Imagination
When you have a fantasy, dream or vision, or any other sort of inner life experience are you imagining it?
The short answer is yes!!!
But is what you imagine real?!! And what is Imagination?
Dictionary definition: faculty of forming images in the mind.
My use of the term imagination owes much to the work of C G Jung and others mainly artists, however, and I use it to mean not just images as mere representations or distortions of external objects. Imagination can be such a faculty, somewhat like an editor which uses pre-existing images from memory and re-arranges them into new scenarios. These may be pleasant or unpleasant and are the basis of so-called daydreams and sexual fantasies which are most often escapist in nature. They are most often the basis of many low level paranoid feelings too. They are however a limited use of the imaginative faculty.
So in this view drawing on the likes of C G Jung, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and W H Auden, to name just few, in which the imaginative faculty allows us to perceive images which have an a priori existence in the psyche. The psyche here being not just a place inside the mind but a realm or dimension of reality of non-physical character; you might call it the realm of Spirit or the Dreaming, it was known as the faerie realm in the Celtic cultures. In Christian tradition it may have something to do with notions of angels and demons which are clearly non physical entities. All of the worlds' religious traditions acknowledge some form of non physical existence which seems to parallel our current physical incarnation. Its something we have stopped having a name for because our culture proposes a secular materialist world view in which there is no place for such things except only in you mind which of course means, not really real.
Hallucinations, visions and dreams are perceptions (not products) of the imagination. They bring to light, as it were, things that were already there but not accessible to consciousness. I associate the imagination with Jung's intuitive faculty or function. As the five senses allow us to perceive physical reality so the intuitive faculty allows us to imaginatively perceive non-physical reality. If you `see' fairies or spirits or devas, or the dreamscapes you experience at night, you see them with your `minds eye' or intuitive/imaginative faculty. That's what its there for! You really perceive such things not make them up or invent or produce them.
It was just this that Jung's `inner' guide Philemon taught him, that there are things in the psyche which we do not produce but which produce themselves and have a life of their own. We do not produce fairies or nature spirits or even the figures in our dreams. Nor do the Aborigines produce or invent the Dreaming. At the most we just clothe these inner psychic realities in images from our daily lives to make them more acceptable to our every day consciousness.
This is a reality which indigenous cultures recognised and which was a cornerstone of their world view, that the psyche or spirit world was real. Further more they saw that realm as standing before and giving rise to every day reality.
So, you might ask, why have we stopped believing it?? That is a
good question.
