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

No good. The trend did not continue. I did a search and found these (picking up after the intro):

• De Imaginatione I: Classical Sources The mirror in your liver, and more
• De Imaginatione II: Neoplatonism All is full of signs
• De Imaginatione III: Jewish and Christian Beginnings images of God
• De Imaginatione IV: Clement, Origen, and the Desert Fathers Who shall see God?

That seems to be the entire series.

From part I:

“Imagination [phantasia],” said Apollonius, “wrought these works, a wiser and subtler artist by far than imitation [mimesis]; for imitation can only create as its handiwork what it has seen, but imagination equally what it has not seen; for it will conceive of its ideal with reference to the reality, and imitation is often baffled by terror, but imagination by nothing; for it marches undismayed to the goal which it has itself laid down.”​

When I learned to draw it was largely from the imagination, using the techniques of comic book artists, who obviously weren't working from photographs or live models most of the time. I studied the method known as constructing the figure, which means to build it from the gemoetric solids (cubes, cylinders, spheres, pyramids and cones etc) after learning how to draw those in perspective and to shade them and light them properly from any angle. I also of course studied the proportioning and relevant forms of the human body. Armed with that information you can easily invent the human figure in any pose, seen from any angle, and lit from any angle. This skill allowed me later, when actually working from photographs for instance, to change any part of a picture I wanted to, say the angle or position of an arm, or to turn the head a different way if I chose, and convincingly render it so it looks good. It was pure providence that I happened upon the skills in this order, but it gave me a lot of flexibility over artists trained only in copying photographs or drawing bowls of fruit from direct observation. They had no clue how to change anything, and, as Apollonius said above, were terrified of even trying it.

I'm not sure what the equivalent would be in writing fiction—maybe writers who began as journalists, working from real events? I don't think that's really the same, you still learn to come up with details to make an article more interesting. Maybe it's more about imitating the work of earlier authors? Not sure if writing was ever taught that way, as drawing and painting definitely were, though imitation and emulation are encouraged even today, as they should be (just not by themselves).

Everything after Neoplatonism deals directly with religious ideas. Actually, all of it does. Clearly the Platonic Ideal Forms were essentially what Jung named the Archetypes—those indwelling concepts that show up frequently in dreams, visions, religious and mythical narratives and the like, and give shape to the really big and powerful ideas. Most of the archetypes seem to take human-like form, as powerful beings, gods, or monsters. But I don't believe they're all of that type, I need to look into this. I think there are also archetypes of situation, such as certain kinds of buildings (largely religious or ceremonial ones) and spaces that contain a great deal of power.

So, the question then is—what does this mean in regards to Coleridge's Secondary (Poetic) imagaintion? Does it apply only to religious or mythical ideas? I suspect it's at least very close to that. His own Big Three (Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Christabel, and Kubla Kahn) all dealt directly with religious ideas. I think he at least is talking about ideas at that level of importance, though I believe they can be philosophical as well as religious in nature. I'm trying to think if there can be other categories, but I believe anything on that order of magnitude (powerful enough to be dealt with by the poetic imagination) would fall under one of those listings. Mythological too, which is closely associated with religion. And maybe certain concepts that don't fall under any clear category but belong at that level.

But if there are two levels of imagination (Primary and Secondary), are they strictly separated, or is it more of a spectrum? Personally I believe most things we see as binary opposites are actually much better described as spectra, with a grey zone dividing the sections rather than a hard line. Certainly many ideas arrived at by the imagination can be completley false. And we may not be able to discern the difference. And there's no way to tell if ideas that just pop into your head are 'inspired' or not. But obviously some are much better than others. And it seems to me that the mind of the artist can be trained to lean toward better, stronger ideas. It's basically the artistic training regimen—gradually learning to listen to those quiet inner voices rather than always assert rational ego-based control over everything.

The John Vervaeke videos I've been posting on the Spiritual/Psychological Videos thread deal precisely with how to strengthen your ability to listen to those quiet voices, through practices like meditation and contemplation. He's a cognitive scientist as well as a practitioner of many forms of Buddhism and similar Eastern as well as Western approaches to the inner world. He doesn't just say "Study Buddhism" or anything so basic. He has studied each approach and understands which parts of each really help get in touch with the aspects of the unconscious that contain these voices. I've been doing various kinds of mediative practices for many years now, mostly just by shutting off the inner stream of words inside your head and sitting in silence, often using a Tibetan singing bowl or a hand-carved wooden Native American flute for parts of it. I also spend some quality time out in nature (I'm fortunate to have the woods reach right up to my back door). I can definitely say it all helps to get in touch with your inner creative Self (Higher or Greater Self).

I do believe the Poetic Imagination works with ideas that aren't necssarily religious or philosophical in nature, though some of those ideas actually come down pretty close to earth so to speak. I believe it can definitely shape fiction that deals with powerful human truths. And actually a lot of that stuff is found throughout the Bible—it isn't just about visions of God in all his majesty as a burning bush or a column of cloud or fire or shadow. Often the stories are about ordinary people struggling through this diffcult world, this vale of tears we live in. As I've said many times, all Holy books are filled with human truths—in fact they were often very philosophical and sometimes just dealt with the harsh realities of living life. And philosophy in Ancient times wasn't an academic exercise, it was literally wisdom about how to live your life to avoid excess suffering, and to find meaning in the suffering that can't be avoided. If you can find meaning or pospose in your life, even in the suffering (especially there), then you can bear just about anything. And that's exactly what religion and philosophy help you do.

Many people today have some distorted ideas about what these things really are (philosophy and religion). I've spent a good deal of time looking into both, as well as psychology, and I concentrate on the more down-to-earth aspects of each. Trust me, they all have them.

I just remembered the primary imagination doesn't dissolve and distill in order to reform and create new substances, it only imitates. I'd better check and make sure this is true, I might be confusing it with the fancy.

I went back to page 1, where I was quoting from the paper on Coleridge's ideas, and found this:

"If we ask, then, what is it which the Secondary Imagination must ‘dissolve, diffuse, and dissipate’, the answer is given here; it is the ‘inanimate, cold world’ of the Primary Imagination; all that is allowed to the daily, prosaic consciousness of average humanity, and to poets themselves when power deserts them."​

So, the primary imagination doesn't transmute the base metal of ordinary experience into the alchemical Philospher's Stone of true poetry, it's only the secondary imagination that does that. Ok, good to know. That means that, once you've developed it (if it reequireas developing as i assume it does), then it's available to you whenever you create anything artistic (or anything thar requires some creativity). That means in a sense it isn't a spectrum, there's the secondary imagination or there isn't. This aligns with what Stanislavski said as well, about acting students with three different kinds of imagination available. One that is reactive, one that is fully active and self-initiating, and one that is hardly even reactive.

Therefore, if you have the secondary imagination, it will work its magic on anything you create (assuming you let it—it might be possible to prevent it). In other words, it doesn't need to be Biblical or philosophical stuff. Yeah, now I remember, all those little snippets of poetry used to illustrate both kinds—even among the secondary examples it wasn't all earth-shattering stuff on the level of The Book of Revelation or anything, some was about moonlight on the bank of a lazy river for instance. Ok, cool. Good to know. Those articles were just written from a religious viewpoint about religious aspects of the poetic imaginaiton. Got me off track there for a minute.

Neoplatonism by Paulina Remes came in. I'm putting a moratorium on buying any more books or even looking up more info on this stuff. But I did decide to bite the bullet and buy the article. Ah crap, I talked about it in I think the Poeisis thread. Can't keep track anymore, all this stuff could go in like three different threads I have going right now. I bought an article called Romanticism, Gnosticism, and Neoplationism by one Laura Quinney, on a research portal site. I went with $10 to be able to read it for 48 hours, so I need to take notes like a madman. I feel like between the article and the book that just came in I'll get my fill of all this Neoplatonism and Romantic Imagination stuff. Lol, it became like an all-consuming addiction real quick!

Unfortunatley the book on Neoplatonism (mentioned in the previous post) seems to be written strictly about the philosophical aspects of it, and that in the modern sense, where philosophy is treated as little more than an intellectual exercise. In the ancient world philosophy was about self-transformation. Students were exepcted to change their lives in accordance with what they were learing. Learning Stoicism has definitely changed my life, as it was intended to. You don't simply 'learn' it, you live it. It would be equivalent to treating martial arts for instance as no more than a series of postures and movements done for health, flexibility and relaxation, as has happened to yoga (which originally was also about self-transformation and was much closer to a religion than purely physical exercise). I'm concurrently also reading the book on Neoplatonism I already had on my Kindle (also doubtless mentioned in another thread) and it's much more in accordance with what I was looking for. I want to know how it changed the lives of the people who studied and lived it, not just read about it as a historical oddity or a dusty old philosophy. Plus the author seems stuck in Academic-ese, meaning she finds ways to twist and distort sentences so they don't make any real sense, and to break paragraphs so they don't connect up. It's dead, purely left-brain reading, and seems to be deliberately so. But then when I encounter academic-ese it always seems like they deliberately kill off any possibilities that are inherently there in the material. They need to kill it and dissect it because they apparently can't deal with anything alive. Wow, it just hit me—they must lack the secondary imagination. Even when their subject is something vital and alive they can't see it that way, but only as lifeless mechanism. But of course, if you want to make a name for yourself among the academics, this is the way you get into that club.

I broke my moratorium and bought

• Living Theurgy: A Course in Iamblichus' Philosophy, Theology and Theurgy by Jeffrey S Kupperman

This is much more what I was looking for. The author himself said in the intro that ancient philosophy was not the pursuit of abstract reasoning and argumentation we think of it as today, but that (as I said in the last post) it was designed to change your life, and a study of it should reflect that, and not be merely academic. The book concentrates on Iamblichus, the most mystical-minded of the great Neoplatonists, who added the practice of Theurgy, ie making yourself more godlike. The Sample is really long, I didn't even finish reading it all. Clearly this is the book I'm looking for.

I've also dropped

• The Heart of Plotinus: The Essential Enneads (Perennial Philosophy) by Aldis Uzdavinys

in my cart, and will undoubtedly be buying it soon. They actually misspelled the author's name, it should be Algis, not Aldis. Plotinus was the founder of so-called Neoplatonism, coming a few generations before Iamblichus, and balancing out his strong mysticism with his own level-headed rationalality. His mission seemed to be to reconcile Plato's mysticim with Aristotle's rationality. It looks to be on a level with the Iamblichus book, and the Sample is lucid and comprehensible. And with this the moratorium is back in place.

I pulled the trigger and bought the Plotinus book from the previous post.

I've just stumbled into a new realm known as the Imaginal. At this point I'm not sure if it's a big enough topic to deserve its own blog thread, so for now I'll just make (probably) a (few) post(s) about it here. I'll be sure to include the word Imaginal in the title of each. (Nope. Didn't happen. I lied—time travelling Xoic from the future.)

This is a pretty mystical concept, so yeah, it fits right in here with all the Neoplatonism. But; as with all the parts of neoplatonism I personally like, it's also quite practical and true, though not in a physical material sense. Is it real? Well, that depends. Is love real? Is a headache real? How about the imagination? Ok, then this is just a little bit farther—it's about the imagination telling us deep truths. Really it's a somewhat different term for a Neoplatonic concept. In fact I've seen the word used in books and videos in realtion to Plotinus and the gang.

I've used it myself in fact, but I thought it just meant imaginary or something very close to it. I had only seen it in the context of psychologcial discussions about Jungian Active Imagination and the like. Let me drop in a brief attempt at a description real quick:

"It is an entryway into the invisible realms of Truth, into the numinous or transpersonal realms. But unlike visionary or prophetic access to these realms, it is malleable to a certain extent. It can be shaped by our creativity and imagination. We do not have unlimited free-reign with our creativity here, for even as we shape it, it affects us, it transmits its truths to us, it informs our art. With the imaginal, we do not simply access life’s familiar realities–those which can be had through traditional knowledge, lived experience or insight. Rather, the imaginal taps into a higher order of reality, but softly. Where the visionary stabs with shocking brilliance, the imaginal hints and reveals subtly, like a cat at the curtain. Where the prophet calls back from its farther shores, the imaginal beckons. I still do not know my own name for that country, but Tolkein called it the realm of faerie and Jung the collective unconscious, home of the archetypes. To access the imaginal realm (as a place) and to partake of the imaginal process (as a type of work), we must open the imaginal eye. This is a process with both psychic and heart-centered dimensions. I’ll note, because we’ve become so dissociated from the heart in modern life, that the heart’s vision or knowing is actually closely related to conscience–the little voice inside that knows what is right."

Source
​

There's a good deal more info at that web page (click the Source link), from Katy Morakawa, who identifies as an artist and a mystic. There's a podcast there that I'll be listening to later.

I'll also be reading a book called The Eye of the Heart, by Cynthia Bourgeault. It's another book I already own. The moment I ran across the title I remembered having begun to read it some time ago, and I embarked on a massive search of most of the book-bearing areas of my house (there are a lot)—some several times. I found all the closely-related books, but couldn't turn it up anywhere. So I hit up Amazon and pulled up the book's listing which told me across the top that I had bought it two years ago. In Kindle format. Well crap, no wonder I couldn't find it anywhere!!

So, as my understanding of it develops over the next few days I'll be posting about it here.

I suspect some of my recent think-tank sessions on Season of the Witch qualify as excursions into the Imaginal realm. I might be wrong of course, but it does feel like these ideas are better, in a different way, from most of my story ideas. They've always been kind of shallow and silly before, in certain ways—fun and lightweight. But this is getting deep and dark, and the characters seem to be getting more solid and real little by little. It's reached that point where a story begins to take on a life of its own, to shape itself, as if I'm only the vessel, and something higher is working through me. Either that or all this Stanislavski stuff is really working. I suspect it's both, and this is what an inspired actor feels like when the character takes over.

Oh, I forgot to post this—Cynthia Bourgeault has a three-entry blog series about the Imaginal:

• Introducing the Imaginal—A three-part blog series by Cynthia Bourgeault

Here's a page with some good information:

• The Mundus Imaginalis—Accessing and Activating the Imaginal

It's a course. I'm not recommending anybody sign up for it, I'm certainly not doing that myself. But I've been well aware of the techniques of Active Imagination for many years now, and have done it many times. I ran across all this when I immersed myself deeply in Jung's books (and the books of many of his followers, as well as books about him and his techniques). I also did three years of Shadow work at the same time, and was paying a lot of attention to my dreams, writing them down every day (almost every day anyway), and because it was a part of my chosen approach to Shadow work, digging deeply into them, as well as into my own Shadow-related ideas and memories and experiences—to the point that my arms and hands would ache from so much typing every day.

What I discovered was that my visualizations (often of figures or situations from a dream) worked way better, and became very clear and vivid, if I did a session right after waking up, before moving or even opening my eyes. I invented a mantra to help with this—I would say (and write in my dream journal) "When I wake I lie still, eyes closed, and remember the dreams." This was actually a technique I had learned much earlier when I was into lucid dreaming. So I just added in the technique of remembering a character from a dream I had just had, or maybe one form an earlier dream that felt important, and allowing it to appear in my mind's eye again. Sometimes it would work very well, and I could interact with it. It's tricky though, you're walking a tightrope. If you're too close to sleep, you can easily just fall asleep, or you can also wake yourself up too much and not experience vivid visualizations (or any at all for that matter). Every once in a while though you hit the jackpot and have really powerful ones. Usually they don't last very long, just a few seconds or maybe a minute or so. Then you're going to wake up more fully or fall back asleep. But what you can do when it's really working is ask the character what it wants of you, what it wants you to do, or if it has a message for you. I haven't had any luck trying to talk to them or get answers from them verbally, but I've found it best to communicate with them through actions. Lol, showing I suppose, rather than telling.

Hint—it's a lot easier to try to re-activate a dream you just woke from, than to try to create a whole new situation from scratch. It's still there, just beneath the surface. You just experienced it, the characters and situations are still fresh in your mind.

Carl Jung on Active Imagination and the Imaginal:

• Jung on Active Imagination: Features, Methods and Warnings @ Jungian Center
• Jung on Imagination and the Imaginal Realm @ Jungian Center

He was ridiculously well educated, in a way nobody is anymore, and he definitely knew about Neoplatonism and the Romantics, and I'm sure about Coleridge's ideas about the Imagination and the Fancy. In fact he used basically the same terms in those links. He just said fantasy instead of fancy. All the people who wrote about the imagination in this way throughout history, like Plotinus and Coleridge, Stanislavski and Jung etc, were artists, mystics and/or visionaries. William Blake was one of the Romantics, and a visionary. He was so overwhelmed by the power of his imagination, he constantly saw angels and devils sitting on the branches of trees as he walked by, and they'd talk to him. Literally like he couldn't shut off the dreaming function even while he was awake. In some people it's so close to the surface, and so powerful, they're often thought to be mad. And some of them probably are. But some are just experiencing powerful imaginal visions. We're incredibly fortunate to have Jung in our recent history to illuminate all of this stuff so we can understand it, and see it as the psychological phenomena it really is.