Transpersonal Philosophy

In the Blog entries titled "Mithal or Mundus Imaginalis" we are approaching dreams from the point of view of Creative Imagination, considering them part of the Mithal ontological plane, to which not only dreams but all imaginative activities belong. The idea is to establish a continuity between sleep and wakefulness, a continuity of all human existence. In these Lightnings on the nature of dreams we are focusing on a different perspective, in a certain sense, it is a preliminary discussion about the "Reality" or "Non-Reality" of dreams. “Dream is felt to be unreal, first, because it ceases and has no farther validity when we pass from one status of consciousness to another which is our normal status. But this is not by itself a sufficient reason: for it may well be that there are different states of consciousness each with its own realities; if the consciousness of one state of things fades back and its contents are lost or, even when ca...

  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 princip...

  Let me begin a new branch "Lightnings", with short quotations and impromptus from different authors. If then the world is a dream or an illusion or a mistake, it is a dream originated and willed by the Self in its totality and not only originated and willed, but supported and perpetually entertained. Moreover, it is a dream existing in a Reality and the stuff of which it is made is that Reality, for Brahman must be the material of the world as well as its base and continent. If the gold of which the vessel is made is real, how shall we suppose that the vessel itself is a mirage? We see that these words, dream, illusion, are tricks of speech, habits of our relative consciousness; they represent a certain truth, even a great truth, but they also misrepresent it. Sri Aurobindo . Life Divine. Chapter: The Methods of Vedantic Knowledge  

  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 expe...