If visions and voices, forms and messages, often enter the mystic's field of consciousness at a certain stage of his experience, they are like the similes and metaphors which poets and writers use in order to express the feelings aroused by something or other. They ought not to be confused with the deeper psychological experience to which they are related, any more than we ought to confuse a writer's allusion in the expression "the man was a Napoleon in daring" with thinking that the man in any way became a real Napoleon instead of a figurative one. The educational and theological ideas familiar to a mystic are similar figurative projections when they reappear in his visions, although he is usually too confused or too unscientific or too carried away to separate them from their psychological basis. Nevertheless it may still be the divine Overself which supplies the original inspiration for them, and the thrill of uplift or peace which he experiences does then come from such a basis. The mystic is too close to his experience, too enthralled with its wonder, to notice how far he is himself contributing a genuine and how far a dubious or even a fictitious element to it, or to comprehend that it is the act of meditation itself, and not the object meditated on, that really produces results. The inspiration may be indubitable, but it is a common mistake to superimpose upon such a feeling the intellectual image which memory constructs or the theoretical interpretation which natural bias or human expectation provides. The nugget of inspirational gold is hidden within a fantasy created by his own desires and emotions, by his strong wishful thinking. It is a more refined version of the old story of making God partly but not wholly in man's image.
Thus these experiences do not really originate from an outside source. It is his own mental pictures that are brought up out of the subconscious and reflected into his conscious mind, even when he believes that they are visions of something external. The message he hears may only be the echo of his own voice, a subtle psychic self-deception. The content of many clairvoyant visions and portentous prophecies, as of many dreams, is determined by what has previously been read, thought, or experienced. Hence they are only projections of mental images already familiar to him. These ideas may simmer in the mind's depths for a long time but eventually they float to the surface. The mental phenomena obtained differ according to the notions previously entertained and are consequently coloured accordingly. This is inevitable because his mystical study or practice is usually and unconsciously carried on under the sway of such educational preconceptions and experiential bias as he brings to it. The historical variations in mystical phenomena are too wide, and the visions themselves are too similar to the expectations of the mystic to be acceptable as valid, even when their actual occurrence is undeniable, as it often is. We see wish-fulfilment at work here, whether it be the consequence of unconscious wishes or conscious ones. These experiences form too frail a foundation to hold up a true conception of the world or of God.
-- Notebooks Category 16: The Sensitives > Chapter 15 : Illuminations > # 95
