The Synthesizing Imagination—Working Out my own Understanding of Coleridge's Concepts

This is going off-track, but really it isn't. All these ideas are intimately connected. So I'll continue to post in this thread about them.

A phrase stuck in my head from the Cynthia Bourgeault book—

"move the mind into the heart."​

The book is called The Eye of the Heart. That phrase comes straight from Paul in the Bible. But I also remembered the thing about moving the mind into the heart, or moving from the mind into the heart, and that turned up this page:

• The Way of the Heart, by Cynthia Bourgeault

She always grabs me and shakes me up. She seems to be preternaturally tuned in to all of this esoteric wisdom stuff. She knows all of it apparently, and has figured out how it all fits together. At least I always get that feeling when I read her.

I've had this phrase echoing through my head all day, and it made me remember something. When I was young I wasn't all logical and intellecutal-like as I am now. In Jung's terms I used to be feeling-centric, but I've become thinking-centric. I had my own reasons for it—it was mainly a defense mechanism. Putting up a little armor around the heart, which used to be too vulnerable and open.

I don't want to dump a bucket of TMI in here or overshare, so I'll just say I think it would be very good for me, in several ways, to open up my heart again and learn to drop some of the armoring, at least at times, and in the right settings. I think it might be the key to writing poetry (or just writing poetically), and to advancing spiritually.

In the above article I discoverd this book:

• The Wisdom Jesus: Transforming Heart and Mind--A New Perspective on Christ and His Message

By guess who? I don't want to try to type that name again, it hurts. Surprisingly though I've been getting it right more often than not. I've read part of the Sample. What she says about cleansing the heart of 'passions'—it's precisely the trick at the center of Stoicism, to 'switch off' overhwelming emotions. So I guess my heart is already purged of those pesky passions and ready to be opened up to the spiritual way. As I've said before, I always did think of the Stoics as secular monks, in their homespun robes and all. Their wisdom originated from the same sources just about all of it did in those days.

I've bought the Kindle of The Wisdom Jesus and read a couple of chapters. The premise is that Jesus was what she calls a Wisdom Teacher, and that what he was teaching was non-duality, squarely in line with Buddhism. And it turns out that "moving the mind into the heart" means to make the left hemisphere of the brain the emissary of the right. The mind in the analogy is the left hemisphere—the logical, linguistic, egoistic and completely dualistic part. And the heart is the right hemisphere—the spiritual, meditational, unified part. To make the Many into the One means to enter the Unified Mind or the right hemisphere, the non-dualistic state.

Had a dream last night relating very strongly to this "moving the mind into the heart" stuff. I think it was showing me how to do it, or that my idea for how to do it is right. At any rate it showed it happening and in the way I hope I can make it happen. But it may have just been because I was thinking so much about it, and attaching a good deal of feeling to it. That tends to make things show up in your dreams. It also tends to make things happen in the unconscious as well. They're very closely related. It was all shown very symbolically with symbols that, on waking, made good solid sense to me.

I don't really like the Eye of the Heart book very much, which is about the Imaginal. It very quickly goes deep into Gurdjieff territory. He was a mad Russian mystic who came up with a lot of really out-there theories. A lot of people put a great deal of stock in them. Personally I find them very hard to follow and they sound kind of crazy, but whatever.

The Imaginal is a concept that arises from Sufi mysticism, which is the mystical branch of Islam. Nothing wrong with that, but she goes on to say that it does not mean at all what people always think it does—it has nothing to do whatsoever with the imagination. Well, I sort of lost interest at that point. The book also was meandeing all over the place and didn't seem to be expaining anything very celarly. Glad it led me to her other book though.

The method for moving the mind into the heart is called Centering Prayer. It's the core of what's called Contemplative Christianity, and it turns out to be exactly the kind of meditation I've been doing for many years, which consists of just sitting quietly and shutting off the stream of words that normally course through the mind endlessly:

• Centering Prayer: The Very Basics @ The Contemplative Society

I won't be posting about this much if at all anymore. I only mentioned it here at all because it seems to be an important part of developing the Poetic Imagination.

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