The right to instantaneous and universal satisfaction (as a birthright) of our desires and projects, demanded by contemporary humans, perversely conditions our sense of Reality. It is generally considered that only what is immediate, common to a majority and connectable to an egoic volition is Real. But Symbolic Reality is not conditioned by the ego, not even by the intellect as a whole with all its arsenal of conscious and accessible memories. The Symbolic Reality, Mithal, permeates our triple Soul, it is everything that we perceive around us as the world, the totality of our human interactions, identities and valuations, our religions, arts and sciences, our everyday life. Religion and Art are in a sense the group counterparts to individual dreams, serving the purpose of consolidation of social identity through genuine self-conscious expression. This leads us to an important understanding: dreams are social and cultural actions, not individual, just like vigil experience is anything but individual. Dreams are transpersonal Soul experiences, our whole life is a transpersonal Soul experience.
The isthmus that unites vigil and dreams is imagination. The notion is related to the thinking process of producing representations, so it is also densely embedded in concept formation and rational thinking. The faculty to produce images is rooted in space intuition, however, when we talk about imagination we are talking about something that goes beyond the formation of images. Imagination also denotes the process of image composition, the syntax that relates them in their temporal display, as well as the simultaneity structure that these images maintain among themselves. Imagination not only builds sequences of thoughts but also scenarios, spaces. From this point of view, geometry is an imaginative construction that follows very precise rules: those of inferential games, that is, games that are based on the principle of non-contradiction. Are the objects of geometry entities that the world of the senses offers us or are they free synthesis of representations such as those that make up a triangle or a sphere? It is difficult (to say the least) to find perfect spheres in the natural world, spheres like those that geometry handles. Geometry builds perfect spheres and produces an image of this unnatural object, natural insofar as it is introduced into nature by the hand of human imagination.
Imagination not only composes images of the senses generating sequences of actions and objects of physiological experience, but also creates its own objects. Human imagination is a creative intellective force, which separates from the world of the senses and completes it, taking it further. This going further is not only limited to objects of sensory experience, it is not only that the imperfect geometric forms of nature find a completed and perfect form through imagination, but also that imagination operates in realms outside mere perception. Geometry showed us the intellective actions of the imagination (not only geometry, of course), but once we see its operation in geometry at a level that goes beyond images, and also beyond its syntactic composition of the images, we see that imagination intervenes in a subtler terrain: that of our feelings. Imagination also transforms our feelings. And it does it in a twofold manner. On the one hand, it offers images and forms for fluid feelings and then operates with them on a narrative level. On the other, it completes the feeling itself by extending or expanding the meaning beyond the sphere in which the feeling appeared. With an example. Let us examine this painting.
Just a few remarks. The feeling that we experience after a long winter and the arrival of warm weather is expanded by imagination. Hormonal and physiological changes in general are inscribed in human social life, in the synthesis of economic actions and metaphysical narratives that generate the identity of the group in relation to the seasons, and in particular to this moment of equinox. The painting represents an allegory that is nothing more than a specific process of the imagination that expands a system of objects. In this case, references are made to the world of plants, fertility and abundance, but there is much more, as Spring becomes a complex psychological state. On the left we see three female figures and one male who (traditionally identified with Mercury) by looking at the apples opens the painting to the narrative of prince Paris the three Goddesses and the apple, (the mythological origin of the Trojan War). Appearing in this context the Trojan narrative creates and extend the connotations of the emotion of Spring, around the figure-symbol of Aphrodite. The creative imagination produces a broader Reality, our Emotional Soul unfolds in new dimensions, the World is shown as a place of Beauty that only touches the dimension of animal impulse in a small border.
With this picture and this experience we have entered the world of dreams, while maintaining ourselves in the intellective world. This double world of waking and dreaming is an imaginal continuum. It is the imagination that is found on both sides of the threshold, and it is the imagination that carries the objects and forces that exist in the two worlds from one side to the other. What objects can cross that threshold?
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