Mithal or Mundus Imaginalis III

 

When our thinking proceeds mechanically, we use lexicalized imagination structures, id est, protocolized and fixed representations that for a given input give the same imaginative output, in theoretical structures of various kinds, legal, scientific, ethical, artistic, religious. This form of imagination, already mechanized, lexicalized, fixed in procedures and methods, is also imagination, or rather a dead carcass of imagination, a mummy of what in another moment was something alive and full of potential energy. To the non-mechanical form of imagination we call "creative imagination" or “active imagination” the living imagination that updates its meanings and contents with each of its appearances. I understand this force as an impulse of expansion of Life-Intelligence outside the limits of symbols related to everyday experience, it is a second-order symbolic force, like general abstraction, but endowed with a unique emotional vitality and directed by a principle of autopoiesis: it it may start out of everyday symbols but goes beyond and constructs its own symbolic realms. This creative imagination is no more illusory function than any other mental map can be: it was at the heart of the construction of geometry, or at the heart of the high emotions that vitalized the works of art. In fact, the intensity of its impulse throughout our entire existence as a species presents creative imagination as a sure guide of our being in the world. Through it have manifested forms of reality that practical reason would never have revealed.

The intensity of creative imagination will determine the intensity of the aesthetical action and dreams. Such intensity depends on the degree of Presence, the actual focusing of consciousness in us. The high seas of creative imagination are the realms of aesthetic experience (not only of Art, since Art has a social dimension that does not coincide with aesthetic experience), of dreams, and of what the Sanskrit language calls dhyana (meditation, concentration) or dhymahi (expanded or supramental mind). The intensity of Presence of the “I Am” will determine the intensity of dhyana. However, we need to have clear that the imaginal world extends to the two realms of wakefulness and sleep and that both are incomprehensible separately, what is more, their full understanding requires the inclusion of deep sleep, where the direct and naked intuition of the "I Am" occurs.

Creative imagination is a meaning-generating psychological force for the narrative of the individual and for the development of the species. It is inscribed in the intentional process of the Emotional and Intellective Souls in their expansion towards the realms of the symbol, as we can see examining the evolution of our arts and sciences. Doubts about the truth content of the actions of imagination come from a dualistic conception of existence, or if we prefer to put it in other terms, the consideration that the Human Ontological Principle is independent of the ontological principle that we see acting in nature and in the universe at large. Is the image of the sphere false because nature does not offer ideal spheres? Is the image of moral qualities false? These questions are the result of a long process of narratives of separation and “otherness” constructed from the point of view of the veiling of Self-Ignorance. The separation has obeyed the intimate desire for independence with respect to natural conditioning. Once our continuity with respect to natural forces ceased to be perceived in the processes of civilization we have felt orphaned with respect to our existence in the world. Such a break with Universal Life led to the mythological planes of the King-God and the dogmatic Universal Law. Living Nature became an incomprehensible Presence, only to be dominated with the sword of rationality, cut into slices and recomposed in thinking machines (logic itself is a symbolic machine), tested in closed actions to control in detail all the variations of its mechanic proceedings and thus fix them in protocols of technical rationality.

But we are not separated from the Universe, we are the Universe. Our thoughts, feelings and volitions are the spontaneous result of the very forces that operate in the Universe, it is not something created by us, but developed and actualized in our experience. It is not the result of a deliberate action on the human part, but a way of Being, ours and that of everything else. When we exercise creative imagination spontaneously, both its contents and its procedures correspond to realities no less than the reality of the forces that make the sap rise up the palm tree. The image that I see in my internalization, whether or not it takes the form of an object or person that corresponds to my past vital experience, is an autonomous process. My ego will rush to manipulate it from some merely rational point of view (which will even include argumentative fallacies on its part and misunderstandings), since that is its function and the training it has received in long years of vital experience, but its spontaneous intervention (the ego is also spontaneous in its impulse to intervene) is analogous to the spontaneity of my creative image and its composition in narratives or creative scenes.

We are suspicious about creative imagination in relation to its individual use, though not in relation to its canonical artistic or scientific use. Our planet has the shape of a tangerine rather than a sphere, it is flattened at the poles, but no one questions for a single moment the effectiveness and interest of geometrical spheres and the theorems derived from them. There is more than one geometry, in fact there are an infinite number of geometries, with different axioms, with different objects, relations or forms. Not for a moment do we doubt the usefulness of its application in our society. Behind this confidence there is a pragmatic conception of Truth: Truth is what works, what is worth for us in relation to life and while it is worth for us in relation to life. We could also apply it to art. Creative imagination is a useful tool of the arts that helped to develop our thinking, feeling and volition, in a splendid and enriching way. Its use as a species is beyond doubt, and if it is fine for the species, it must also be for what we call “the individual”. Both art and science belong to interconnected worlds of human Symbolic Reality. Implicitly, the present scientific paradigm has led us to believe that scientific reality is somehow above and superior to artistic reality, and by extension that there is a deeper ontic level in science than in art, that science deals with the Real in a truer way, that art is some sort of decorative point of view of existence, related to beautiful and charming objects, something additional, a plus that comes after science and politics, the arenas where the seriousness of human existence is dealt with. It seems as if art and psychology have to justify their actions at every step of their way before the inquisitorial tribunal of technical rationality, before the superstitious understanding of matter proposed by modern science. All this is the final expression of a psychological superficiality that is unbridled in our days and that exerts in an authoritarian and harmful way a patriarchal castration upon the nature of the Universal Soul and the Human Spirit.

The Sufi mystics consider Creative Imagination to be an organ for the imaginal world that extends liminally between the experience of ordinary consciousness and the awaken consciousness. To see what transpires behind that which appears (using Ibn Arabi's expression), to see the archetype stand out in the example, and conversely, to see the perfection that an imperfect manifestation supposes, a permanent memory of our essential Human Nature is needed. This memory is not something individual but is a joint action of all Consciousness. The Universal is hidden in the particular before us, in plain sight, and if for a moment we are able to withdraw our particular interests from the world, if we look at it with detachment, it begins to show. Awakening the Witness in us by "loosening the ego", minimizing for a moment our personal history, the Universal Person appears, who is the one with Unity Consciousness. It is not a question of annihilating the ego but of leaving it subsisting within the Universal Consciousness, without losing its unique perspective. But when seeing what transpires behind what appears, we must not lose sight of what appears in front of us, the object, but see all its depth, its dimension transfigured as the Universal Being. This way of seeing makes use of the organ of the creative imagination, the production of an image that shapes the world. Let's not confuse this with fantasy, which is a purely hedonistic thought exercise of the ego. Creative imagination is an action that arises from the Emotional and Intellective Souls, it unfolds from a demand for veracity and authenticity about the meaning of Existence, which produces an Encounter with the Supramental Universal Consciousness.

Oscar Enrique Muñoz