sense of a gap between you and everyone else.

I have been through this. That person is still a beginner and would not understand.

This is the most corrosive thing that can happen to a practitioner. The practice is supposed to lower and widen you. An experience often raises and narrows you instead. The two point in opposite directions.

Where I stand now is simple. Every person's experience is valuable, and every person's is different. Some people see intense imagery. Some see nothing at all for decades. That difference is not a difference in level. It is just a difference in people.

Frequent experiences are not a talent

There is a rather mundane reason I had so many of them.

Before I worked as a photographer, I spent fifteen years designing clothes. A designer turns shapes and colors over in their head all day. Picturing something that does not exist yet was my job. A person whose visual imagination is trained that way will also see scenes in meditation.

So the frequency of my experiences was not evidence of depth. It was the shape of my own brain.

Meanwhile, there are people who see nothing, who look at themselves with great honesty, and whose lives change quietly over the years. There are far more of them, and they go much further.

Having no experiences does not mean you are doing it wrong.

If you practice alone, please read this part

Here I want to be more serious.

Once an experience becomes enjoyable, the next session becomes an attempt to have it again. That is where it begins. The purpose of sitting has already changed.

And this state becomes harder to leave the longer it goes on. Without anyone beside you to say "that was not a big deal," your own interpretations start confirming your own interpretations. Inside that loop, the meaning attached to each experience only grows.

Rarely, it goes further and ordinary life gives way. The boundary between experience and reality thins, relationships fall away, and basic obligations stop being met.

So if any of the following appears, pause the practice and talk to a professional.

This is not a sign that you practiced badly. It is closer to what happens when you push the body too hard. You stop, and you get help.

What to look at instead

There is something to watch in place of experiences. Ordinary life.

If even one of those has shifted, that is progress — including if you have never seen a single vision. And if you have had remarkable experiences while all three remain exactly as they were, then nothing has happened yet.

I wrote separately about how trying hard to meditate well gets in the way.

The truth is simple

Whether it is an old scripture or the words of people considered awakened, the core is startlingly plain. Be here. Look at yourself. Love.

The problem is that this is difficult to sell. Which is why some people interpret it into complexity and package it as knowledge only certain people can hold. Mysticism usually grows in exactly that spot.

If someone tells you that your experience is "not something just anyone has," watch where that sentence leads. It usually leads toward deeper dependence on the person saying it.

About the name Botong Lee

My family name is Lee. Botong is the Korean word for ordinary. I put the two together.

I wanted to build a meditation practice that is not a special activity performed by special people, but something as ordinary as the rest of the day. It is also why I leave slightly silly moments in my videos on purpose. I do not want this work to look mysterious.

I would like the culture of practice to become as common and unremarkable as pop music is. For that, the threshold has to be low — and mysticism is the thing that raises it.

If you have had an experience

Finally, for anyone who has actually had one.

Experiences pass. What matters is only what remains after they pass.

I still sit. On most days nothing happens at all. That is exactly as it should be.