Imagination and Spiritual Growth

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Today I want to present to you various fantasies about the nature of human beings. I don’t expect you to believe any of them.

Much of these ideas were inspired and clarified by the writings of James Hillman, considered by some to be the founder of "archetypal psychology" - a psychology of imagination, sometimes called "depth psychology".

bio. reference:

James Hillman was born in New Jersey (1926) but was educated in Zurich, Switzerland, receiving his PhD from the University of Zurich in1959 and his Analyst’s diploma from the C. G. Jung Institute there in the same year. He stayed on at the institute for the following ten years serving as Director of Curriculum. In 1978 he moved to Dallas where he co-founded the Dallas Institute=20 for Humanities and Culture and edited Spring Publications with Robert Sardello until 1984. He now lives in Thompson, Connecticut. As a therapist his methods challenge the conventions of psychotherapy as established by his mentors Freud and Jung by reason summarized by the title of his 1993 book, We’ve Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy and the World’s Getting Worse.  Author of over 20 books on behavior and psychology, his latest, The Force of Character and the Lasting Life, was released in August of 1999.

We cope with things we don’t know or can’t understand by inventing reasons and meanings, and the liberating fact of our lives is that we know nothing and understand nothing. So, we have to make it all up. We explain things about the world to ourselves with words and images. We often use words and images to explain our view of the world to others. This helps us to believe our own fantasies. What is real? What am I? Why am I living? Humans may be the only animals who ask these questions. The answers are mysteries.

Psychologists and physiologists have discovered that words and images are particular impulses which originate in separate parts of the brain. The left hemisphere generates words; the right generates images. If I ask you to describe the breakfast you ate this morning, you will probably experience both visual and verbal thought. You might see the food in your mind and then select and organize the words needed to describe that picture. Brain activity influences personality. The left-brain is the seat of logic and linear organization; of structural certainties - lists, outlines and scientific proof; of sensing the order of time. The right-brain is intuitive rather than mathematical in influencing judgment, recognizes the parts of a thing as an integrated whole (gestalt), yet is divorced from knowing time. Visual impulses move through consciousness as images, impressions, and sensations like dream experience. Visual thinking is our ability to imagine. The right-brained person might be accused of being a dreamer - lost in "imagination".

The word "imagination" is often associated with young children. We find it cute that children have such vivid "imaginations" when they play, pretend and invent. When my son, Michael, was 8 years old, he said something which I was compelled to write down:

"When I die and am reincarnated as a bird, I want to make my nest in one of the O’s in the Brookshire’s sign. It can be my electric egg hatcher."

As adults we lose interest in imaginal thinking. Robert Fulghum, a former (part-time) Unitarian minister and author of the book Everything I Wanted to Know I Learned in Kindergarten, once visited a kindergarten class and asked, "Can any of you draw?" Every child raised their arms emphatically. "Can any of you dance, sing, act?" For each question every child could do all of those things, and wanted to demonstrate with an impromptu audition. Then he visited a college classroom and asked the same questions. No one could or would admit to drawing, dancing, singing or acting. Picasso observed that "all children paint like geniuses. Then asked, "What do we do to them that so quickly dulls  this ability?"

Christ advised that we should all be like children (Matthew 18: 1- = 4).

If we examine the word imagination we see that it has "image" in it. An image is a mental picture. It also has "imagine" in it. To imagine is to create mental pictures, to see with eyes closed. We all imagine in common ways everyday, in remembering - "did I turn the stove off?"- , daydreaming - what will I say at the next committee meeting?"... Through imagination we project our feelings and expectations onto objects in our environment, like Van Gogh’s painting of a chair or Leonardo’s notebook descriptions of seeing dragons in the clouds and faces in the cracks of sidewalks. Rudolf Arnheim, the perceptual psychologist, suggests that . "A car known to contain no motor may actually look different from one known to contain one." (Art and Visual Perception, 47).

We create analogies and metaphors to connect with things outside of ourselves, as in the classical myths where the forces of nature are personified into gods and goddesses, and with the inner aspects of human personality, as the characters of fairy tales - giants, witches, trolls, fairy godmothers, princes and frogs.

Through art, personal analogies and metaphors are shared through the visual language of the imagination.

This is clear in the Haiku:

- Jack Kerouac’s haikus (Spring,1958-Blues and Haikus):

The tree looks like a dog/ barking at heaven.

In my medicine cabinet/the winter fly/ has died, of old age.

- or from Basho the 17th century inventor of Japanese Haiku:

Bright moon: strolling around the pond all night long.

- Kobayashi Issa: (early19th century)

Under my house an inchworm, measuring the joists.

Imagination is the source of fantasies - daydreams, the visionary’s ability to create unseen worlds and discover unknown routes to familiar places. We seem to have an instinct for inventing images to identify the intangible forces of our lives. With the ability to visualize, to see through our mind’s eye, we project our hopes and plans for the future, and the identity of who we are and how we connect to the world around us. The images we create determine the reality of personal existence. We become what we imagine.

John Lennon asked us to

Imagine all the people, living life in  peace... no countries, ... no religions, ... no possessions, ... no need for greed or hunger, ... Imagine all the people sharing all the world...

John Lennon, Imagine, Capitol/Apple, Bag Productions, Inc.,1971.

James Hillman, the pioneer of "depth psychology", describes imagination as

... the inner aspect of consciousness, ... the imaginal or unconscious aspect of everything we think and do... the part of the soul that we keep to ourselves [which] is central to analysis, to confession, to prayer, central between lovers and friends, central in the works of art... and central to our fate.

Hillman,=20 Inter Views, 65). re: quoted from The Myth of Analysis

We witness the power of imagination when we give ourselves over to a good book, exhibition, play or movie, and then exit - displaced, blinking into the glare of daylight.

What is the basis for self-image? I think of myself as an artist, but in a given year, the activity I am most engaged in is sleeping, then reading, then talking (as a classroom teacher). Should I therefore adopt a new self-image as sleeper, reader, or teacher?

In imagination we can adjust our self-image to live more vibrantly, closer to our natural instincts as human animals, to counter the ego demands for order and certainty. Hillman proposes that

...if we imagine ourselves engaged as artists in life, if we use artists as our models instead of sober teachers and sterile doctors and administrators, then we can work with the daily mess in our lives as the material for psychological creativity...We don’t have to be artists but we can change the model, the fantasy we live by, so that we don’t have to imagine ourselves dull and sober and rational and critical"

Hillman, Inter Views, 61.

Van Gogh’s Chair

Seeing like an artist can be a process toward empathy. Empathy for all things outside of the self. By looking closely, we can connect with the world outside, projecting ourselves into the environment. The artist can employ the activity of drawing to analyze, measure, diagram, to look closely and recognize the marvelous complexity and diversity of the physical world. Drawing becomes a means to empathize with the physical attitude of an object - its posture, character, visual personality - and to record those impressions with visual adjectives as an emotional response. In this process, the artist can connect with the subject by first feeling like the subject and then expressing a self portrait. Supporting his theory of "empathy", the German psychologist, Theodor Lipps explains this process: "

When I project my strivings and forces into nature I do so also as to the way my strivings and forces make me feel, that is, I project my pride, my courage, my stubbornness, my lightness, my playful assuredness, my tranquil complacence. Only thus my empathy with regard to nature becomes truly aesthetic empathy

Arnheim, Art and Visual Perception, 448).

Early in his career, Claude Monet was enticed by the artist Eugene Boudin, to begin painting outdoors, completing an observed scene in one session. Repeated experiences of recording his environment directly from life led to Monet’s enlightenment as an artist:

My eyes were finally opened and I understood nature; I learned at the same time to love it.

Seitz, Claude Monet, 13.

Some writers describe art as an activity, a verb, a way of doing. In 1896, the Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy suggested this in a book of non-fiction titled, What is Art?:

To evoke in oneself a feeling one has experienced, and having evoked it in oneself, then by means of movements, lines, colors, sounds or forms expressed in words, so to transmit that feeling that others may experience the same feeling, that is the activity of art.

Here Tolstoy reduces art to the Communication of Feelings. He includes too the concept of personal expression. To express means to get out of the self and project into the environment; to get out of the body, out of the psyche so that it can be shared (the Le Leche League is dedicated to the expression of breast milk).

Robert Henri, an American artist and teacher (early 20th century), also described art as activity, a form of visual meditation. In his 1923 book, The Art Spirit, he explains that:

... the [purpose] of painting a picture is not to make a picture - however unreasonable this may sound. The [purpose behind] every true work of art is the attainment of a state of being, a state of high functioning, a more than ordinary moment of existence.

The Art Spirit, 159

Jackson Pollock described a similar trance-like state:

When I am in my painting I am not aware of what I am doing. ...it is only after ...that I see what I have been about. There is a pure harmony, an easy give and take.

Gilbert, 35

Like religious ritual, artists engage in the activity to transcend the particular time and place, to participate in a higher consciousness. We can compare the activity of art to right-brain thinking - divorced from words and from an awareness of time.

The Surrealist manifesto of 1924 described the activity of art as a channel through which one can access the subconscious. Andre Breton, the manifestos’ author, had studied Sigmund Freud’s theories of psycho-analysis and techniques of "free-association" while training as a psychiatric nurse in the French army. Breton labeled the activity as:

"Automatism" - purely spontaneous activity by which images erupt from imagination without interference from logic or reason, and exempt from any aesthetic or moral concern.

Andre Breton, The Manifestos of Surrealism, xiv, 1924.

The Surrealists attempted to live between the oeneric or dream state and the conscious waking state. Many experienced visions of surreality when under the physical influences of extreme fatigue, hunger, drugs (ether and opium) and/or alcohol.

As described by Breton, the surreal image is by design elusive and obscure. In the first manifesto he quotes from his precursor in the surreal image, Pierre Reverdy:

The image is a pure creation of the mind. It cannot be born from a comparison but from a juxtaposition of two more or less distant realities. The more the relationship between the two is distant and true, the stronger the image will be - the greater its emotional power and poetic reality. [from Nord-Sud, March 1918]

Breton, Manifestos, 20.

Breton maintained that this incongruous juxtaposition could only occur within the domain of the unconscious. Once revealed, the image possesses the power to spark a momentary awareness of the expansiveness of being, the poetic basis of mind which involves the faculties of both the rational and the oneiric. In his words:

It is as it were, from the fortuitous juxtaposition of the two terms that a particular light has sprung, the light of the image, to which we are infinitely sensitive

Breton, Manifestos, 37.

Whether written or painted, the numerous manifestations of the surreal image share this implausible, yet visible union.

Andre Breton, A Branch of Nettle Enters Through the Window

The woman with the crepe paper body

The red fish in the fireplace

Whose memory is pieced together from a multitude of small

watering places for distant ships...

trans. David Antin (Michael Benedikt, 130).

from Gullaume Apollinaire, Earth-Ocean (for Giorgio de = Chirico)

I built a house in the middle of the ocean

Its windows are the rivers flowing out of my eyes...

trans. M.B. (Benedikt, 27).

Paul Eluard, The Beloved

She is standing on my eyelids

And her hair is inside mine,

She is the shape of my hand,

She is the color of my eyes,

She is surrounded by my shadows

Like a rock by the sky.

trans. M.B.

(Benedikt, 173).

Pablo Neruda, Melancholy Inside Families

I keep a blue bottle.

Inside it an ear and a portrait. When the night dominates

the feathers of the owl,

when the hoarse cherry tree

rips out its lips and makes menacing gestures

with rinds which the oceans wind often perforates-

then I know that there are immense expanses hidden from us...

trans. Robert Bly and James Wright

(Bly, Moore, Hillman, The Rag and Bone Shop of the Heart, = 103).

Adolescence represents the surreality in every life. The soul is caught in an awkward state of transition from the naiveté and magical fantasies of childhood into the enlightened realization, yet stifling heaviness of social and physical responsibilities of survival. In this awkwardness we can find exhilaration and a heightened sense of the strangeness of being. It is the quest of the artist to achieve and prolong this adolescent state of surreality through the act of creating, as a psychic medium bridging conscious and unconscious realities. As Robert Henri suggests, the creative impulse itself is more valuable in affirming the state of being than any message or information that can be delivered by it.

The Roman god Mercury is a herald and messenger between the gods and humans, from Olympus to Earth, from the unconscious to the waking mind, from imagination to intellect, from the moment to the timeless.

God

Who is God? What is God? Which fantasies, images have we invented to understand something which is so mysterious. In religious traditions we resort to faith. The fantasy comes with a disclaimer: the nature of God can’t be understood. The Christian solution has been to first postulate that God created man in His own image and then to imagine that He sent his only son to be born as a man. When God becomes man we can then describe him in human terms, much as classical deities were presented in human forms and temperaments - the testy Poseidon, promiscuous Zeus, lovely Aphrodite, the bitch Hera...

To be made in the image of God is to be creative like the Creator. In the Sistine Chapel, Michelangelo imagines God as an old, gray-bearded man, an image repeated in William Blake’s God images from his Bible illustrations. (My son Carlton has one of those tattooed onto his chest). What does Jesus look like? Does he look like Willem Dafoe, or more like Jeff Goldblum? In the mid-’80s I was commissioned by a black Baptist congregation in Kilgore to paint a mural of the resurrected Christ behind the baptismal pool. I went to the church to see the space, take measurements and discuss the details. I worked up the courage to ask the obvious: what color should Jesus be? I wondered if they would want a Negroid Savior. The pastor and deaconess looked at me as a fool and soon brought forth a bible with an artist’s rendering of a resurrected brown eyed, auburn haired European-style Jesus. "This is Jesus! We want one like this". They accepted this image as gospel.

In other religious traditions, man becomes God by achieving enlightenment: Buddha, Rama, Krishna, Mahavira; the fully enlightened human mind merges human consciousness with God-consciousness - in Hindu terms he becomes "God-realized". What images do we have for God’s consciousness? Islam makes no attempt to express a god image. Mosques are decorated with elaborate, geometric patterns, nearly psychedelic in their complexity. At this point in the search we revert to words, expressing verbal concepts which don’t have a visual translation/correlation. God is the essence of being, the essence of existence. In John’s gospel we are told

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God"

John: 1, 1.

When I was in grade school I learned about the solar system from textbook pictures. I was proud to know the names and order of the planets, their respective diameters, circumferences and distances from the sun. I remember being fascinated by this new image of the world. It expanded my awareness of space the same way it did for humanity when Copernicus first introduced it in 1543. The expansiveness of the universe - our sun, one of millions in the galaxy, our galaxy one of millions in the universe, maybe millions of other universes; this helps me with an image of God and an image of my place in the cosmos. Science, like religion, becomes a matter of imagination and of faith. Like the Buddhist image of the veil of rubies in which each facet of each gem reflects the whole veil - multiplication into the infinite. And the Buddhists postulate that the infinite exists in one moment - NOW. 

Memory

Remembering is the opposite of dismembering. To dismember is to take something apart. To remember is to put together the pieces of your past - images, sounds, smells, tastes. Memory is very sensual. It can be triggered as you’re walking down the street. From a window comes a smell that brings a memory of sleeping at your grandmother’s when you were five, while your mother was in the hospital giving birth to your baby brother. She stayed up late with you making caramel apples and the smell coming from the house is exactly that smell. For a moment you become five again. Shortly after his mother died, a friend confided, "When my mother died I lost the only person who really knew me when I was a little boy. Now I am alone."

You might turn on the radio in the car and catch just the last two notes of a song. You recognize the song, because it was playing on the radio all during the summer when you were 15 and started your first job. All the memories of that summer return. The smell of Marlboros, the taste of Boone’s Farm, the sound of the Volkswagen beetle. Memories come full of sensory details. Hillman wrote of the evocative power of scents; the connection between smells and images:

...the cognition of smell is like a recognition. Smells bring the remembrance of Platonic recollection together with an instinctual reaction. Lured by musk, swayed by damp honeysuckle, we respond to the aphroditic evocation and recognize love arising without previous learning. Reflex and reflection together. The smelled image is both immediate and remembered, both animal and memorial

Hillman, A Blue Fire, 63.

The Oneiric

We are like plants growing at night, putting down roots in the still, dark, quiet of sleep.

Imagination is the deep well of your dreams. Dreams are eruptions from the part of you which is held down all day while you get dressed, go to work, make appointments, answer voice mail messages, check your watch to be sure you are where you’re supposed to be at the right time. At the end of the day, when you’re tired and you lay down to sleep, the person inside (your wordless self) begins to come out and talk. It gives you important messages about your life. The dreams can be marvelous, awesome, terrifying, outrageous, amazing, weird, embarrassing, ridiculous. Imagine a dream in which you are laying on the floor in the kitchen and a red snake slides out of the dishwasher. You saw it in two with a bread knife and each half grows a head - one is your mother the other is your father and each starts to swallow you from the feet up. You might not understand your dreams but you can sense their power and importance. Dr. Hillman recognizes the value of dream images in working through psychotherapy. Unlike his predecessors Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, he is not interested in curing his patients, or interpreting their fantasies and dreams. He advises us to be alert to imagination and to pursue it, call it into sharper focus; feel its power and importance.

Imagine Elizabeth Dole appears to you smoking a cigar and wearing Monica’s stained blue dress. Hillman would suggest that you work imaginatively with this apparition. Don’t analyze or interpret it, but l

... let the image express itself in its own language

Hillman, Inter Views, 66.

Examine her closely. Wait for her to speak - to tell you what she wants. Ask her how you might help her. Savor the image without trying to possess it or translate it into knowledge. That pre-cognizant moment of sensation allows us to glimpse the mysterious activity of the psyche and provides evidence of a deeper level of reality.

Hillman, Blue Fire, 59.

We use imagination in remembering, daydreaming/fantasizing, empathizing, dreaming, and seeing.

It provides the atmosphere in which religion, psychology and the arts can breathe.

It provides images which suggest answers to the hard questions: What am I? Why am I living? What is real

Frank Herbert 1/23/00