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Wakefulness and Creative Imagination

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Is there really a clear line between the so-called dream worlds and the waking world? Isn't wakefulness another form of dream? Isn't waking another form of sleep in the sense that much of our waking life is a life of low consciousness (historical, psychological, epistemological, ethical)? Perhaps we are facing a continuum of experience that only the roughest forms of sensitivity polarize into two well-separated worlds. The aesthetic experience seems to confirm this hypothesis, and it should not surprise us since human beings are symbolic creatures.

Only basic emotions are literal insofar as they point to some survival action. The rest is symbol. If we consider reality as a complex symbol, the traditional border of sleep-wake psychology vanishes. And what scene do we have before us then? What is experience? Our experience is a shared myth built from successful survival actions. But beneath these actions is the mystery of life itself, towering over something equally mysterious that we vaguely call matter. And in the bosom of life the mind has arisen, emerging with it new movements of determination of reality. This continuum of Life-Intelligence, of which we make vague mental representations and of which we have intense vital representations (but also imprecise), shows a force that seems to be a combination of the vital and mental worlds, a force that operates in the line of the numinous experience. It has traditionally been called "creative imagination", or "active imagination". 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 self-mimesis. This creative imagination is no more illusory function than any other mental map can be. In fact, the intensity of its impulse throughout our entire existence as a species presents it as a sure guide of our being in the world. Through it have manifested forms of reality that practical reason would never have revealed. Its action is not limited to the world of dreams, where it is fully active in most of us, but works in our vigil when we are able to put aside the urgency of survival. Then, not only our mind but all our self enters a second-order symbolic experience (a reflection about symbols themselves).

The intensity of the creative imagination will determine the intensity of the aesthetical action. Such intensity depends on the degree of presence, the actual focusing of consciousness in us.



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Oscar Enrique Muñoz said…
This text, which I already used in some of my courses, is a first approximation to the continuity between the world of dreams and wakefulness. One of the basic principles of my ontology. There is a single Reality that is expressed in different planes of Existence.
January 5, 2024 at 12:17 PM
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