I also did this process, but my experience was different. When I first realized that others could visualize things and I could not. I practiced trying to visualize a simple cube for months, relaxing and meditating as you did. Then one day I actually saw something. I was fully awake, and I saw a crystal clear image of a large granite slab, slowly rotating. I could see the texture of the surface, the physical detail of the shape. It was a truly amazing experience, the likes of which I had never experienced.
And then I had what was the most frightening thought I've ever had: "I don't know how to make this thing go away - what if I can't make it go away? Have I just taught and meditated myself into psychosis? Oh shit!!!"
I then pulled out of the visualization (no idea how that happened, it just ended with no fanfare, presumably as I started to think about other things) and have never seen another mental image like that, even though I've tried. This happened perhaps ten years ago.
That experience was not entirely unlike my experience with lucid dreaming some years earlier. I essentially never dreamed (never recalled my dreams), but I read all about lucid dreaming, thought about it, and used Richard Feynman's dream study approach to try to focus on it. Then one night I had a lucid dream, and the next night, and the next. Each night for almost a week I had an incredibly vivid lucid dream, absolutely amazing experiences, waking up the next morning with full recall of it and feeling exhausted and entirely unrefreshed from my sleep. At the end of that week I had a final dream. In that final dream the subject of my dream was the realization that I couldn't lucid dream any more. I never had another lucid dream, and have almost never remembered any dreams since then.
The hardware is clearly there for this stuff, at least in my case, but it seems the OS is also clearly working to "protect" me from some of those hardware features.
Given that there absolutely are people who are subject to uncontrolled hallucinations and mental breakdowns between the real and the imaginary, I've concluded that at least for my mind these experiences are too close to the boundary for whatever circuitry protects me from that sort of breakdown. Others will have their own journeys, but for me based on my personal experiences I've concluded it's not a case of the mind "can't" it's a case of the mind "shouldn't" or "wont."
As with any extreme training, be careful not to injure yourself. You might be fine, but not everyone who engages in extreme training does so without injury. I'm glad to have walked away from the process safely and can easily imagine not having done so.
Well, there really is no boundary of insanity. Not one that you can define clearly, anyway. You shouldn't be afraid of yourself, that's not productive to learning. You're not that many people, hardware and software and all that, that's nonsense. There isn't a war going on inside you unless you imagine there to be one.
Be more bold.
I was like you, very ambitious. Started with a cube, after many attempts getting nothing saw something incredibly vivid, very much like lucid dreams that I've had when I was younger.
And then three months of nothing again.
I got SO EXCITED. It's there! I was right, people condition themselves largely, into a form of acceptable experience. But there is more.
So I took smaller steps. A point. A spot of magnitude. Add color. Add one more spot, at a measure from the first. Rotate that around, then rotate that in three dimensions. Trace letters, one by one. Read backwards the result. Light a surface, texture a surface, bend a surface.
The smaller the steps the more success you'll have. It's important to feel grounded, and it's important to be motivated to invest the time. Success is non-negotiable, it has to be there.
Sorry friend, but most of your comments regarding "growing out of aphantasia" sound like we just need to pray it away, or similar nonsense. Have you thought perhaps it's not just a matter of "being more bold"? If being bold worked for you, have you thought that perhaps it might be harder for other people? Your advice feels a little too condescending to me.
It's like going to a short-sighted person and telling them to just to open their eyes more and everything will work out in the end. I don't think you understand what this phenomenon is.
I'm here to point out that it doesn't actually exist, because you can work at it and improve. That's not a disability, at that point. This is not to do with what you're born with, but what you're raised with.
This is conditioning. I am a sample of one, but there is no contrary evidence that I can find; and plenty to support my experience.
