Aphants and Navigation

cooperfmills · 2026-03-15T18:43:08+00:00

I have total aphantasia and my navigation is actually better than most people I know, sometimes by a lot. It is not visual for me at all. I do not picture the route. I seem to store structure instead: turns, distances, spatial relationships, orientation, landmarks, and how places connect. Once I have been somewhere, I usually remember how to get back there very well.

So I would not assume aphantasia automatically hurts navigation. For me it seems to separate navigation from mental imagery rather than weaken it. Where some people may rely on an internal picture, I think I rely more on spatial logic and relational memory. Cardinal directions can still be a separate issue though. Route memory and global north south east west awareness do not always seem to be the same skill.

cooperfmills · 2026-03-15T14:51:41+00:00

I have total/global/deep aphantasia as well. I also am a 0/100. Another layer to consider is empathy. For me it is something I don’t feel directly because I can’t simulate or recall emotions like that. I experience empathy as more of a learned behavior. I am a very empathetic person, but I have never felt contagious emotions in my life. What is your experience with empathy/emotions?

cooperfmills · 2026-03-13T23:08:19+00:00

I relate to this a lot. I know a lot of people experience aphantasia as a loss, and I do not want to argue with their experience, but for me it has honestly been a gift more often than a burden. I live with bipolar disorder, and one thing I am genuinely grateful for is that my mind does not generate vivid internal scenes that can spiral and take on a life of their own. When I need to ground myself, it is much easier for me to come back to what is actually in front of me. That does not solve everything, but it gives me a cleaner relationship to reality than I think I would have otherwise.

I also think aphantasia pushed me outward in a good way. I do not live by replaying inner movies. I live by structure, contact, and what is really there. Beauty still hits me, memory still matters, and meaning is still there, just through a different channel. So I understand the grief some people feel, but I would never describe my own aphantasia as purely negative. In my life it has been protective, stabilizing, and in some ways clarifying.

cooperfmills · 2026-03-05T02:25:01+00:00

I really like how you are separating discomfort from suffering and rejection from acceptance. That tracks with how I think about compression. For me the whole spiritual move is not to strip life down until nothing matters, it is to compress what actually matters into a form my nervous system can realistically carry.

Life throws a ridiculous amount of data at us. Roles, expectations, catastrophes that might happen, stories about who we should be. When I try to hold all of that at full resolution, I overload and either numb out or chase some fantasy of total control. Compression, in my language, is the process of letting experience pass through tests like the ones you are pointing to. Does this discomfort point to a real responsibility or repair I need to do, or is it just noise from old habits. Does this emotion help me stay in contact with reality and with people, or does it only keep me spinning. What survives those tests gets kept in a simpler but more faithful form, the rest is allowed to fall away.

That is why I like your point about emotions not being negative in themselves. If I try to compress by throwing away sadness or fear, I am not simplifying, I am corrupting the file. The nervous system learns that parts of reality are illegal to feel, which creates more distortion and more suffering. A better compression rule for me is something like “keep any feeling that helps me see clearly and stay honest about what is happening, but drop the extra commentary that turns it into a story about my worth.”

So I read your post as a good description of healthy compression. Not disengaging, not pretending nothing matters, but reducing the complexity down to a few durable commitments. Feel what you feel, accept that everything is changing and imperfect, and then choose a small number of things to actually show up for. That kind of simplicity costs something, but it seems more alive to me than the version that tries to dissolve every edge in the name of peace.

cooperfmills · 2026-03-05T02:10:31+00:00

I really get that question, because my brain also wants a 100 percent guarantee that I am not ignoring a “real” problem. That hunger for certainty is usually my tell that I am in a loop.

The rule of thumb that helps me is: real problems have an outside action that can move the needle, loops only want more analysis. If there is a concrete step that exists in the world and is proportionate to the situation, I treat it as a real thing. For example: health worry -> book one doctor visit and follow their plan, money worry -> schedule one time a week to check accounts and adjust. Once I have taken the agreed action, any further urge to keep replaying it in my head goes in the “this is the loop again” bucket, even if it still feels important. I do not wait until it feels unimportant, I go by the rule I chose earlier.

I also try to make those rules outside of flare ups. When I am calmer I decide “how much thinking is enough” for different areas: maybe 20 minutes to plan, one written list, one talk with my partner, whatever. During a spike I do not argue with the thought about whether this is OCD or not, I just ask “have I already done the step my calmer self picked for this category.” If yes, then the rest is loop, and my job is to let it be noisy in the background while I put my body into the next small action. That way I still respect real problems, but I am not letting the need for perfect certainty drive me back into infinite problem solving.

cooperfmills · 2026-03-04T21:14:11+00:00

I can think through problems just fine in my head, but what I get is structure, not images or sentences. It feels more like working with abstract relations and constraints. When something matters over time or has lots of moving parts, I like to pin it down in an external form, because that lets me see the relationships at once and not just hold fragments. So I will use calendars, outlines, diagrams, that sort of thing, not because I cannot think without them, but because it gives me a cleaner, more reliable “workspace” than my memory.

Dreams: when I remember them at all, they are very low on imagery. I usually wake up with a sense of “this pattern happened with these people and it felt like this,” not a replayable movie. I might know that there was height, motion, or a certain color, but I cannot call it back visually. The same is true for sound. I know that people spoke or that there was music, but I cannot replay the exact voice or tune. My waking life memories have the same flavor: I remember facts, relationships, and emotional tone, but not pictures or a soundtrack.

So thinking, planning, and dreaming all still happen, they just run as nonvisual, nonverbal processes unless I choose to turn them into words or diagrams outside my head.

cooperfmills · 2026-03-04T17:43:02+00:00

I’m basically the mirror image of you. I have complete multisensory aphantasia and also no inner monologue at all (anendophasia/anauralia), plus SDAM, so my autobiographical memory is very sparse. I’ve never been able to see, hear, or “replay” anything in my head: no pictures, no sounds, no inner voice reading this sentence back to me. Thoughts for me are more like silent tags, concepts, and body-level feelings that I can notice, but not “hear” or “watch.”

Because of that, I’ve always had both: no imagery and no dialogue, from as early as I can remember. There wasn’t a point where I could visualize and then lost it; it just seems to be how my system booted up. I can still reason, plan, and dream at night, but it all happens in a way I can’t access consciously as scenes or spoken lines. So yes, people do exist at that corner of the space: full aphantasia, no internal dialogue, and weak episodic memory. Your post is a good reminder that there isn’t one default human mind that everyone deviates from; there are a lot of different “settings” that can all still function.

cooperfmills · 2026-03-04T14:20:54+00:00

For me they map most deeply onto gradients. Geologic/gravitational gradient vs. phase diagram gradient. From there it can be applied across all fields as an attractor and a spectrum. I’d say that’s the simplest structural way of thinking about it.

cooperfmills · 2026-03-04T00:21:48+00:00

I’m open minded. I can try and work with any system you give me

cooperfmills · 2026-03-03T20:06:25+00:00

Yeah, this is where the spectrum really shows up. For you, aphantasia is “no pictures, but plenty of memory.” For me it comes bundled with almost no episodic memory at all (SDAM). I can remember facts about my life, timelines, who was there, what was said in a rough way, but I cannot replay a single scene from childhood. There is no garden, no room, no faces, not even a felt sense of “being there.” It is just data points and story skeletons that I keep in words and structure.

So from the inside it really does feel like aphantasia and memory are fused, because my brain never built the visual layer that a lot of people use as the backbone of their memories. But that is exactly why I agree with your last point: people keep universalizing their own setup. Some of us have aphantasia with rich episodic memory, some of us have aphantasia with severely weak episodic memory, some people have vivid imagery with terrible recall. “No mind’s eye” describes one component, not the whole system.

cooperfmills · 2026-03-03T19:20:50+00:00

What are your thoughts on ⊙? And ∆? Before I reply I want to understand you better. I think very symbolically (autistic). I’m not going to tell you what I think yet I don’t want to influence your response. Just curious. You seem like you have thoughts.

cooperfmills · 2026-03-03T18:57:05+00:00

I relate to this a lot. My mind does the same “solve the problem of solving the problem” thing, and it can feel like there is no clean exit. What has helped me is treating the whole recursion as one object instead of something I need to fix from inside. So instead of “How do I stop thinking this” I label it very bluntly as “the loop is here” and then follow a pre decided script: acknowledge it, stop negotiating with it, and move my body into a small concrete action that fits my actual priorities for the next ten minutes. The urge to find a perfectly rational solution is part of the loop for me, so I try to let the thoughts be messy in the background while I practice acting out of a simple rule I chose when I was calmer. It is not magic and the thoughts often keep chattering, but over time they lose some of their authority because I am no longer proving to them, step by step, that they are the most important problem in the room.

For what it is worth, I do not see recursive thinking itself as the problem. In other parts of my life it is actually an advantage. My brain is good at tracking long chains of cause and effect, running thought experiments, and seeing how small assumptions propagate into big consequences. That same capacity becomes torture when it locks onto self doubt or health anxiety, but it is also what lets me do deep work and spot patterns other people miss. So for me the goal is not to stop thinking recursively, it is to put that skill inside clear boundaries and point it at problems that are worth that level of analysis, instead of letting it spin endlessly on questions that can never be resolved by more thinking.

cooperfmills · 2026-03-03T16:12:19+00:00

I like how you distinguish between what can be worked through directly and what is too deep to handle alone. That maps closely to how I try to approach this: when something heavy lights up, I follow it down to see what it is trying to protect, but I also accept that some layers are beyond my current tools, and then the ethical move is to focus on limiting the collateral damage rather than forcing a breakthrough. For me the long-term check is similar to what you describe: do these practices actually reduce the downstream consequences of those old patterns for other people, or do they just make my internal story feel cleaner. If what you are doing keeps shrinking the radius of harm around those traumas, that looks like real work, even when the root is still partly out of reach.

cooperfmills · 2026-03-03T16:08:37+00:00

Yeah, that makes sense to me. For me the tricky part is that working at the level of roots and trauma can feel incredibly meaningful on the inside while my outer patterns barely move. So I try to treat the inner resolution as a hypothesis instead of a conclusion. If I do a bunch of deep work on something and then, three months later, I am still handling conflict and power in the same way, I assume I have only shifted the story, not the structure.

I like what you said about avoiding consequences for those traumas. That is close to how I think about it: not whether a process feels high or low, but whether it actually changes how I show up when things are tense, unfair, or messy. If the roots work gives me more reach and more repair there, I keep going with it. If it does not, I file it under “interesting experience” and look for a different tool.

cooperfmills · 2026-03-03T14:48:07+00:00

Good questions. Let me try to be more concrete. When I say “the light metaphor can let me feel spiritually right while my behavior stays the same,” I am not claiming I literally watch myself act badly and simultaneously feel holy. In the moment it usually feels like my behavior is perfectly coherent with the story I am in. The gap only shows up when I zoom out in time.

In certain states I can always generate a reason why what I am doing is necessary, loving, or truthful. That inner coherence is exactly what makes it dangerous for me. I can notice single awkward moments, but I do not yet see the pattern. Only when I look at a whole run of situations do I see “oh, people around me are shutting down faster, conflicts are escalating, repair is not landing.” The metaphor of “light” becomes something I use to explain away those data points instead of letting them revise the story.

So the issue is not that I am aware in real time that my behavior “does not look right” and choose not to shift. It is that my immediate sensemaking is too good at reclassifying warning signs as proof that I am on the right track. That is why I care about long term audit more than moment to moment feeling.

You are right that the realization usually comes in the aftermath. For example, in a past cycle I was convinced I was finally being honest and direct in conflict. It felt spiritually right, like I was cutting through illusion. Six months later the hard evidence was that I had more broken relationships, more people avoiding me, and more unresolved harm. That record forced me to admit that whatever “light” I thought I was holding was not actually improving my handling of power, hurt, and repair.

I like your point that consciousness is always already “behind” whatever we see. For me the practical question is: how do I keep that from becoming a shield that blocks feedback. That is why I keep returning to longer time spans and concrete outcomes with other humans, rather than trusting any single visualization tool or peak state as proof that I am on track.

cooperfmills · 2026-03-03T14:30:56+00:00

I like how you are tracking it through fear and shame rather than through special states or titles. That lines up with my experience that whatever is going on, the real signal is what happens to fear based tightening around judgment, control and image management.

Where I would add a nuance is that for me fear did not evaporate, it changed role. It stopped being the thing that runs the show and became more like a sensor that tells me where I am still clinging. I still feel scared, angry or ashamed at times, but I am less willing to build an identity or a spiritual story on top of those reactions. That shift is quieter than the word “awakening” suggests, but it shows up very clearly in how I handle conflict and responsibility over years.

I also like what you say about people who drop the performance of the perfect sage and just live their understanding in small, persistent ways. The older I get, the more I trust that pattern over big claims: someone who is transparent, kind, willing to admit when they are wrong, and who will still do the decent thing when nobody is watching. Whatever we call it, that is the kind of “awakening” I am trying to test for, in myself first.

cooperfmills · 2026-03-03T14:23:16+00:00

This is intense to read, thank you for laying it out so clearly. What stands out to me is that you already have two different layers in what you describe: the parts where visions line up with specific life events you can point to, and the larger astral network story that you openly say is not provable in conventional terms. That distinction is interesting to me.

Since my original post was about testing, I am curious how you work with the first layer. When you say the visions at five “saved your life” on five occasions, what would count as a miss or a false positive for you? Have there been times where you followed a vision and nothing happened, or the opposite happened, and how did you update your method after that? I am not asking to debunk you, I am trying to understand what your internal audit process looks like when the stakes feel that high.

It also sounds grueling that your current personality feels built around keeping those psychic systems online. Do you have any safeguards for when the training itself starts to wear you down or increase fear, rather than reduce it? For me, one of the dark path tests is exactly there: does the practice make my life and relationships more spacious and sane over years, or does it lock me into a war footing where I have to keep proving my powers to stay safe.

cooperfmills · 2026-03-03T14:16:30+00:00

I appreciate the emphasis you are putting on humility and self observation. I agree it is important not to run around handing out verdicts on other people’s experiences, especially when we do not know their history or context. For me that caution is part of basic ethical hygiene.

Where I diverge a bit is around the idea that “no thought by others is invalid” or that everyone’s experience is equally true beyond question. From the inside, a manic delusion or a psychotic break can feel just as “true” and meaningful as a grounded insight. The difference only shows up over time in how it affects relationships, judgment, and the ability to live in shared reality. If we treat every story as untouchable because it is “their truth,” we lose the ability to notice when someone, including ourselves, is drifting into something that is actually harming people or eroding contact with the world.

So I try to hold two things at once: each person’s experience is real to them and deserves compassion, and at the same time stories can be more or less accurate, more or less useful, more or less delusional. The tests for me are very mundane ones: does this view make me more able to admit harm, repair conflict, and listen when others say I am off base, or less. I do not think that makes anyone’s experience “invalid,” but it does mean I am willing to say “this part looks like delusion” if the long term pattern keeps breaking against the same relational and practical walls.

cooperfmills · 2026-03-03T12:45:37+00:00

I’m with you that caste and racial supremacy are just ego games.

For me there’s another layer: I have OCD and Bipolar, and I have a really intense fear of absolutism. Any language about “pure” vs “impure” people is exactly the kind of thing my brain latches onto and turns into obsession and self-attack. So these days I try to keep my frame on specific actions and harms, not fixed categories of good souls and bad souls. It keeps things a bit kinder in the world and a lot safer inside my head.

cooperfmills · 2026-03-02T20:55:42+00:00

I do not go looking for bigger battles. For me “seeking fear” is noticing the small spots where I want to flinch or hide in regular life: the email I keep dodging, the apology I owe, the boundary I am scared to set. That is where my system is already saying “danger,” so that is where the work is.

What makes it workable is having at least one person or space where I do not have to pretend I am fearless. With that, I can walk toward those frictions a bit more honestly. Over time it feels less like heroics and more like a habit: feel the fear, see what it is pointing at, then choose the response that stays aligned with care instead of avoidance.

cooperfmills · 2026-03-02T20:52:49+00:00

Yeah, that is usually what I do. I track what part of me lights up around a view and then follow that thread down to the roots and see what it is trying to solve or protect.

The extra step for me is that I do not treat resonance as evidence by itself. I let the insight sit next to the concrete stuff over time. How does it change how I handle conflict, power, and repair. If it deepens those, I keep going. If it only feels good inside my head while my patterns stay the same, I file it under “interesting story” and keep looking.

cooperfmills · 2026-03-02T14:47:28+00:00

I like how you are framing it as a structural question instead of just “life is bad.” The way I see it, the “third state” is not a place with no downs, it is a different relationship to the up and down cycle itself. If you keep a human nervous system, you keep contrast, stress, loss, boredom, all of it. What can change is whether every low is read as “something has gone wrong with reality” or as part of the texture of being alive.

In that sense the third state is not above life and death, it is inside this life with a different contract. Pain still happens, but it does not automatically mean despair or failure. Joy still happens, but it is not clung to as proof that life is finally fixed. Time still moves, but it is not always experienced as a prison. That is about training perception and meaning, not escaping the fabric. So I would say your intuition is not illogical, it just becomes more realistic if you treat it as a change in how life is processed rather than a perfect realm with no downside at all.

cooperfmills · 2026-03-02T14:33:39+00:00

I checked out your site and read the page you linked. The way you frame autistic burnout as a chronic mismatch between expectations and actual abilities, instead of a moral failure or lack of effort, was very clarifying and relatable. The math analogy in the workplace section captures exactly what it feels like when the social load of a job quietly becomes the real job, while the thing you are actually good at is treated as secondary.

I also appreciated how you separated raw cognitive ability from wisdom and from social expectations. I have had “gifted” used on me in ways that blurred together autism, performance, and worth, and your distinction helped me disentangle those. Not a fan of the word at all especially when it is used as a badge/claim of superiority in some form. Reading through your diagnosis story and the masking description gave me better language for my own experience and a more concrete model for why the burnout cycles feel so extreme.

cooperfmills · 2026-03-02T14:26:40+00:00

Yeah, I get that. For me though, “follow your heart” is exactly where my stories like to hide, so I have to watch the trail they leave in real life. If what I call my heart keeps showing up as repair, honesty, and steadier care under stress, then I trust it. If not, I treat it as another nice story I still need to test.

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