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Imaginal Reality

Toward a Phenomenology and MethodologyJim McNamara, jim@livinginstitute.org, 1 416 418 3035

List of Contents

Introduction, p1

Phenomenology, p4Imaginal, Mundus Imaginalis, p4; Soul, p6; Spirit Soul Distinctions, p6; Poetic Basis of Mind, p8; Alchemy, p9; Archetypal, p10; Polytheistic, p12; Holotropic Participatory, p13; Awe, p15; Romantic Irony, p16; Non-representational Reality, p18; Existential Absurd, p19; Postmodern Nouveau Roman mis-en-abyme, p19; Duende, p20; Apophatic Existential Absurd Poetry, p23; Apophatic Aphorisms, p27; Spiritual Emergence, p28.

Holistic Experiential Process Method (HEP), p 29Experiential, p29; Holistic, p30; Process, p30; Event/Experience Dialectic, p30; Author/Character Dialectic, p31; Nowhere No where Now Here, p32; Story, p33; Redemption, p33; Fate, p34; Homo Dei, p35.

Imaginal Clinical Methods, p36Musing, p36; Imaginal Amplification Meditation, p36; Star Group Visualization – an Astral Travel Meditation, p38; Subtle Body and Divine Individuality – a Defeat of Death Meditation, p40; Clinical Vignettes, p41.

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Imaginal RealityToward a Phenomenology and Methodology

This paper focuses on Imaginal Reality, with an eye toward descriptive evocation of

imaginal phenomenology and toward delineating an imaginal methodology I will give a

brief outline of imaginal phenomenology and methodology here and explore further in

subsequent sections.

The imaginal has the characteristics of a dream that mediates between spiritual

and material levels of existence as an archetypal, soul realm. It has qualities of the

ungraspable, particular individuality of the alchemical philosopher’s stone. The imaginal

is holotropic, structured by and moving toward wholeness, with mutually transforming,

co-creative, participatory, open ended dynamics. It has a phenomenology that is not

comprehensible from a rational empirical perspective and cannot be understood utilizing

a rational empirical epistemology, as epitomized in an evidence-based, medical model,

scientific method. The imaginal does not provide facts, explanations or access to linear

causality. It has quantum characteristics of non-locality, atemporality and paradoxical,

irreducible uncertainty. It is acausal and nonlinear. It is chaotic, with an emergent self-

organization that may be understood through the model of complex adaptive systems

theory. It cannot be grasped. It is apophatic in that whatever is said about it must be

unsaid, though not literally. It must be given. It has fractal characteristics of wholeness,

with identity (and the reality that emerges from and informs that identity) scanning

across all levels of the whole in a surrealistic, abstract expressionistic form. It has a

surreal, existential absurd style of exposition, where nothing can actually be taken as

given, since ‘giveness’, as a final statement of identity and reality, is absurdly surreal. It

has the qualities of romantic irony in which authorial and characterological themes co-

creatively intermingle, where character grounds author in narrative (the movement of

which provides an unfolding of identity and reality toward a tentative wholeness), with

author as arche and telos (providing a mythology of origin and an ontology of emergent

meaning and received purpose, corresponding with the ancient Greek idea of fate). The

imaginal is orchestrated – yet in an improvisational, existential absurd, romantic irony

style. It has duende, and enacts in a romantic, dialectic dance of eros/pathos/thanatos.

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It is a polytheistic, archetypal play of subtle body figures, characters from the collective

unconscious, the Buddhist Samboghakaya, a dimension of radiance. It is the world of

subtle body, Chi and chakras.

A methodology for facilitating the awakening of awareness of identity in imaginal

reality must follow an emergent phenomenology that is experiential, psychodynamic,

existential, archetypal, holotropic and participatrory. A gnostic methodology that dreams

the dream onward, with awareness of the need to surrender into the self-created nature

of imaginal identity and reality. A never completed, evolutionary process in which

awareness and acceptance of the never-ending process is the ‘end’ point goal. A

mystical descent and return motif threads through this method with the lived world as a

grounding, reference theme. The intermediate, mediating nature of the imaginal means

that spiritual experience is facilitated along with awakened, alive, sensate experience –

a tantric method. Imaginal methodology draws on imaginal phenomenology and points

toward an imaginal epistemology. The clinical methods of musing, imaginal

amplification, a divine individuality meditation and astral travel visualization are given.

Two clinical vignettes are given. One of these is the basis for a clinical video.

Epistemological implications include a critique of the hegemonic nature of the

rational empirical model of existence and medical model of treatment, particularly in

their application to psychotherapy. The rational empirical tradition, specifically through

its enactment in the scientific research method and medical models of treatment, holds

itself out as the arbiter of what is valid knowledge and what are valid methodologies for

establishing such validity. Its epistemological methods, however, do not provide

accurate, fully complex access to the reality of the imaginal dimension of being. The

linear, reductionist, cause and effect model and methods of the rational empirical

tradition cannot see, hear or feel the details of the experience of imaginal reality. This

paper explores models and methods for attunement to, and validation of, imaginal

experience and what it says about life, identity and being, specifically in the field of

psychotherapy. There is an attempt to suggest ways to illuminate the term

‘epistemology’ with imaginal qualifiers.

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PhenomenologyImaginal, Mundus Imaginalis Henri Corbin, drawing on contemporary 12th century Sufi mystics Ibn ‘Arabi and

Suhrawardi, has characterized the imaginal as an intermediate, and mediating reality,

(the ‘really real’ or ‘True Reality’ in Sufi terms) between the transcendental, super-

sensible world of Platonic Ideas and the mundane specificity of the everyday human

world of natural materiality. In Corbin’s terms, the imaginal is materialized spirit and

spiritualized matter. (Henry Corbin, 1972, Mundus Imaginalis or The Imaginary and The

Imaginal, Spring, Zürich, originally published 1964, and Corbin, Henri, 1969/1997,

Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn ‘Arabi, NJ, Princeton University Press)

In his 1964 paper (Corbin, 1972), Corbin suggested using the term ‘imaginal’ to

distinguish the reality of these intermediate, mediating experiences from the ‘imaginary’,

a term typically used in a derogatory, dismissive way to characterize idiosyncratic,

personalistic fantasy. He also uses ‘mundus imaginalis’ to characterize this reality,

highlighting a cosmological aspect of the imaginal, as the ‘imaginal world’.

He says that in the imaginal, “we are no longer confined to the dilemma of

thought and extension, to the schema of a cosmology and a gnoseology restricted to

the empirical world and the world of abstract intellect. Between them there is a world

that is both intermediary and intermediate … the world of the image, the mundus

imaginalis: a world that is ontologically as real as the world of the senses and that of the

intellect. This world requires its own faculty of perception, namely, imaginative power, a

faculty with a cognitive function, a noetic value which is as real as that of sense

perception or intellectual intuition…Each of these three wolds has its organ of

perception: the senses, imagination, and the intellect, corresponding with the triad:

body, soul and mind.” (Corbin, 1972, pg.5)

He delineates a defining characteristic of the imaginal as “(signifying) a clime

outside all climes, a place outside all places, outside of where (Nâ-Kojâ-Abâd)”, (Corbin,

1972, pg. 5) and, paradoxically, also says “Rather than being situated, it situates, it is

situating” (Corbin, 1972, pg. 8). He characterizes the phenomenology of the imaginal as

ontological, having no external criteria by which to judge or analyze it. “(H)ere

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phenomenology becomes ontology…this is the postulate implied in our authors'

teaching on the imaginal. There is no external criterion for the manifestation of the

Angel other than the manifestation itself.” (Corbin, 1972, pg. 13) This has

epistemological implications. “(T)he reality which has hitherto been an inner and hidden

one turns out to envelop, surround, or contain that which at first was outer and visible.

… Its place … is (nowhere) because, in relation to what is in sensory space…it is…

(everywhere).” (Corbin, 1972, pg. 4)

The imaginal may be personified. “(T)he forms and figures of the mundus

imaginalis do not subsist in the same manner as the empirical realities of the physical

world” (Corbin, 1972, pg. 6) “(T)his is the world of 'subtle bodies', of which it is

indispensable to have some notion in order to understand that there is a link between

pure spirit and material body.” (Corbin, 1972, pg. 7) He also refers to this ‘subtle body’

as the ‘imaginal body’.

Corbin suggests active imagination as a method for access to the imaginal.

“Active imagination is the mirror par excellence, the epiphanic place for the Images of

the archetypal world.” (Corbin, 1972, pg. 7) He also suggests this as an alternative to

rational empirical modes of knowledge development. “The cognitive function of

imagination provides the foundation for a rigorous analogical knowledge permitting us to

evade the dilemma of current rationalism, which gives us only a choice between the two

banal dualistic terms of either 'matter' or 'mind'.” (Corbin, 1972, pg. 7) “This is why…the

mundus imaginalis is closely bound up with … imaginative cognition and … the

imaginative function, which is a truly central, mediating function, owing both to the

median and the mediating position of the mundus imaginalis. (Corbin, 1972, pg. 7)

“active imagination … makes possible a transmutation of inner spiritual states into outer

states …All the faculties of the soul then become as if they were one single faculty”

(Corbin, 1972, pg. 9). Here we may draw out a possible term for an imaginal

epistemology - analogical epistemology.

As does Hillman, Corbin highlights the particularity and individuality of the

imaginal. “(I)t refers … to the archetypal images of individual and singular things”

(Corbin, 1972, pg. 6) and further highlights the epistemological power of these

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phenomena, “He who has discovered the meaning of (this) True Reality has arrived at

(the) Spring of Life. (Corbin, 1972, pg. 3)

Soul Active imagination evokes soul experience as this intermediate reality. Dennis

Slattery, in his presentation “Revisioning Dionysos” at the Climates of Change

conference, April 2016, Pacifica Graduate Institute, explores Dionysian energies of

psyche and literature in Hillman’s Revisioning Psychology. Hillman says “I suggest that

the word (soul) refers to that unknown component which makes meaning possible, turns

events into experience, is communicated in love, and has a religious concern” (Hillman,

James,1975/1992, Revisioning Psychology, New York, NY, Harper Collins, pg. xvi).

Hillman also relates this to Dionysian soul making, “a perspective rather than a

substance, a viewpoint toward things rather than a thing itself” (xvi), a reflective

perspective that “mediates events, makes differences between ourselves and

everything that happens. Between us and events, between doer and the deed, there is

a reflective moment, and soul making means differentiating this middle ground”

(Hillman, 1975/1992, pg.xvi). The imaginal is this middle ground.

Hillman speaks of the place of soul as “a world of imagination, passion, fantasy,

reflection, that is neither physical and material on the one hand, nor spiritual and

abstract on the other, yet bound to them both. Psyche or soul has a relationship with

dream, fantasy and image. This relationship has also been put mythologically as the

soul’s connection with the night world, the realm of the dead and the moon. We will

catch our soul’s most essential nature in death experiences, dreams of the night, and in

the images of ‘lunacy’”. (Hillman James, 1975/1992, Revisioning Psychology, New York,

NY, Harper Collins, pg. 67-69)

Spirit Soul DistinctionsHillman gives an account of the process of soul making that is also an account of

awakening to the reality of the imaginal, distinguishing this from spirit. “At moments of

intellectual concentration or transcendental meditation, soul invades with natural urges,

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memories, fantasies and fears. At times of new psychological insights or experiences,

spirit would quickly extract meaning, put them into action, conceptualize them into rules.

Soul sticks to the realm of experience and to reflections within experience. The

verticality of soul is downward and inward. It moves indirectly in circular reasonings,

where retreats are as important as advances, preferring labyrinths and corners, giving a

metaphorical sense to life through such words as close, near, slow, and deep. Soul

involves us in the pack and welter of phenomena and the flow of impressions. It is the

‘patient’ part of us. Soul is vulnerable and suffers; it is passive and remembers. It is

water to the spirit’s fire, like a mermaid who beckons the heroic spirit into the depths of

passion to extinguish its certainty. Soul is emotional. Soul is imagination, a cavernous

treasury, a confusion and richness both, whereas spirit chooses the better part and

seeks to make all 0ne.

Look up, says spirit, gain distance; there is something beyond and above, and

what is above is always, and always superior. Spirit is after ultimates and it travels by

means of a via negative. ‘Neti, neti’, it says ‘not this, not that’. Straight is the gate and

only first or last things will do. Soul replies by saying of the ten thousand things, ‘I am

this too’.

The cooking vessel of the soul takes in everything, everything can become soul;

and by taking into its imagination any and all events, psychic space grows”.

(Hillman,1975/1992, pg. 67-69). In serving soul he says we need to dream the myth

onward, translating this as pathologizing the myth onward. “Serving soul implies letting it

lead; it leads, we follow. Here we adapt Jung’s famous dictum that analysis is dreaming

the myth onward, transposing it to ‘pathologzing the myth onward’. ‘Pathologizing the

myth onward’ means staying in the mess while at the same time regarding what is going

on from a mythical perspective”. (Hillman, 1975/1992, pg. 74) In this regard he says,

“Our concern is with the symptom, that thing so foreign to the ego, that thing which ends

the rule of the hero – the hero, as Emmerson says, is he (sic) who is immovable

centered. Pathologizing moves the myth of the individual onward by moving them, first

of all, out of the heroic ego. Both the spiritual person and the natural person are

transformed by being deformed into the psychological person”.(Hillman, 1975/1992, pg.

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89) This is echoed by Thomas Moore. “(I)f we take Patricia Berry’s advice – that the

symptom always has a telos”. (Moore, Thomas, Dark Eros, 1975/1992, pub?, pg. 148)

Poetic Basis of MindIn order to receive communications from, and perceive events in, the imaginal,

there has to be, in Hillman’s terms, a “poetic basis of mind” (Hillman, James, 1983,

Archetypal Psychology: A Brief Account, Spring Publications, Inc., Dallas, Texas, pg.

6).Susan Rowland says “To the Romantics, as to Coleridge, poetry was a larger

category that could not simply be confined to the making of poems. Poetry is a quality of

writing that emerges from the creative imagination, whether it is directed to scientific,

philosophical or literary ends”. (Rowland, Susan, 2017, Dionysus and Magic: The zoe of

‘active imagination’ for/as ‘close reading’, in Remembering Dionysus: Revisioning

Psychology and Literature in C.G. Jung and James Hillman, Routledge: London and

New York, pg. 99) Poetic framing of the imaginal, paradoxically, arises from within the

imaginal. As in Romantic irony, the author/authorship/authority for the story arises from

within the story and must be characterized. The transcendent, in this sense, is a

characteristic of the immanent, or perhaps more precisely, an immanence, since, for the

imaginal, nothing is absolute. And in a poetic sense, this nothingness is existential – the

place where phenomena go to die, a formless, fertile void from which form arises, in

Buddhist terms, sunyatā. And, again as in Buddhism, this empty fullness of (the)

nothingness is characterized by (the) suchness (tathāta) of what is, in and of itself.

David Miller, in his presentation Changing Climates of Education at the Climates

of Change conference, April 2016, Pacifica Graduate Institute, says imaginal learning,

learning from and in the imaginal, requires us to sit down in the material (as Jesus did

when ‘he taught them’) rather than standing up, which we do to preach, convince, pitch,

sell. Miller asks us to sit down into complexity and allow transformation to emerge from

the unconscious, ‘reading between the lines’. Reading between the lines is a key

feature of imaginal knowledge development. Miller also spoke of Silenos, a classical

Greek archetype of the teacher, who was continually drunk, being a teacher of Dionysus

and a character in his retinue. Silenos’ drunkenness intoxicates the rational empirical

Apollonian consciousness and is, in the imaginal sense, a deep stillness, the

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paradoxically sobering drunkenness of ‘the self led to itself’ by sitting down in the

complexity of the material. When the ‘I’ goes to sleep in imaginal drunkenness, and

dies, others wake up – a kind of resurrection that is carried by the breath of the deep,

resting in (Silenic) emptiness, filled with divine intoxication. Miller goes on to quote

Angelus Silesius (17th century), “A rose is without ‘why’. It blooms simply because it

blooms.” [source] According to Miller, this may be contrasted with an unfortunate aspect

of most contemporary education. “The soul of contemporary teaching and learning

suffers the impact of perspectives of global consumerism in which the student is

imagined to be a consumer and the teacher is expected to be a sales person with a

product to deliver”. This suggests another term for an imaginal epistemology –

Dionysian epistemology.

AlchemyHillman’s characterization of the alchemical Philosophers Stone relates it to the

phenomenology of the imaginal. He says that in moving torward the Philosophers Stone

“imaginatio is both goal and a starting point, the goal as idea serves to remove the mind

at the very beginning to a utopic, non-physis condition, comparable with Henry Corbin’s

many descriptions of the imaginal.” (Hillman, James, 2014, Alchemical Psychology:

Uniform Edition of the Writings of James Hillman, Vol. 5, Spring Publications, Putnam,

Conn., pg. 239)

Like Corbin’s account of the imaginal as a locus of particularity and individuality,

while yet remaining ungraspable, located ‘no where’, Hillman says, “Alchemy speaks of

the stone as … the wisdom of the ‘ultimate actuality’ of the ‘singularity of individuals’ …

Duns Scotus (c.1266-1310) spoke of haecceitas, haecceity or ‘thisness’ … the wisdom

that logically establishes each thing as itself, individualized ... ‘thisness’ provides a

founding rock for William James’s philosophical favoring of eachness over Idealism’s

allness, oneness, and wholeness.” (Hillman, 2014, pg. 250) In saying “what we seek is

here or nowhere,” (Hillman, 2014, pg. 256), he also says “the stone does not allow itself

to be held in meaning. It does not yield to understanding. Its capacity to resist mental

penetration is the primary wound to human hybris.” (Hillman, 2014, pg. 246). He gives

an account of the stone that relates it to an important characteristic of the imaginal - its

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evocative, emergent, expressive creativity. “(T)he stone is the perfection of mercury, a

compositum oppositorum, unable to be captured by definition, though nothing in nature

be more sharply defined. … the lapis is able, because of mercurial fusibility, to

participate, conjoin, dissolve, mean anything without loss of essence.” (Hillman, 2014,

pg. 247).

Hillman provides a rich account of the complex, paradoxical, imaginal nature of

the stone as an unfolding of emergent self-expression whose goal is psychological self-

awareness, but a self-awareness that is deliteralized. This is also true of the imaginal.

“The rotation also returns telos itself to its root meaning. … The goal itself circles,

because it is a psychic goal; or, the goal is psyche itself obeying the laws of its own

motion, a motion that is not going somewhere else; no journey, no process, no

improvement. … We awaken to the fact that the goal of the work is nothing else than

the objectification of the very urge that propels it …the result is not merely the

objectification of subjective ‘me-ness,’ but the objectification of its material basis. This

has been dissolved, calcined, tortured, putrefied, and distilled to a clarity that can be

completely seen through, as if it were not there are all, not a speck of literalism remains,

not even spiritual literalism. The libidinal compulsion, the organic towardness of hope

and desire that would always go further for a faraway grail, turns around on itself and

dissolves itself. The snake eats its own tail – another goal image of deconstructive

subversion. The snake of healing, transformation, and rebirth, the goal most dearly

desired, and the artifex’s obedient service, all dry to dust, mineralized. The uroboric

motion poisons (iosis) (ftnt. 26) [check this] the very idea of cure. Or poison is the cure.”

(Hillman, 2014, pg. 256). Two terms for an imaginal epistemology are suggested –

complex epistemology and paradoxical epistemology. And, perhaps, alchemical

epistemology.

Archetypal The imaginal is archetypal. As given by Richard Tarnas, the archetypal is

multivalent, indeterminate, contextual, participatory, creative, dynamic, pervasive, non-

local, holographic, recursive, complexly multi-relational, complexly causal. (Notes on

Archetypal Dynamics and Complex Causality in Astrology, Part One, Archai: The

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Journal of Archetypal Cosmology, No 4, Death, Rebirth, and Revolution, Jan 29, 2013;

Part Two, personal communication). According to Tarnas, a transcendental, middle-Jungian and Kantian

view of archetypes, as conditions of experience, says that archetypes are the great organizing principles of psyche and cosmos. Archetypes are a priori formal constants, like powerful governing selective stencils through which reality is perceived, elicited, interpreted, constructed, invested with meaning, and experienced. In Hillman’s view, archetypes also express the radically pluralistic, multivalent, multi-centric, improvisational, incarnational co-creativity of human life, in which the creature has ontological value vis-à-vis the Creator, musically manifesting both pre-structured classical and improvisational jazz dimensions. The One is not monologically in charge in a top-down way, nor are the Many without a unitive, ordering, axial center and essence. It is a complex, dialogical and recursive dialectic that is characteristic of the imaginal.

Archetypes are holographic, complexly interconnected through their participation

in the larger system, serving the flourishing and fullest realization of both whole and part

— irreducibly both fully holistic (integrative, unitive, parts serving the whole which

becomes more than the sum of the parts) and fully differentiating and diversifying, in an

imaginal complexio oppositorum, mysterium coniunctionis, a cosmic hieros gamos

(sacred marriage). Archetypes are multidimensional, at once mythic-imaginal, cosmic-metaphysical, psychic-psychoid, sociocultural, material and cannot be localized in a particular dimension of being or reality, manifesting multiple

locations through time and in space, reflecting an imaginal, holistic interconnectedness

in the nature of reality in which archetypes are pervasive, nonlocal, connecting

principles, expressing the phenomenon of synchronicity that transcends both temporal

and spatial constraints and mechanistic causality and is a defining feature of imaginal

phenomenology. Archetypes have the capacity for pervasive, permeating co-presence

in any phenomenon as the defining preconditions of experience, and by their ‘presence’

in these instances, those instances are made what they are. This self-reflexive self-

creation is imaginal.

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Archetypes are dynamically and irreducibly multivalent in meaning, not literal ‘things’, as reductively definable entities, an imaginal unifying principle that informs and integrates all its diverse expressions, and yet, also, by its very nature, generating diversity. Archetypes are contextually responsive to and shaped by circumstantial influence, the specific ground within which the archetypal wave function collapses to a concrete particle of actuality being a necessary factor in the inflection of the universal to imaginal particularity. Archetypes are complexly causal in ways that are

bidirectional, multimodal, and complexly teleological, both arche and telos, reciprocally

the originating source and the teleological end of phenomena, with a spontaneous,

resonant tendency towards formal, imaginal, metaphoric, analogical, and aesthetic

coherence, rather than linear-mechanistic causality. Archetypes are dynamic, indeterminate, imaginal potentialities, ‘tendencies to exist’, like probability waves, with many co-determining factors, being both a priori and contingent, creatively constellating and actualizing imaginal phenomena. According to

Edgar Morin archetypes recursively “generate a dynamic feedback loop in which

products and effects themselves produce and cause what produces them”, a process of

“auto-causality”, a defining characteristic of the imaginal.

The creativity of the archetype itself is spontaneous, poetic, imaginative expressiveness, interweaving diversity and coherence, an autonomous self-organizing system with an aesthetic-metaphoric-formal coherence. Archetypes in combined imaginal manifestation can be simultaneously

concurrent, complementary, confluent, competitive, antagonistic, enantiodromic,

dialectical, dialogical, recursive, synthetic, and synergistic, in complex multi-relational

ways. Archetypal manifestations are responsive to and shaped by human participation, being an ‘enaction’ (Varela, Mantura, Ferrer) that brings forth a world of distinctions, co-created and co-determined by all the elements in any event, calling forth the individual human being’s imaginal potential for self-creation and world-creation, what Robert Bellah calls the dynamic, multidimensional, modern self, and this paper identifies as the imaginal self.

A term for an imaginal epistemology is suggested – archetypal epistemology.

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Polytheistic In the new polytheism (Dallas, Spring, 1974), David L. Miller speaks of an

“imaginal theologizing” (Miller, 1974, pg. 19), referencing the philosophy of Gaston

Bachelard and Henri Corbin, mythic stories, dreams, imagination, the synchronistic

holism of immediacy – “the domain of the mundus imaginalis” (Miller, 1974, pg. 20).

According to Hillman, translating this into a polytheistic, imaginal psychology “favours

differentiating, elaborating, particularizing, complicating, affirming, preserving” (Miller,

1974, pg. 124), suggesting this as a characterization of individuation. Miller’s imaginal,

polytheistic psychology sees the mysterious ambiguity of “metaphors, stories,

anecdotes, aphorisms, puns, dramas and movies” (Miller, 1974, pg. 26) as able to

express the multivalent, cosmological self, in which the “center that is everywhere” (of

Cuso, Bruno, Jung, the Corpus Hermeticum) is the centre of a new, exploded circle that

carries “liberation, openness, release from fixation and from the oppression of centers

and boundaries” (Miller, 1974, pg. 31). Hillman, in moving from the “one-ness, one-

sidedness” (Miller, 1974, pg. 128) of monotheistic literalism, wants to translate the

polytheistic Gods adjectivally as qualifiers, thus de-substantiating them such that they

do not require belief or worship in an imaginal, polytheistic psychology, where

“eachness” affirms the “unity of each thing, that it is as it is, with a name and face”

(Miller, 1974, pg. 131). We may suggest a new term for an imaginal epistemology –

polytheistic epistemology.

Holotropic, Participatory The imaginal is holotropic, structured by, and moving toward, wholeness

(Stanislav Grof, Hal Zina Bennet, 1992, The Holotropic Mind: The Three Levels of

Human Consciousness and How They Shape Our Lives, New York, NY, Harper Collins)

and participatory, “a dynamic and open ended living system that is continually involved

in co-creating itself” (Ferrer, J. N., Participatory spirituality and transpersonal theory: A

ten year retrospective. Journal of Transpersonal Psychology, 43(1), 1 – 34, in Harris L.

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Friedman and Glenn Hartelius, ed., 2015, The Wiley Blackwell Handbook of

Transpersonal Psychology, John Wiley and Sons, Ltd, West Sussex, p 194).

Holotropic is a term coined by Dr. Stanislov Grof to characterize the non-ordinary

states of consciousness that arise in his and Christina Grof’s breathwork method of

transpersonal activation, psychedelic research and other intense, experiential,

embodied mysticisms, evidenced also in parapsychology, anthropology, near-death,

out-of-body and spiritual emergence experiences. According to Grof, holotropic states

provide “a source of new, revolutionary data about consciousness, the human psyche

and the nature of reality” (Revision and Re-Enchantment of Psychology, Stanislov Grof,

in Friedman and Hartelius, 2015, p 92). Grof also says, regarding the “average

Westerner: in our everyday state of consciousness we identify with only a small fraction

of who we really are and do not experience the full extent of our being” (Friedman and

Hartelius, 2015, p 93), and, as Alan Watts says, “we are actually commensurate with

the cosmic creative principle itself” (Watts, A. W., 1961, 1974, Psychotherapy East and

West, New York, NY, Ballantine Books, in Friedman and Hartelius, 2015, p 93). Grof

also says “(holotropic) findings challenge the most fundamental metaphysical

assumptions of materialistic science” and complete “the move from Newtonian to

quantum-relativistic physics” (Friedman and Hartelius, 2015, p 96), suggesting that

consciousness is a primary and further irreducible aspect of existence – an equal

partner of matter and possibly superordinated to it” (Friedman and Hartelius, 2015, p

99) These are imaginal themes.

Holotropic also refers to COEX systems, ‘systems of condensed experience’,

elements of identity that are fractally encoded across biographical, perinatal and

transpersonal levels of consciousness. It draws on the observation that everyone has

personal and transpersonal identity themes that are structured and refracted in

differentiated, yet nested, forms and dynamics throughout the various levels of their

being, and that these fractal, nested holotropic structures and dynamics naturally enact

in such a way as to call for realization of our full human and transpersonal potential for a

non-reductive wholeness ,a key imaginal theme. (Grof, Bennet, 1992) A term for an

imaginal epistemology is suggested – holotropic epistemology.

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Grof references the imaginal and mundus imaginalis to holotropic states in which

there are “visions of God and various divine and demonic beings, encounters with

discarnate entities, episodes of psycho-spiritual death and rebirth, visits to Heaven and

Hell, past life experiences” (Friedman and Hartelius, 2015, p 111-112). He says the

imaginal world is “as fully ontologically real as the material world” and can be “verified

by consensual validation”, referencing this also to the participatory nature of

transpersonal experiences and events (Friedman and Hartelius, 2015, p 112) which

“presents a substantive challenge to Cartesian dualism” (Transpersonal Philosophy:

The Participatory Turn, Glenn Hartelius and Jorge Ferrer, in Friedman and Hartelius,

2015, p 194). The participatory turn builds on Romanticism’s holistic, integrative theme,

suggesting, as Bateson does, “that mind and nature are necessarily woven of the same

fabric” (Friedman and Hartelius, 2015, p 195), that “the mind can know the world

because through the mind the world knows itself” (Tarnas, 1991, Velmans, 2008

[source] in Friedman and Hartelius, 2015, p 195), “that nature’s processes (are)

archetypal processes” (Tarnas, 1991, pp. 427-428, in Friedman and Hartelius, 2015, p

195-196). “Participatory events are co-created encounters with spiritual powers and

presences that are ontologically real … self and world, part and whole shape each other

reciprocally in an ongoing process of mutually transforming participation.” This is an

archetypal, imaginal, transpersonal reality, constellating, and constellated by, the

archetypal, imaginal, transpersonal nature of being. “The mystery to which (this points)

… advances in multiple ontological directions” (Friedman and Hartelius, 2015, p

197).Imaginal reality. Imaginal being.

AweAt the 2016 International Network on Personal Meaning Conference (Spirituality,

Self-Transcendence and Second-Wave Positive Psychology, Toronto, July 28-31, 2016)

Kirk Schneider presented on awe, which is a key theme in his Existential-Integrative

Psychotherapy approach and a key characteristic of the experience of the imaginal.

(Schneider, Kirk, 2008, Existential-Integrative Psychotherapy, New York, Routledge)

Awe is awful and awesome, and can be correlated with the sacred. Awe is an I-Thou

experience of mystery and meaning that cannot be commodified or manualized and is

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not a place to ‘get to’. Awe is a vastness that cannot be assimilated (grasped) yet can

be accommodated (adapted to). Qualitative, in depth research shows that awe is pivotal

to life transformation, associated with ‘being in the moment’, a sense of surprise,

wonder, openness, discovery, difference and the appreciation of the vast context

behind, and beyond, the immediate situation – apart from and a part of. Awe involves

intricacy and subtlety, the subtle sublime, and includes both a sense of solitude and

interconnection. Awe requires presence to hold, in a moment, that which is palpable and

significant, to be fully there and face the groundlessness of existence. Awe is living

rather than performing, requiring a slow simmer rather than a quick boil. This suggests

another possible term for an imaginal epistemology – integrative epistemology.

Romantic IronyThe imaginal is evoked within the Romantic tradition. In the Romantic tradition

we are understood as complex, differentiated, unitary organisms in which imagination,

spirit, emotion, creativity, self-expression and self-creation are key. The Romantic

tradition works through inspiration rather than through reason. Life is understood as a

drama, rather than a scientific abstraction in which psyche, soma , energy are as

important as mind, brain, physiology. Truth in the Romantic tradition is sublime and

transfiguring, not sought through testable, concrete proof. Science in the Romantic

tradition is holistic and quantum, focused toward understanding life as a complex,

adaptive system rather than through Newtonian, Cartesian, reductionistic, mechanistic,

rational empiricism. Romantic epistemology is experiential involving complexity, self-

awareness, consciousness. It uses qualitative, ideographic narrative methods rather

than empirical, quantitative, nomotheitic studies of behaviour, cognition and mechanistic

states. In the Romantic tradition nature is seen as a live vessel of spirit, mystery and

revelation to be entered into rather than an object for experiment, theory and

technological manipulation and sober analysis. (Tarnas, Richard, 1991, Passion of

Western Mind, location?, Ballantine Books, pg. 366-368). A term for an imaginal

epistemology is suggested, romantic epistemology.

Romantic irony (established as a literary technique by the early 19th century) is

an imaginal, literary version of an individual’s transition from ego identification with

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victimized character structure and given storyline, to identification with the evolutionary,

imaginal, creative authorial power of Self – that which creates and provides authority for

the characteristic ego, setting it also in an evolutionary challenging story line. Although

this sounds like a classic creator/creature//God/human motif, in romantic irony the

typical order of the world is upset, and the character announces within the story that the

author has died and that the character will continue the story, thereby becoming the

‘creator’. Romantic irony contains the theme of the dawning of an awareness of the

creation of one’s life as a story emerging out of itself, having no authority beyond itself

i.e. in romantic irony, the authority for character and story is contained within character

and story. This is deeply imaginal. A common ironic technique is for statements about a

work to be contained within the work, or to embody a theory of the novel within the

novel. This corresponds to the individual’s continually evolving, imaginal understanding

of the process of his or her own self creation from within the created self, a key

archetypal, psychodynamic and humanistic/existential theme, and fundamental to the

imaginal.

A central goal of any imaginal, experiential psychotherapy is this facilitation of

the individual’s understanding of the origins of how he or she comes into being through

experiential insight, based in the experience of one’s self, i.e. to give an experience of

one’s origins psychologically from within the psyche. This is imaginal and provides

access to our own authorial power to create our life story as congruently expressive of

their deep self. An imaginal psychotherapy eschews the simply transcendental

implications of this formulation, however, by insisting that access to authorial creativity

can only authentically come through the abject victimization of characterologic suffering

i.e. we become responsible in an authorial sense only by surrendering any notion of

control over the characterological exposition of story line as authorial intent. This is

imaginal and is reminiscent of Sartre’s existential aphorism “existence precedes

essence.” In an experiential phenomenology of the imaginal discovery of self-creation

and self-authorization, this is fundamental.

Romantic irony became a major theme in late twentieth century Western culture,

as the implications of quantum theory, relativity, chaos theory, postmodernism,

globalization, multiculturalism and the return of ancient spiritual traditions pervasively

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settled into popular culture. As a co-creative literary theme it is given exquisite

expression in Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author (1921), where six

characters (members of a classic dysfunctional family) go in search of a new author to

continue writing their story after their original author has lost interest. It is perhaps

most accessibly exemplified, however, in late 20th century movies such as Robert

Altman’s The Player, Sally Potter’s The Tango Lesson, Tom de Cilo’s Living in Oblivion,

The Warshasky Brother’s The Matrix and Matrix Reloaded, David Cronenberg’s

Ekzistenz, Federico Fellini’s 8 1/2, Peter Greenaway’s Prospero’s Books, Charlie

Kaufman scripted and directed movies (such as Synecdoche, Adaptation, Eternal

Sunshine of the Spotless Mind), and the complex, illuminated, dream style of Richard

Linklater’s Waking Life. All these movies explicitly examine the phenomena of a ‘reality’

that is seemingly secondary and derivative, which co-creatively intermingles with a more

ontological primary ‘reality’, such that the ontological primacy and secondary

phenomenology are indistinguishable, and even seem interchangeable. This is imaginal

and translates as an attempt to reveal the deep (typically unconscious) dream-like,

creative nature of waking life, and to bring fully aware consciousness to this dream level

of reality. Imaginal reality. Imaginal identity.

Non-representational Reality

Leo Robson’s review of J. M. Coetzee’s latest novel, The Schooldays of Jesus

(2016, city?, Harvill Secker) highlights an implicit and explicit critique of “the

quantificatory spirit” in the 20th century by anti-realist authors such as Kundera, Musil,

Kafka, Beckett (in a line of descent that includes Cervantes, Goethe, the English

eighteenth century). This is a tradition that eschews the taxonomic, literal descriptions

and fourth wall. There is an existential absurd, romantic irony theme here. A Coetzee

character in an earlier novel, The Childhood of Jesus, asks “What is wrong with

intuition? What else is there we can finally trust?” Coetzee, writing in Notes of the

American Mathematical Society, speaks of the “mystical argument that … certain

operations of the mind – not necessarily the most rational operations – allow us insights

into nature that are essentially true”. Coetzee, along with W. B. Yeats, evokes the

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“mystic modern trinity” of music, irrational science and the suprarational body, to

suggest a bypassing of the intellect. Coetzee’s characters “unanswerable questions”

and “open-ended endings”, and complex interplay of form and content are imaginal, as

is his rejection of representational reality as a reflection of instrumental thinking.

Coetzee’s valuing of passion juxtaposed with rationality is imaginal. (Times Literary

Supplement, Sept 2, 2016)

Ceci n’est pas une pipe

Existential AbsurdThe absurdist tradition in literature, and especially theatre, is a key imaginal

theme in 20th century, postmodern, western culture that draws on the secularized

existentialism of Kierkegaard, Heidegger, Jaspers and Sartre, in which human

individuals are seen to be ‘thrown’ into an irrational, alienating world of ‘booming

confusion’, where meaning and purpose are not a priori givens, and identity is created

by the manner in which we take up the circumstances of our life, a profoundly imaginal

theme. Sartre’s aphorism ‘existence precedes essence’ locates the source of identity,

meaning and purpose in the experience of living, based in the irreducible (and terrifying)

freedom to choose that an individual is faced with. This is imaginal. Heidegger’s account

of authenticity as the acceptance of endless, indefinite becoming, through caring for

things-as-they-are, a never arriving processful form of world participation, is the sine-

qua-non for the accomplishment of imaginal, mature humanness. This means

participating in the sometimes cruel uncertainties of life, accepting our unsocialized

instinctual nature, not glossing our alienation from our deep self or our fellow humans

and God, accepting ambivalence and uncertainty as defining characteristics of

individual humanness, and participating fully in life even through the profound

indeterminancy of the course of events. Imaginal reality. Imaginal identity. Jarry,

Ionesco, Beckett, Genet, Gräss, Pinter, Stoppard, Artaud, Albee, P. T. Anderson, Jonez

are theatrical and cinematic exponents, while existential writers such as Camus, Sartre,

Vonegut, Pynchon are literary.

Postmodern Nouveau Roman mis-en-abyme

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The postmodern nouveau roman style of literature brings romantic irony into the

20th century, blending it with existential, absurdist and deconstructive postmodern

tendencies, portraying themes of impersonal alienation, banal anonymous obsessive

objectivism, non-linear narrative, time jumps and indefinite characterization, such that

‘reality’ is derealized and ‘realism’ revealed as an ideological, social construct. Imaginal

reality. The nouveau roman lineage includes existentialism, phenomenology, literary

irony, theatrical and literary absurdity, Dada, surrealism and postmodern fiction. In

France, starting in the 1950’s, Robbe-Grillet, Sarraute, Simon, Butor, and Muriac

contributed to the theory of the nouveau roman (in journals such as Esprit), as well as

writing novels. Calvino, Brooke-Rose and Sontag refrain the experimental nouveau

roman style in other countries.

The self-reflexive (‘play within a play’) mise-en-abyme of nouveau roman

literature, in particular, refrains the imaginal, romantic irony theme of self-reflexivity, the

self-conscious awareness in a work of art of the nature of its own construction. The

imaginal, romantic irony theme of authorial absence and awareness of the self-created

nature of a work is also part of the new novel. The mis-en-abyme/romantic irony style

has been extensively picked up in cinema. Greenaway’s Prospero’s Books, in which the

‘reality’ portrayed in The Tempest and the process of the creation of The Tempest are

depicted with equal validity in a magic realism style, is an imaginal example, as is

Altman’s The Player, in which the initial framing of the movie is as the making of a

movie, and in which the culmination of the movie is the initiation of the process of

making a movie based on the ‘reality’ content of the movie just viewed. Imaginal reality.

Another example is Sodeberg’s Full Frontal, in which the complex interweaving of the

making of a movie and the movie itself is the meta-subject of the movie. Imaginal art,

imaginal life, imaginal identity, imaginal reality.

Duende

Edward Hirsch shows in his book, The Demon and the Angel (source), how the

deep, dark, fatal challenge of the demonic fallen angel has inspired Western poetry, art

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and music, particularly in its romantic form, through an evocation of duende. We may

extend this to twentieth century depth psychology and to an illumination of the imaginal.

Duende is an Andalusian term for “a demonic anguish (that) suddenly charges

and electrifies a work of art in the looming presence of death” (Hirsh xii). It was made

widely known by Federico Garcia Lorca through his essay, Play and Theory of the

Duende [source] in the 1950’s. Duende, daimon, demon, angel take us to the

precipitous edge of the known world, the edge of the self, and through a rigorous,

disciplined ‘rational and systematic derangement of the senses’ (Rimbaud) enables us

to return from the dark, night mind emptiness of the void with unique, inspirited,

passionate, poetic, imaginal creations. Duende is especially conveyed through an

experiential enactment in the arts that “require a living body to interpret them, being

forms that are born, die, and open their contours against an exact presence” (Lorca

Deep Song, quoted in Hirsch, pg.1) The duende “delivers itself” (Hirsch 14). It is present

tense, now, with a “dangerous immediacy”, the individuality and particularity of the

imaginal as given by Corbin and Hillman. Martha Graham’s dance, happenings, and

performance art enact this, as does Artaud’s, Brooke’s and Grotowski’s theatre work.

Veronica Goodchild in Eros and Chaos (source) connects this imaginal, romantic

embodiment theme to divinity: “Alchemists, mystics and poets – those pilgrims of direct

experience – have always recognized that the link with the divine is through the

transmutation of intense affect in the body.” (Goodchild, pg. 47)

But if duende is a deep source of vital, embodied, poetic inspiration, full of vigor

and life, it is also dark and fatal. The genius of duende rests on the awesome presence

of death and in awareness of the emptiness of form. This is imaginal. Cesar Vallejo

speaks from duende in these lines. “Verily I say unto you that life is in the mirror and

that you are the original, death” (Trilce 1999 H 95). Hillman says “the goal of death is

always now.” (“Thanatos and Existence – towards a Jungian phenomenology of the

death instinct,” from Pathways into the Jungian World, source, pg. 127) This imaginal,

romantic awareness of death in life and life in death makes duende a dark, dangerous,

frightening, and yet exciting, enlivening intensity that manifests and enacts an essence

of imaginal creativity. Lorca connects duende and death in his Gypsy Ballads, “It is a

longing without object, a keen love for nothing, with the certainty that death … is

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breathing beyond the door”, key imaginal themes. (Lorca, pg. 112) Walter Otto in

Dionysus: Myth and Cult [source] says “all intoxication arises from the depths of life

which have become fathomless because of death... From these depths comes music –

Dionysian music – which transforms the world in which life has become a habit and a

certainty and death a threatening evil”, a powerful evocation of imaginal transformation.

(Lorca pg. 140)

In Lorca’s work we see an imaginal unification of Eros and Thanatos, such that

we may say that life rests in death and death is vitally present in life, not just the

outcome of life. Lorca suggests St. Theresa as exemplifying this conniunctio of Eros

and Thanatos in duende. “She was one of the few creatures whose duende… pierced

her with a dart and wanted to kill her for having stolen his deepest secret, the subtle

bridges that unite the five senses with the raw wound, that living cloud, that stormy

ocean of Love freed from Time”. This is reminiscent of Lacan’s interpretation of

Bernini’s St. Theresa: “she’s coming, there’s no doubt about it”, having been penetrated

in “the body’s most secret entrails” by what she calls “the locutions of God”. (Boothby) This imaginal, romantic elaboration of duende calls for the passionate participation of

duende in the travails of the world, not only as the source of art but, more profoundly, as

the ultimate source of aliveness as distinct from the deadness of literal linearity, blind,

rational conformity and authoritarian preservation of the status quo. This is an imaginal,

romantic theme. Lorca’s evocative description of duende is also of the imaginal. “The

duende, then, is a power, not a work; it is a struggle, not a thought… ‘The duende is

not in the throat; the duende climbs up inside you, from the soles of the feet.’ Meaning

this: it is not a question of ability, but of true, living style, of blood, of the most ancient

culture, of spontaneous creation.” (Lorca, pg. 43)

Goodchild (Eros and Chaos) speaks of “a move from an order/power-based

consciousness to a chaos/love-based awareness [that] can also be seen as a move

from a hierarchically ordered universe that excludes its unwanted shadows, to a soul-

making cosmos based on mutual regard and participation … C.G. Jung speaks of an

evolving consciousness that can endure opposites, and face its shadows, as the

achievement of the Holy Spirit, meaning a ‘restitution of the original oneness of the

unconscious on the level of consciousness’ ”. (4) This is imaginal. It is the imaginal,

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evolutionary, dialectic movement outlined in the Axiom of Maria, a 4th century alchemical

formulation of emanation (splitting) and return to origin (unity) through engagement of

polarized opposites (completion). The origin that is returned to however, while it retains

its original unity, is not the same as it was before. It is an evolved, differentiated,

complex unity, a one that has become four, via duality (two i.e. alienated polarities)

becoming dialectic (three i.e. relational polarities). This is a key imaginal theme of the

romantic, alchemical tradition.

The duende moves through this embodied, imaginal passion play of Eros,

Chaos, Thanatos as the romantic passion of yearning, of lost love, of burning desire, of

a compulsion to be, to do, to have, to become, to enact. This Shakespearian and

romantic, imaginal theme burns through the abstract expressionist, modernist action

painters who wish to viscerally lose themselves in their work so that they become an

imaginal embodiment, an instance of action. Spontaneous fiery presence shaking the

body and darkly burning up the soul. “But there are neither maps nor disciplines to help

us find the duende. We only know that he burns the blood like a poultice of broken

glass, that he exhausts, that he rejects all the sweet geometry we have learned, that he

smashes styles.” (Lorca, pg. 45) – and egos. This imaginal combination of passion and

spontaneous action was particularly enacted in Pollock. “When I am in my painting, I’m

not aware of what I’m doing. It is only after a sort of ‘get acquainted’ period that I see

what I have been about. I have no fears about making changes, destroying the image,

etc. because the painting has a life of its own. I try to let it come through…” (Hirsch, pg.

173). Imaginal art.

Apophatic Existential Absurd Poetry

Paul Celan says this:

why, from the uncreated,given that, in the end, it awaits you again,stand out? Why?believer in seconds, thesedelusion wages?Metalgrowth, soulgrowth, nothinggrowth.Mercurius as Christ,

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a philosopher's pebble, upriverthe sign interpretedto shreds,

carbonized, rotted, watered,

unrevealed, certainmagnalia.(Celan, Paul, 2014, Breathturn into Timestead: the Collected Later Poetry of Paul Celan, a bilingual edition translated and with commentary by Pierre Jorris, NY, Farrar, Strous and Geroux, pg. 346)

Phillipe Lacoue-Labarthe says of Celan’s poetry, “I believe these poems to be

completely untranslatable, including within their own language, and indeed, for this

reason, invulnerable to commentary. … sooner or later one finds oneself back at

‘wanting to say nothing,’ which exceeds (or falls short of) all ‘wanting to say,’ all

intention of signifying, since it is always caught in advance in an archetypal double bind

of the ‘Don’t read me’ sort: in this instance, something like, ‘Don’t believe in meaning

anymore.” (Lacoue-Labarthe, Phillipe, 1999, Poetry as Experience, Trans. Andrea

Tarnowski, Stanford University Press: Stanford, pg. 13) He also says, “What should we

think of poetry (or what of thought is left in poetry) that must refuse, sometimes with

great stubbornness, to signify? Or, simply, what is a poem whose ‘coding’ is such that it

foils in advance all attempts to decipher it? (Lacoue-Labarthe, 1999, pg. 14). A

somewhat Hesienbergian formulation.

He gives this poem:

If there cameIf there came a manIf there came a man unto the world today, withThe beard of light of thePatriarchs; he would need only,If he spoke of thistime, he would need onlyto stutter, stutterwithout, withoutwithout cease.

(“Pallaksh. Pallaksh.”) (Lacoue-Labarthe, 1999, pg. 17)

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Bob Dylan is an apophatic, existential absurd, imaginal poet. Dylan’s turn from

simple protest songs to an imaginal, existential, psychological and Romantic style of

cultural criticism and personal awareness had been stimulated, in part, by LSD and

marihuana use.  His 1965 album, Bringing It All Back Home, brought this into popular

culture.  His “Mr. Tambourine Man” is a poetic, lyrical evocation of the intricacies of the

chaotic, imaginal, consciousness expanding, identity deconstructing world of the

psychedelic journey as a beguiling innocent abandonment to aesthetic redemptive

yearning – “I’m ready to go anywhere, I’m ready for to fade into my own parade.”- into

the imaginal. Yet, he “has no place to go” and “no one to meet” on this magic

disappearing trip, where all his “senses have been stripped,” an ex-stasis in which the

author/narrator is reduced to “vague traces of skipping reels of rhyme… a shadow your

seeing that he’s chasing.”  The menacing mystery tramp is here “just a ragged clown

behind,” aimlessly, madly spinning down weary, frozen, foggy, empty ruined streets,

“with all memory and fate driven deep beneath the waves”, the determinate past and the

determined future washed clean in this lyrical, psychedelic, imaginal meander.  He’s not

speaking to anyone and we should not “pay it any mind.”  Yet, in this seemingly nihilistic

world of vague pervasive disappearances, “but for the sky there are no fences facing” –

the diamond sky of the sleepless Vajra mind, Indra’s net, flashing, reflecting all and

everything, fractally encoding the “jingle jangle” of the simple tambourine as the infinite,

imaginal possibility of no known past, no specified future and no confining identity – the

apophasis of knowledge in The Cloud of Unknowing, the Muhamadian ‘station of no

station’ of Ibn ‘Arabi and the self-other transcendence in being neither oneself or

another of Eriugena. (Michael E. Sells, 1994, Mystical Languages of Unsaying,

Chicago, The University of Chicago Press). Dancing, “with one hand waving free,

silhouetted by the sea, circled by the circus sand.”  Entranced.  “Pray God that we may

be rid of God.” (Eckhart).  Disappearing into the imaginal. Heisenberg grins like a

Chesire cat in a box.

In the self-described closest sound to the music that he hears in his head, “that

thin…wild mercury sound,” (Dylan interviewed by Ron Rosenblum in Playboy, 1978, p.

51 Trager), 1966’s Blonde on Blonde defines the mythic genius of Dylan, “rock ‘n roll at

the farthest edge imaginable [with] instrumentalists and singer all peering into a deeper

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abyss than anyone had previously imagined existed,” (Dave Marsh, p. 53 Trager). The

“fractured consciousness” (Shelton, p 54 Trager) of the imaginal, surreal, visionary

torrent of “Visions of Johanna” is a darkly pellucid urban dreamscape of an individuality

that is stranded in the bardo of “the empty lot,” and now must contend with the

uncontrollable rush of ‘otherness,’ where even “infinity goes up on trial,” and Mona

Lisa’s smile secretly sings “the highway blues.”  Meanwhile, echoing Beckett’s 20th

century defining theme of lost humanism and Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, “we sit

here stranded though we’re all doing our best to deny it,” waiting for Madonna, who “still

has not shown.”  Is life really a composition of seemingly random visions that become

our identity, as we “mutter small talk at the wall” and “harmonicas play the skeleton keys

in the rain?”- the intuitively generated ‘skeleton key’ that is a secret master key, opening

the hidden, imaginal locks of our constructed identity. Is this really “what salvation must

be like after a while?”  Maybe, after “everything’s been returned which was owed,” our

karma has played out and our “conscience” can let go in that final flash of diamond

light.  No more need to face the music, because “the fiddler has stepped to the road”

and “these visions of Johanna are now all that remain” – the content has become the

context, the thought has become the thinker, the character has become the author,

characterized as a contextualizing thinker created by visionary content.  And the beat

goes on.  This is what salvation is like, after a while, here, now, in this surreal life, in this

empty, uncertain, imaginal  identity and reality.  The spiral dance of the falling

revolutionary angels circling deeper and deeper into the displaced centre.  The same

old place. Imaginal reality. Imaginal identity.

Dylan’s imaginal, deconstructed identity theme is illuminated in the Dylan biopic,

I’m Not There. Six different actors play Dylan, both male and female, in a nonlinear

narrative style, characteristic of the imaginal. In a movie he co-wrote and starred in,

Masked and Anonymous, he plays ‘himself’ as Jack Fate. In a pervasively chaotic,

anarchic/totalitarian world, nothing is solved, “nothing is revealed” (Ballad of Frankie

Lee and Judas Priest) and nothing is figured out. It’s not dark yet, but it’s getting there.

Leonard Cohen and Tom Waits create their own apophatic, imaginal blues. Laurie

Anderson sings in Freefall that “when you think your swimming to the surface, you’re

swimming straight down … all the way to the bottom … like when your drowning or

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falling asleep, you get turned around … there is another world spinning inside of this

one”, a riff on a Paul Eluard line from his poem, La Religion. ‘Rapture of the deep’.

Imaginal reality. We may also reference improvisational jazz, in which what I play is

spontaneous musical self-expression in response to your spontaneous musical self-

expression that is a response to my spontaneous musical self-expression in response to

yours. All of this being just ‘the playful self-experimentation of a deep dynamic

invariance’ according to Dzogchen’s Longchenpa, all in the context of Derridean ‘poetic

undecidability’, the sublime fragment of the ever present remainder. Imaginal identity.

And, finally, in fielding the question ‘How many surrealists does it take to change

a light bulb?’ we answer ‘A fish’, which is no particular answer at all.

Ceci n’est pas une pipe – the treachery of representation.

Apophatic AphorismsThe imaginal identity and reality theme may be illuminated through contemplating

the apophatic question ‘what is it that is not what it is when you grasp it?’ This is a point

of entry for people into the apophatic labyrinth of the imaginal dimension and a

continuing thread to intuitively follow. There are aphoristic responses to this question

that are metaphoric, paradoxical characteristics of the imaginal. The theme is inquiry

and mystery. The tradition is apophatic – that which cannot be stated simply, directly,

didactically. In the apophatic tradition, any explicit statement must be ‘unsaid’ if it is to

convey mystical, apophatic, imaginal truth. (Sells, Michael, 1994, Mystical Languages of

Unsaying, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago)This suggests another possible

term for an imaginal epistemology – apophatic epistemology.

Here are some examples of apophatic aphorisms. ‘Remember that what you are

looking for is looking for you. Because what you are looking for is what is looking’. ‘It’s

not about waking up in the dream, it’s about dreaming your waking life’. ‘To reach where

you want to go, keep your eye on the horizon. To be taken where you need to go, look

at where you stand’. “You are not a drop in the ocean. You are the entire ocean in a

drop” (Mevlana Jalaluddin Rumi [source]). ‘Take yourself as you find yourself, but don’t

leave yourself as you find yourself’. ‘You have the life you want by wanting the life you

have’. These can be used as reflective, meditation themes that are, paradoxically,

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guiding yet not instructive. They frame and shape without prescribing and proscribing.

They provide a container for transformational growth and realization of embodied,

paradoxical wholeness through dialectic integration of spirit, soul, body in the imaginal,

dream level of reality that holds space without objective grasping, a journey without

goal. The process is the realization of selfhood as suchness in the enlivening

immediacy of the emptiness of being. Imaginal embodiment. (Chogyam Trungpa, 2000,

Journey without Goal: the Tantric Wisdom of the Buddha, Shambhala Publications,

Boulder).

Spiritual EmergenceThe imaginal is not spiritual per se, though it is inhabited by spirits. The spiritual

of the imaginal is a materialized spirit in the form of the subtle body, which might also be

characterized as the energy body. This energy is known by different names, with

somewhat different characteristics, in different traditions. It is Chi in Traditional Chinese

Medicine, prana in Hinduism, bodhicitta in Buddhism, Kundalini in the Kundalini

tradition. It has been described as ‘vital force’ in energetic healing traditions such as

homeopathy. It may be said to be liquid light.

Imaginal experience sometimes has the qualities of what Stan and Christina

Grof, David Lukoff, Frances Lu and Robert Turner have called ‘spiritual emergence’.

(Grof S. & Grof C. Spiritual Emergency: When Personal Transformation Becomes a

Crisis, Los Angeles, CA, J. P. Tarcher, and “From Spiritual Emergency to Spiritual

Problem: The Transpersonal Roots of the New DSM IV Category”, David Lukoff,

Frances Lu, Robert Turner, Journal of Humanistic Psychology, 38, 21-25, 1998). This is

an exciting, challenging, sometimes difficult, process of awakening to the imaginal,

embodied, spiritual dimension of existence in a way that has not previously been

present for that individual. It can involve direct experience of the transpersonal,

archetypal world (as a felt sense, as an energetic phenomenon, as a being - for

example a shamanic guide or Buddhist diety), psychic and paranormal experiences

(one person experienced knocking on her door with no one there and her bed shaking

in the night), tantric experiences of the enlivened body (paraesthesia, shaking, back

arching, ecstatic mind expansion, cosmic consciousness and groaning, orgasmic

sounds), a sense of the presence of the spirits of the dead (ancestors come into

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people’s visionary awareness in a way that is helpful and supportive), angelic encounters (awakening to a presence at the end of the bed that is neither malevolent

nor benevolent, just there, watching), cosmological awareness, with what seems like

knowledge of the true nature of life and death, and of the purpose and meaning of one’s

individual life. A person’s sense of embodied identity and transpersonal reality

transcends that defined by the reductionist, rational, empirical scientific tradition of the

Enlightenment model of identity and reality and begins to align more with the embodied,

transpersonal, Romantic, imaginal sense of identity and reality.

The Holistic Experiential Process Method (HEP)HEP is an imaginal, integrative, evolutionary model and method that emerges from

humanistic, existential, transpersonal, holotropic, psychodynamic, archetypal and

somatic depth psychologies, as well as the new sciences of holism, chaos theory and

self-organizing systems theory, and spiritual models that draw on ancient cosmologies,

from both eastern and western mystical traditions, that show the world is not a collection

of separate ‘things’, but a pattern of dynamic relationships, as life unfolds in the

individual, the culture and the cosmos. HEP also draws on the Romantic, postmodern

and participatory traditions in philosophy and culture, modernist art and literature, and

Continental Philosophy as a way of understanding human relationship and the place of

individuality in culture and cosmos. HEP was originally developed as a psychotherapy

method. It can, however, be applied to the evolution of any dynamic, energetic system

that maintains an identity while interacting with an environment – a family, an

organization, a culture, a species – what Prigogine calls a ‘dissipative structure’.

(http://www.livinginstitute.org/papers-and-writing The HEP Method)

ExperientialThe working model is experiential in that the chief focus of all endeavours is the

deepening of the experiential sense of self, via directed intensification of the

phenomena of inner experience, and mapping that experience onto various paradigms,

disciplines and traditions. The focus may begin anywhere in the experiential field. It

may be a dream, a memory from the past, or a story of what happened yesterday at

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work. It may be a thought, an image, a sensation, a feeling, an emotion. Once the

experiential focus is defined, the facilitator’s task is amplification, intensification,

deepening, reflection. Techniques of psychodynamic introspection, encounter or gestalt

exercises, primal psychophysical release, art expression, psychodramatic enactment,

active imagination or transpersonal practices may be used

HolisticThe working model is holistic in that its overview is systemic, organismic,

holotropic, evolutionary and transpersonal. It incorporates both the Jungian idea of an

individuating Self and the persistent diversity of the archetypal, polytheistic perspective.

It is dialectic and integrative, moving from contradiction to paradox. Its focus is

inclusive, in that it sees the complementary nature of opposites and the one in the

many. In The HEP Method, phenomenology is said to manifest ontology and ontology

to ground phenomenology. From the holographic paradigm and chaos theory, it takes

the perspective of wholeness which relates part and whole in a fractal, scaling, self

similar manner, across all levels and states of the whole.

ProcessThe HEP Method involves a deconstructing and reconstructing of one’s

personality and life that provides access to imaginal themes in personal and collective

evolution. An immediate focus of HEP is a deepening self-awareness, so that the

process becomes a process of self-discovery, as the participant moves deeper and

deeper into the experiential sense of the imaginal self. As this happens, problems and

symptoms resolve into gateways or doorways to self-knowledge. In this context,

pathologizing is seen as a set of signs or indicators as to what the deeper layers of the

psyche are throwing up for consideration in the process of ‘soul making’, as defined in

archetypal psychology and a key theme in the imaginal. In this process the various

chaotic, divisive contradictions of the participant’s experience of life become resolved

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into the inclusive paradox of increasing, complex wholeness, without, necessarily,

eliminating the tension of opposites.

Event/Experience DialecticA significant imaginal theme in The HEP Method is recognizing and working with

the event/ experience polarity. This suggests that when an evolutionary issue is being

constellated in an individual, it occurs both as an event in the outer world and as an

inner experience, reflecting the inner/outer correspondence of the imaginal. Typically,

because an evolutionary constellating issue involves disowned, painful, psychological

material, we do not wish to have the experience. So there is a knock on the door – an

event occurs in our lives to remind us of the need for an inner experience. This model

draws on Jung and Pauli’s notion of synchronicity, where there is seen to be a

meaningful relationship between inner and outer world via what Paracelsus, Goethe and

the Hermetic Western Mystery Tradition call the ‘doctrine of correspondences’. It also

draws on Brooke’s archetypal, phenomenological model of the unconscious as having

extension as well as depth. These are key themes in the imaginal. HEP involves a

surrender into life such that a person’s sense of identity extends beyond the skin

encapsulated ego into the life world of the World Soul, Anima Mundi, Mundus

Imaginalis, imaginal reality.

Author/Character DialecticOne processful end point of the HEP process is the full realization of

characterization, i.e. that we are characters in a life story, and that through our story of

characterization an authorial telos is being enacted, the romantic irony theme in the

imaginal. In this process of surrender into the victimization of utter characterization, in

this ego death, a self resurrection occurs. Not the self of the character or the self of the

author, but rather the characterized author as the authorized character, expressed

through the author’s characterological story. A resurrection that is also a imaginal birth

which reveals the self-conceived nature of one’s life story. In HEP it is said that ‘author

creates character and character reveals the author’s characterological story, through

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the authentic lived world of story.’ This recapitulates the Sufi theme of the cocreative

relationship between the generative father, who conceives of the all, and the gestational

mother, who gives birth to the all from, and into, the atemporal, non-local, quantum,

archetypal imaginal world in which conception and birth are co-eternal. The Sufi’s say,

‘my mother gave birth to her father’ and ‘the mystic gives birth to the divinity whose

passion it is to be known by the mystic’. This lived world of story is the integrating

dialectic of the soul, the celestial earth of Ibn’ Arabi, the Mundus Imaginalis, the

quaternity as completion of the evolutionary differentiation of a primary original unity, as

given in the Axiom of Maria. Imaginal evolution.

Nowhere. No where. Now here.As in Romanyshyn’s archetypal, imaginal account of Bachelard’s and Merleau-

Ponty’s work, HEP is a radical phenomenology of the sensuous world, releasing the

imaginal trapped in the ‘literalism of fact’ and the ‘dogmatism of thought’. In this it is an

imaginal, mystical psychology of the embodied heart – the cosmological heart of the

soul, whose centre is everywhere and whose limits are nowhere.

Nowhere. No where. Now here.

Thus we see HEP moving from the ego identification with character to self

identification with the lived world of the author/character dialectic of story, and to a

mystical psychology of cosmos, in which we undertake, in Bamford’s words, “the Great

Work of redemption of the scattered sparks of light in the darkness of every perception”

(The Rosicrucian Enlightenment Revisited, 1999, ed. Ralph White, Lindisfarne Books,

Hudson, NY) – a clarification of the no where of the heart of the cosmos into the now

here of one’s lived life as Homo Dei Cosmopolitos. Bamford’s and Corbin’s singular no

place of Mundus Imaginalis, subjectivity, the clime to which one cannot point.

Alchemical TransformationHEP is an imaginal crucible and container for transformation via nigredo

(darkening), putrefactio (rotting), mortificatio (dying). These are alchemical, imaginal

metaphors for transforming leaden deadness into the radiant gold of manifest potential.

This requires a vessel. Such a vessel is provided by immersion in the matrix of the

relationships of a group, in a bath of the waters of the unconscious, in the container of

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the therapeutic process itself. One of the central experiences of this alchemical

containment in HEP is ‘being in hell’ – the dark, underworld, imaginal, hell state of self-

alienation, self-deception, self-denial. Not being at one with one’s ground of being (self-

alienation), one’s historical and present circumstances (self-deception), one’s needs

(self-denial). Lacking at-one-ment. This self alienation is what in the Christian tradition

Tillich calls sin. In a state of separation from one’s ground of being we are not at one

with our Divine nature, our authenticity. In this sense we are dead and separate from

meaning and purpose. Deadness, hopelessness, despair are characteristic of this

state. At its deepest, it is a feeling of eternal damnation.

StoryTypically this imaginal hell state within our deadness involves a sense of

unfairness. ‘What did I do to deserve this?’ ‘It’s not fair’ ‘I didn’t do anything’. The

circumstances (whether present or historic) that seem to have put us in hell do not

seem to be our ‘fault’ and we seem to have no control over their occurrence, especially

if they are historic (e.g. family) or in a place where we feel intimidated (e.g. school) or

powerless (e.g. job loss because of economic climate).

A key imaginal theme in HEP involves discovering habits and tendencies of

thought, feeling and behaviour that directly, or indirectly, create seemingly

circumstantial reality, which then impacts on us as if we had nothing to do with creating

it. HEP also involves developing the discrimination to not continue to reside in

circumstances that deny who we are and interfere with our life work. HEP supports

being able to say ‘no’ and to separate out. The deepest, mystical, imaginal challenge

that transforms the deepest self-alienation of a fiery hell state over which we have no

control, is to simply take responsibility for it as part of one’s story. ‘I didn’t cause this, I

have no control over it, it’s not fair and yet it is part of my story.’ How do we take

responsibility for something over which we have no control? Through humility, the

humiliation of mortificatio – repeated thematic occurrences of mortifying failure and

suffering, which ultimately leads to an identification with authorial story through our

objectifying characterization as the subjective sufferer. Imaginal identity. Imaginal

reality.

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RedemptionThis is a move which cannot be accomplished simply by reading about it,

believing it or holding an opinion. We must viscerally come to it, through the putrefying,

defensive, primal struggle against it. Scream, whine, plead our case for innocence,

victimization and injustice. Rotten with rage we cry out against it all until we give up the

ghost in despair, relinquishing egoic control in favour of surrender into the necessary

inevitability of excruciating containment in our particular, individual destiny. Imaginal

reality. Imaginal identity. Eros/Pathos. In this moment of what the Sufi’s call fanā’, divine

and human disappear into each other and we become our own saviour. In HEP, as in

Dante’s inferno, at the bottom of hell is purgatory – purging, cleansing, refreshment. In

this transformation of hell into purgatory, we take imaginal responsibility for what doesn’t

feel like our fault and over which we have no control, but which, nevertheless, is part of

our story. We are forgiven by recovering our response – ability and our heart opens

even as it is pierced by the world and we take responsibility for the alien ‘other’ by

accepting that, ‘yes, I am this too’. Imaginal reality. Imaginal identity.

Eternal damnation becomes redemption by surrendering denial and refusal.

Atonement is attained by surrendering alienation. Then all you need is love. Love of

what is. Forgiveness ultimately follows through faith, which we may lack but which,

through understanding and courage, we may bring to the moment of defeat. In the

surrender of ‘not my will but Thy will be done’, there is a paradoxical liberation. No

longer are we lamenting not having the life we want, because we now want the life we

have. And not only do we want the life we have but hidden, imaginal, Plutonic treasures

are revealed – hidden under the dragon’s tale. Hidden resources we forgot we had or

that looked like something else other than treasure. The Hymn of Jesus from the

Gospel of John says ‘If you knock on me I will be a door. If you are a traveler I will be a

road. If you look at me I will be a lamp. If you see me I will be a mirror’. This is our life

speaking to us through the depths of our alienation and despair. Imaginal reality.

Imaginal redemption.

Fate

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One of the recurrent mystical themes in the HEP imaginal, author/character,

event/experience, transformational model is that of fate – those irreducible themes in

our lives which change us rather than are changed by us. HEP validates and develops

the ego position of striving with skill and means to accomplish personally set goals,

using discipline, intelligence, foresight and planning, including such things as intuitive

methods, lateral thinking, visualization, mantra and meditation. Sometimes however,

our best laid plans repeatedly go astray and are defeated by ‘circumstances’. Then we

must look inside to see what fatal, imaginal story is being played out in our world. A key

HEP imaginal theme is a reversal of causality model. Typically we feel ‘I am this way

because of my life’ – including present circumstances and past history, social setting

and even archetypal context. In the causality reversal model the sequence becomes

‘because my life story is trying to make me aware of a deeply buried set of feelings or

aspect of self, it constellates circumstances and events to “create” the experience or to

bring the self-structure into focus’. This is not, however, a literal, directly causal model

but, rather, generative, shaping, focusing, imaginal creating.

The model of imaginal connection then becomes pattern rather than causality,

story rather than event or circumstance. What this ultimately does is deliteralize events

and empower the victimized, marginalized character as the imaginal agent of the

authorial centre, the imaginal basis of the storyline of events and circumstances. The

imaginal question then becomes not the helpless victimization of ‘why is this always

happening to me?’ and ‘why is everybody always picking on me?’ but the fatal, imaginal,

archetypal, identity question ‘who am I that my life should occur to me in this way?’

which ultimately leads to the service oriented question, ‘what is my life asking of me?’

This imaginal realization of the life serving function of the fatal themes in our life is a

fundamental focus of HEP.

Homo DeiThe essence of the Christ myth applies here, where the crucifixion and death

experience is referred to as ‘the passion’. In this myth, Christ is not a victim but a

‘world’ Saviour – by surrendering personal will to transpersonal will. For not only is it

the life we live that we must attend to, but the life that lives through us. In imaginal

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reality, it is the lived world itself that lives. The Unus Mundus of the Mundus Imaginalis,

the Anima Mundi that lives through our life, through our authentic aliveness. The

complex, unitary nature of the imaginal world of the world soul. This further leads to the

possibility that we are not only agents of our own individual evolution but also (or,

actually, even through this individual evolution) agents of Divine evolution. Corbet

speaks of the religious functions of the psyche, suggesting that individual human

development over the lifespan, as well as manifesting latent personal potential through

conscious choice in relationship, involves an imaginal embodiment of the Self as a

personal, spiritual and psychological experience of God, what in HEP is called the homo

dei experience. (Corbet, Lionell, year?, Religious Function of the Psyche, pub?) Jung in

Answer to Job [source] proposes that the human condition bears the burden of enacting

Divinities’ conscious transformation as human existential suffering. In this process we

realize that the world, which has seemed to be the solid foundation of our being, is

equally a construct of our self-created, imaginal awareness. Imaginal reality. Imaginal

identity. Homo dei cosmopolitos.

Imaginal Clinical MethodsMusingDennis Slattery speaks of a method that is “more akin to a heart than to a head

listening, (carrying) with it both a darkening and an illumination at the same time as it

encourages musing over analysis, contemplating rather than clarifying, and an

inclination to reverie rather than a reduction and flattening out that explanations seem to

gravitate toward.” (Slattery, Dennis Patrick, 2016, “Seeding the Soul: Musing Our Way

Down.” Psychological Perspectives Vol 59, Issue 2: 167-176, pg.169,). He suggests

musing as a method (that we may relate to an imaginal epistemology) that works

through inspiration, and can enact an anointing, “partly conscious, partly memorial,

partly oneiric and partly a forgetful act of imagination” (Slattery, 1969, pg. 171). He

suggests being “off-guard, contemplative, and porous.” (Slattery, 1969, pg. 170) He

says that “Poetic insighting and imaginal knowing have their richest value in their ability

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to grasp by analogy the patterns beneath the floorboard of conscious life, where the

myths that inform the natural and human orders are made a bit more manifest. This

level of discovery is contemplative and quickens the imagination.” (Slattery,1969, pg.

175). This suggests four possible terms for an imaginal epistemology – oneiric

epistemology, contemplative epistemology, analogic epistemology and musing

epistemology.

Imaginal Amplification MeditationA key intuitive method in the Holistic Experiential Process Method (HEP)

(http://www.livinginstitute.org/papers-and-writing , The HEP Method) that is integrated

into Living Institute Existential-Integrative Psychotherapy Diploma teaching

(http://www.livinginstitute.org/curriculum ) is imaginal amplification, a way of tuning into

and addressing the transpersonal, archetypal, holotropic, participatory, imaginal

dimension of being and reality. It is the key and ground of the holistic learning in the

program, involving a deep and focused commitment to ‘what is’. It provides an

experiential methodology for personal growth work in the self-development part of the

program and it is used in the teaching of particular traditions in the program. Imaginal

amplification facilitates emergence from, an entry into, the imaginal dimension of reality

and being that is both personal and transpersonal.When teaching students how to experientially facilitate opening up awareness of

the imaginal, and how to facilitate this with their clients, we use these guiding phrases

while also suggesting holding the questions given as background points of reference of

what to pick up on, how to see, hear and sense. This is a kind of poetic, metaphoric set

of instructions as to how to develop presence and guide an imaginal amplification

meditation. This method invokes the transpersonal, archetypal, holotropic, participatory,

mythic level of being through an acceptance of responses that are personal yet do not

close off possibilities of experience on a transpersonal level. It is an evocative,

emergent approach that echoes Brian Eno’s and Peter Schmidt’s ‘oblique strategies’,

both cerebral and intuitive, for creating ambient music, and art that utilizes ‘lateral

thinking’. John Cage’s invitation to ‘begin anywhere’ applies here.

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Begin from a focus on any direct, personal experience of feeling, emotion, image,

vision, thought, desire, mood, sensation, memory, dream. These beginnings are

amplified by metaphoric, poetic, symbolic association and deepening. Look for the

dream like quality in any experience to follow. What is vibrating within the moment?

What does your intuition lead you to see, say, do? Pay attention to where/when there is

a turning away, a step back, a tightening (of voice, eyes, energy), a disappearance. Be

attuned to the moment when there is a felt sense of new coherence, insight, ‘aha’,

illumination. Follow threads of unconscious, subtle cues and synchronicities. Don’t just

look directly, look indirectly, ‘out of the corner of your eye’. Hear poetic resonance. What

is being whispered? What is not being said? Hear and see metaphorically. See abstract

expressionistic reduction. Use phenomenological method of dropping non-essentials.

Start anywhere. Be generous in receptivity and cautious in grasping. Don’t move till you

are moved. Don’t take, be taken. Pay attention to psychodynamic themes of typology,

defences, unconscious, evolutionary stage, life circumstances. How does it work in the

moment? Where does it take you in the moment? Follow through with practical

integration into daily life. Bring into relationships and daily living with spontaneous,

compassionate, practical authenticity. How does it work in your life? Where does it take

you in your life? Here are two possible terms for an imaginal epistemology – holistic

epistemology, metaphoric epistemology.

Star Group Visualization – an Astral Travel Meditation This visualization is an adaptation into the HEP tradition of one taught by Ven.

Namgyal Rinpoche, a teacher in Vajrayana Buddhism and the Western Mystery

Tradition, with input from Ay Ghabda Waya (Eileen Nauman), a spiritual teacher from

the Cherokee, Apache and western energetic healing traditions.

It is an imaginal, subtle body, astral travel meditation that draws on the

Rosicrucian, Neoplatonic, Sufi, Kabbalistic, Tantric, existential, primal, and union

mysticism traditions.

Imagine yourself in your subtle body form, sitting in a circle holding hands, right

hand down, left hand up. Your body is hollow, transparent, filled with a milky white

luminous liquid. Imagine red and white tantric threads, intertwined like DNA strands and

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the snakes of the caduceus, running round the circle of your joined hands, connecting

through your pierced palms. From the base of your spine, a pencil thin blue tube runs

up your spine, out the top of your head, projecting up into space. This is the susumna

of the tantric tradition, the central channel in the subtle body. The red and white tantric

threads run up your arms, across your chest, and around your heart, like a crown of

thorns, then spiral up around the susumna as it projects out into space.

Slowly, your subtle body third eye rolls backwards in your forehead, till you are

looking up along the line of the susumna, way up into the spacious of your mind, which

is a blue sky, the dome of heaven, where the susumnae of all the group members meet,

forming a blue cone. Resting on top of the blue cone is a blue sphere. Inside the blue

sphere is a mirror pool in which lies a baby. This is you in your divine child form – the

form of that which is about to come into being as your subtle body answering angel,

which is both created by you and comes to you in response to your yearning. As you lie

there in the mirror pool of the self-reflecting circumstances of your life, you notice the

waters are turbulent. This is the turbulence of birth, which is the ever present state of

the always being born divine child. The waves are red and white capped, and you feel it

is almost unbearable, this ever present turbulence. Lying there in this turbulence, you

gaze up at the dome of heaven, the sky of mind, and notice a red dot at mid heaven.

This is the red flame of your parent’s carnal embrace that draws your original spiritual

spark down into the flesh of embodiment, of coming into being. The red dot is also your

original spiritual spark as you incarnate. Imagine watching yourself incarnate.

As you feel yourself drawn into this, you become aware that you are also being

drawn into the circumstances of your life and the red dot is also that point in the field of

your life where events and circumstances that initially seemed strange and alien begin

to take on personal meaning for you, to begin to seem like a part of you that you have

forgotten or not yet become, the event horizon of your becoming all-in-all. This strange

alien other that initially seemed so threatening, now seems like a self-remembering, a

rejoining of the members of your dis-membered body, a becoming, now in angelic form.

This is your angelic self, come to you as an ‘other’, an answer to your yearning for

redemption from alienation and aloneness. Let this answering angel appear to you out

of the red dot, speak to you, give you a sense of presence, a feeling of being kindly

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regarded. The form and presence of this angel is personal to you, so there is no right

way for it to be. It could have a human or animal form or be elemental, such as a

crystal or colored shape. Look if you can see the angel’s eyes or have some sense of

direct contact. Ask the name of the angel. This is personal to you and should not be

told to anyone else. The angel will want to be of service, to you and to others in your

life, and to your life itself. Ask what in particular is this angel’s service. When you are

ready, thank the angel and say goodbye, and that you will be back in touch later. The

angel returns to the red light. Take note of the quality of the image. Did it remain stable

for you during the connection? Return to the blue cone and blue sphere image and

visualize it coming down into your heart centre, where it becomes a blue dot, a bindu

which is the distilled essence of this experience that you carry with you in your heart.

Imagine all dissolving into a field of shimmering blue light, which is also water and a

mist.

Close by saying Amen and Blessed Be.

Subtle Body and Divine Individuality - a Defeat of Death Meditation

In order to discover our true self, the meaning of our life’s suffering and purpose, we must take a night journey into the underworld land of the dead. Here we meet our ghosts and demons. Through this ego death a self-resurrection occurs. We are redeemed from self-alienation, recover from self-denial and are healed from self-deception by remembering what we do not want to know about ourselves. By taking responsibility for what has died in us, we enlived our deadness. This feels like dying as we enter the state of deadness. As state becomes process, we meet our answering angel and are guided back to life with responses to the Gnostic questions:

Who am I?Where am I?

Where do I come from?Where am I going to?

According to Jung, this psychological death experience is a mystical awakening of the whole self- a mysterium conniunctionuis, transforming the leaden deadness of our disowned self into the radiant gold of manifest potential.

According to Heidegger, death is the ‘shrine of nothingness’ where there are no absolute distinctions. Inner and outer are one. Here we have access to how we create our lives by deep cosmic self-conception ion every moment. This is a revelation that comes through accepting the defeat of death as we fall into our self. By accepting this

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defeat of death, death itself is defeated as we enliven our deadened, buried, lost self – our buried treasure. Our ghosts re-embody our demons become teachers. A new body is created – the imaginal, subtle energy body of the resurrection, which carries our eternal individuality.

In this revelation, we discover it is the lived world that lives through us by enlivening our deadness.

The question then becomes:Who am I that my life should occur to me in this way?

andWhat is my life asking of me?

Ultimately then, we have the life we want by wanting the life we have.

For true mystics make dying their profession. In this voluntary death, desire in its obsessive hardened form must die. This means withdrawal of projections from relationship and no longer fighting with phantoms. In this death of hardened desire, true passion awakens.

Christ says: Take up your cross and follow meGoethe says: Die and become

Jung says: What remains for the individual at death is that aspect of cosmic consciousness which has incarnated in the individual. The soul, in a total encounter with

itself, decides for or against its divine nature.

According to the Hermetic tradition, eternal life comes from embracing the shadow as entombment in the hell state of our animal nature. At the moment of defeat by these animal forces, they become the preserver that permits the birth of divine individuality.

It may also be said that we become our true individual self only as the essential cosmic self we embody, and if we do not embody this self the spiritual seed of life does not bear fruit. This feeling for the essential infinite can only be attained, however, if we accept being bound to the utmost by the identity we have created through the life we live.

So every day as you arise and greet yourself in the mirror pool of your life may you sayYes, I am this too.

Clinical VignettesLauren had been born to a teenage mother and grew up un-mothered, suffering

the chaos of unformed identity and fragmented directionality in her life. After a lot of

work on this theme we came to a point where a new mother was coming into being,

emerging from the imaginal, based on Lauren’s deep, complex, self-reflective ownership

of her not providing grounding and containment for herself, or accepting this input from

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others. In a pivotal session I had a sense of this new mother being present, inhabiting

my body and speaking through me, informing and coloring my words and feelings. I

guided Lauren into an awareness of this presence and invited her to tell her (new,

imaginal) mother what it was like for her to grow up with her (historical, personal)

mother, who Lauren had never told this to. With a lot of encouragement and maternal

focusing from me, as her mother, she released intense emotions of anger,

disappointment and need, constellating a deep, embodied birthing experience – giving

birth both to a new sense of self and a new sense of being mothered. We talked about

this experience and the awareness that flowed from it over the next several sessions as

she struggled with the integration of these new aspects of being. This initiated a phase

of re-visioning her life direction. She eventually moved into enacting her artistic and

spiritual potential in the world, with some success, based on her willingness, and newly

realized capacity, to be structured, directional and accepting of the containment

required to build.

In the middle of her process Sarah was walking along a main thoroughfare in

Toronto seeing people and places as if she was in a mediaeval play. There were

grotesque faces and bodies, impoverished and hungry people. Everything was strange

and otherworldly. She was aware of being awake in the everyday world and also as if

she was dreaming. It lasted about 20 minutes, culminating in her finding a large, metal,

mediaeval looking pendant on the street with a male figure on one side and a bird on

the other. She still has it. She says “there was a quality of me being an observer,

invisible to the players and untouchable, and yet still being scared that I was the only

one who could see this. I didn’t think I was crazy but I wondered how far the experience

could go and that unknown created a feeling of alienation. Somehow the mediaeval

characters coming out of mediaeval architecture was significant, as if they were

inseparable – the people and the environment inseparable. The bird is a dove and that

was very significant to find this as we were relating a lot, at that time, to the dove as

spirit coming into matter.” Dream as reality? Reality as dream?