Visualization

With the mind's eye one sees

- Shri Harold Sequeira

Ben, my bakery teacher, would ask me to visualize the brown bread that we would bake in his professional bakery every morning. "Visualise the whole process," he would say. "The careful selection of the wheat flour, levadura (yeast), the temperature of water we will be adding in the mixing bowl, the salt we will be adding, the temperature of the oven, and so forth."

It looked like I was going to do a Ph.D. in bread making. It almost seemed so!

Ben was a senior teacher too in my yoga class, whom I had trained, in the Northern town of Cantabria, Spain. His/our bread turned out so well, it sold off as soon as it reached the health food store. When Dr. Jayadeva conducted national seminars on yoga spirituality in 1984, Ben's bread was his favourite. He would have two thin slices of this golden brown bread and told us it was a great bread.

Ben's training in bread making followed the classic method of visualization by Cicero, the Roman statesman, a genius in visualization.

He called the visualization technique "The Mind's Eye" technique. Cicero (BC 106) laid down the blueprint for the Roman Empire. For all his good work, he was assassinated in Formia, Italy in 43BC.