The Spiritual Power of the Imagination
BY HARV BISHOP
Affirmations can be powerful, but there is much more to the creative power of the mind and imagination.
Our thoughts create our reality in multiple ways, writes Gary Lachman in his fascinating recent book Lost Knowledge of the Imagination.
These alternative ways of knowing include paying loving attention to the beauty that surrounds us to intuit deeper realities. We can also elevate our consciousness through the figurative language of poetry and art, and by learning to embrace the paradoxes of life.
All of these imaginative modes help can connect us to our divine heritage, higher realms, each other and the natural world.
How did this knowledge become lost?
“It was just my imagination, running away with me,” sang The Temptations in their classic song. But imagination, correctly understand, is not a hope-filled wishful fantasy, Lachman writes. How did the imagination, a gate to our highest capacities and spiritual essence, become so diminished in popular culture?
The answer can be found in the humor we find in the literal and logical character of Star Trek’s Mr. Spock, Lachman says. In a world dominated by science and technology, there is only one sanctioned way to see the world and that is through our physical senses and that which can be measured and quantified. We are blinded by the literal and logical just as Mr. Spock is blinded.
For all its gifts, science only discloses the surfaces of the world and our humanity and is blind to our depths. Our inner awe and ache in response to the beauty of a poet’s use of figurative words can’t be measured by a brain scan.
Lachman does not want us to reject the many gifts of science and the rational mind, but argues that it must be balanced with our imaginative and intuitive abilities.
Lachman illuminates his thesis by exploring the experiences of thinkers throughout history, including Goethe and Jung, to explore his major themes.
1) Our language and use of words matter. The words we use influence our ability to connect with our souls.
Lachman explores the British philosopher and poet Owen Barfield’s revelation that language shows our evolution. It was previously believed that language began with literal descriptions and practical need for survival (there’s a tiger five stone throws away) and then evolved to the figurative and symbolic for religious practices and art. Barfield turned that assumption on its head, arguing that language began as a figurative expression of human’s holistic right-brain consciousness that was attuned to nature and non-physical realities. However, that early holistic consciousness was fused with its surroundings and there was little, if any, sense of the creative gifts and value of the individual.
In analyzing the use of words by the Romantic-era poets, Barfield found they were able to accommodate both the holistic figurative language of the imagination and the vaue of the individual, thus showing an evolution of consciousness that harmonized the left and right brain.
Paradox can also open our consciousness to realities beyond the physical. Biblical parables, the Kabbalist’s use of Hebrew words with paradoxical meanings, and Zen Koans are other examples of figurative language used to shift consciousness. If you have read Adyashanti, Eckart Tolle, or Coleman Bark’s translations of Rumi’s poems, you have experienced this phenomenon of language. Life itself presents ample opportunities to learn from paradox beginning with our inhabiting both physical and spiritual worlds.
2) The spiritual depths of the physical world are disclosed by patient, loving attention.
Goethe is one of the prime examples for Lachman here.
As a young man, Goethe was captivated by a local cathedral and spent many hours there practicing loving attention as he studied the design and spirit of the building. As a result he correctly intuited the architect’s original design for a cathedral tower that had never been built and which Goethe would have had no physical way of knowing. Goethe wrote, “I observed it so long and so attentively and bestowed upon it so much affection that it decided at the end to reveal to me its manifest secret.”
Goethe continued to practice a kind of deep, participatory sensing that treated nature as a “living intelligence.” He participated in the plant’s growth cycle from within as an imaginative act rather than seeing the plant as stationary object or as his pre-existing idea of a plant. It allowed Goethe to see “The Primal Plant,” a kind of source archetype or Platonic form for plants beyond the physical.
“Goethe saw as an artist,” Lachman writes. “…our attitude towards what we are observing will determine what we see.”
3) Connecting with the unconscious can be risky territory.
Lachman skillfully recounts the harrowing experience of Jung when he first opened to his unconscious and feared he was going mad when he confronted visionary experiences. The fear was so great that Jung began to sleep with a loaded pistol prepared to commit suicide if he found himself going off the deep end. He eventually made more peace with the unconscious world by “observing his thoughts as phenomena” for analysis rather than personalizing the content of the thoughts. Jung was thus being able to distinguish between the personal and collective unconscious. How do we know whether our visions are fantasy or mystical experience? Lachman writes that “true inner voyagers” are aware of this problem and discern, intuit and reflect on the visions, while “mad men accept all and scientists reject all.”
4) While poetry and art once spoke to our souls, much contemporary art is more about surface realities with serious consequences for our cultural imagination and psyche.
Much art now celebrates the nonsensical, as well as extreme realism and the common place. In short, art is no longer is a portal to our highest imaginative capacities.
Citing the British poet and scholar Kathleen Raine, he notes that art’s “magic glass,” the portal to our depths, has instead become “a brightly lit mirror.”
In its most debased form, Reality TV, ordinary people “do all sorts of things, usually having to do with sex and humiliation,” writes Lachman, “There is much of the commonplace in this, but not, I believe, much transfiguration.”
5) The power of the mind and the imagination must be used responsibly.
The power of our thoughts to influence our reality is true on multiple levels. For example, he notes, that our worldviews can change. Wilderness was once seen as a place humans feared and used for survival. It’s now seen as a place of beauty that can restore the soul that also has its own intrinsic value. Changing worldviews changes our behavior and there is now more concern for conservation.
Lachman also writes that thoughts can manifest in reality through metaphysical and magical practices. Do we honor this magical capcity by reflecting deeply about what we want to manifest, he asks. Citing Blake and Coleridge, he notes that mind metaphysics recapitulates the “eternal act of creation, in the infinite I Am.” Are we honoring the magnitude of our participation in the “eternal act of creation” by making responsible and ethical choices about our thoughts?
Lachman doesn’t offer easy explanations for the power of the mind and imagination. He is skeptical of using quantum physics as a catch-all explanation. More important than explanation he argues, is recognizing that these methods work and using them responsibly whatever our walk of life.
He argues that the mystery of how are thoughts influence our reality results from the dominance of the scientific materialist worldview that says consciousness doesn’t exist without the physical world. If that view is flipped and we are seen as active co-creators of multiple realities birthed first in consciousness, deeper understanding of that perceived mystery may follow.
Reclaiming the Lost Knowledge of the Imagination and balancing with our gifts for rational thought is the key to our future, he concludes, adding that finding that balance won’t be easy.
There is more depth in this book than can be conveyed in a review. I’ve marked many sections to return to for more thought and reflection.
Lachman’s book is highly recommended for New Thought adherents. It is high time to start expanding our perception of our mind’s multiple potentials.
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I really like everything I just read, thank you for sharing Harvey.
Excellent piece.
My thinking is that humans changed the way we perceived and interacted with the world with the widespread use of the printing press and reading. This enabled the scientific revolution(s) to come and shifted us from an internal symbolism to an externally-driven linear worldview. Much of what Lachman points out here can be traced to that period of a few centuries when much of the west and parts of the east became literate.
This, of course, also affected us deeply in spiritual ways – scriptural “literalism” was, well, literally impossible when most people could not read. Our loss of symbolism and magic as primary ways of thinking paved the way for the scientific revolution and all it has brought, but cost us dearly in our relationship to things primal.
We were in Iceland two years ago, and a tour guide told us how in his family, there was a shift from an earth-consciousness to a literal consciousness in two generations. His grandfather, isolated on a farm in the far north, could tell the weather several days in advance, and call his cattle to the barn using thought. His father could do this until he moved to the city, and lost the ability over less than a decade, Our driver, who saw his grandfather do these things (and more) never developed these capacities, being raised almost entirely in the city and being schooled to be highly literate.
This post speaks to me of finding our soul-connections again, at least to whatever degree is possible. Poetry, art, and spiritual practice are pathways which we can follow to at least partially re-connect with our primordial ways of being. Then, perhaps, we can have the best of both worlds.
I love your interpretation and the story of your Iceland tour guide and his family. I totally agree with this so simple truth….use it or loose it.