Most of the pieces in this blog are about the Imaginal in one way or another. It has become compulsive for me. And my reasoning is that the imaginal is an objective reality, indeed it is the warp and weft in which consciousness and life, nature and substance all receive their being. (If this seems strange or improbable, please hang on to the end of this post.)
It seems now to me that by locating all of life – including my own – in what I can best understand as the Imaginal is to make that life more real. Far from the notion of being imaginary (something made up in the head), the Imaginal holds and gives life to all experience. It is a radical liberation from the clinging desperation and irremediable loneliness of ego-selfhood, which sees itself as absolute, because separate, and therefore under threat. ‘We are all in this together’ – yes, we are. There is only ‘this’ and ‘together’, which is where ‘we all’ and ‘are’ can appear and be sustained.
To repeat: ‘imaginal’ is not the same thing as ‘imaginary’, meaning a fantasy concocted by ourselves (although sometimes such imaginations can be a part of it). The Imaginal is the universe of consciousness that certain wisdom traditions locate as a presence or plane situated between pure essence (divinity) and the world of nature and matter in which we have our lives. So why ‘imaginal’? Because it is where images arise from spirit, on their way towards manifest forms. Because, if you like, it is the Divine imagination. It is worth sitting with this idea for a while and seeing where it touches us, whatever ideas of God we do or don’t have. And the point is that every creature – every thing created – is not formed out of nothing but is a projection in the divine imagination in the eternal moment, emerges from it together with his temporal lifetime and returns to it. Our consciousness arises from the Imaginal and our own imaginative activity is returned to it.
It seems odd af first that my states of panic – for lack of money, climate collapse, war, loneliness and who knows what else – are less real than the states of gathering (even while alone) in the Imaginal, which is a collectivity in singularity. Yet, from the imaginal viewpoint, it is not odd at all.
To be held in the imagination of sheer Being is now not just some cerebral concept but a felt sense, a thing known, to some limited extent, and I hope for more. That is where I am known. And it is where I know myself far better than I do the stranger wandering out in the cold of self-isolation. And it is here that there is support, the wellspring for vision and action, which in the ‘imaginary’ self of the ego are illusory or absent.
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