The Influence of the Imagination on the Knowledge of God

Copyright © 2016 by Robert Colacurcio.

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Rev. date: 01/12/2016

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Contents

Preface

Introduction

Chapter One: The Impoverishment of the Imagination

Chapter Two: Our Self Image—Appearance or Reality

Chapter Three: Interiority

Chapter Four: The Virtual Self

Chapter Five: Emptiness and the Virtual Self

Chapter Six: The Answer to the Problem of Suffering: Salvation or Liberation

Chapter Seven: The Imagination and the Con of Self Deception

Chapter Eight: The Translucent Imagination

Chapter Nine: The Method of the Translucent Imagination

Chapter Ten: The Participatory Imagination

Chapter Eleven: Apart vs. A Part

Chapter Twelve: The Poverty of the Imagination Revisited

Chapter Thirteen: A New Creation: Imagine What Comes Next

Chapter Fourteen: A New Creator: The Problem with Being Perfect

Chapter Fifteen: The Utopian Imagination

Chapter Sixteen: The Prayerful Imagination

Chapter Seventeen: The Imagination of the Bodhisattva

Epilogue

Endnotes

Dedication

This book is

dedicated to Carol Jo, my beloved wife and lifetimes partner

Preface

The Surface Points Beyond Itself

I’ve lifted the title for this Preface from a recent book by Arthur Melzer, Philosophy Between the Lines: The Lost History of Esoteric Writing. In a later chapter, A Beginner’s Guide to Esoteric Reading, he makes several suggestions for how a reader ought to approach books whose meaning, for various reasons, is not laid out patently clear on the surface. He points out that his grad students, typical of most intelligent, well-educated readers today, breeze too hurriedly past a careful attention to the literal text, even when they are advised not to do this. What happens, he says, is that a literal reading becomes a constructive process; that is, words that are missed and others that don’t easily fit a quick reading are conjecturally constructed. Also, what necessarily goes along with this is a suppressive reading, one that shuts our eyes to things that don’t seem to fit.

"And this filtering process is a large part of what makes esoteric writing possible. It turns out that you can plant all kinds of ‘pointers’—problems and contradictions—right there on the surface of the text and they won’t be noticed. You can hide things in plain sight. Either the reader, busy with constructing the meaning for himself, eager to make sense of it all, will not notice them at all, or if he does, he will just dismiss them as part of the standard level of meaningless noise to be encountered in every text. The point is: shrugging off textual problems is an essential aspect of the normal constructive process of reading. Without being aware of it, we are always cleaning up the text, eagerly making it more coherent than it is. That is why this kind of reading does not typically become aware of the irregularities and puzzles through which, in an esoteric work, the surface points beyond itself." (1)

The book that I have written is not an easy read. On the one hand, an injudicious reader can easily dismiss it as the work of a philosophic blow hard or just blow it off without a second or negative thought. On the other hand, careful and attentive readers are in danger of having their minds blown. In my former life as a grad school teacher, I was always in favor of my students having a therapeutic BM, if not a daily blown mind, then at least a very healthy brain movement every day. My counsel is that if you read more than a chapter a day of this book, you are reading it too fast. The reason is not what you might think. I haven’t set out to write an esoteric book, one whose real meaning is hidden between the lines, something deliberately covert that only sleuths for meaning (read nerds) will be able to uncover. In the Introduction, I lay out the thesis of the book which is simply stated and clear. I come back to the main points that illustrate, argue for and explain that thesis over and over again, so that there will be no mistaking them. I am not trying to hide anything, and the ideas I present usually do not require any specialized language that one must be previously familiar with in order to understand. Rather, a dimension of the mind needs to be brought into play that is quite different from the ordinary conceptual and linguistically facile dimension. I discuss this dimension repeatedly so that the conceptual mind and its ally, the reflective imagination, hopefully will acknowledge it and give it some space to operate freely. It is this dimension that must be allowed to digest and assimilate what you’ve read and literally sleep on it for a day or so. If you give yourself this space and pace, you will be rewarded with a richer engagement with life itself. My intent in writing this book is that you come away with that. If something like that doesn’t happen, I hope you’ll forgive me for wasting your time.

Why have I given this title to the Preface, if this is not an esoteric book? Because at the very outset, I would have my readers take this title under advisement as a sign post. Esoteric writings are just one instance of surfaces that point beyond themselves. Before the scientific revolution altered the public’s general conception of the function of language, words and speech were generally felt and understood to point beyond themselves to a reality represented but inward beneath the surface of things. Language had this kind of representational function because people experienced the world this way. The language and methods of science can take the innermost dimensions of physical reality and talk about them as surface realities; that is, making any inward dimension disappear leaving only the surfaces behind. The conceptual dimension of mind not only reads books this way, if it is not cautioned to do otherwise; it also reads the entire world of its experience this way.

In this book I discuss several distinct functions of the imagination and the role each plays as ally to different dimensions of the mind as a whole. The imagination in its function as ally to our conceptual dimension of mind I call the reflective imagination because unfortunately it has become relegated to a role of reflecting back to the conceptual mind images of the world that confirm a limited and mistaken conception of itself. It is in this sense that the reflective imagination offers up the surfaces of things which can still be understood to point beyond themselves. The influence of the reflective imagination on the knowledge of God, therefore, handicaps us with images of the divine reality that are surface and superficial.

Fortunately, as we shall see, there are other dimensions of the mind and other functions of the imagination. While it is unfortunately true that contemporary culture in the West does not typically recognize or awaken these other dimensions, they nevertheless operate beneath the surface and call for us to awaken and attend to them. It is this inner dynamism of our spirit that triggers our sense that the surface reality is not all there is. We have allowed ourselves to mistake the appearances (the surface of things) for the entire reality; but the surface nevertheless points beyond itself.

So, a fast read of this book will allow the reader to walk away with only a surface understanding. My intent is that a more careful read will lead one beyond the reflective imagination’s presentation of the divine reality to an engagement that discovers the divine beneath every surface reflection. For me, an exciting development in contemporary Western culture is that science on its frontiers is leading us in this same direction.

Introduction

The thesis of this book can be simply stated: we create God in our own image. While this reverses the traditional theological dogma that we are created in the image of God, it’s become a psychological commonplace and is not a shocker. Even a cursory acquaintance with cultural anthropology reveals a very wide spectrum of peoples’ images of God and their relation to Divinity, not just between different cultures but within any given culture. Take the example of sacrifice from our own Judeo-Christian tradition in the West. From human sacrificial victims, we moved on to the blood sacrifice of scapegoats or other ritual substitutes, and then to the bloodless sacramental sacrifice, for example in the Catholic Mass.

However, the thesis we create God in our own image has many not so commonplace components. We can refer to current cultural norms of our contemporary time and place or be taken as a rhetorical plural for me personally and individually. Create as an act of the human mind needs to be carefully and clearly understood. As we will see, which dimension of the human mind gives rise to or creates the image radically alters the entire framework in which the image functions. The image itself is not an obvious given because the imagination itself is not just one thing. There is 1) the reflective imagination mentioned in the Preface 2) the participatory imagination and 3) the translucent imagination to name three that I will be discussing in detail. Each one positions the self in a quite different relationship to the Divine.

There are also three main streams that form a confluence of influences that directly impact how the self nature of the individual understands its relation to the ultimate or absolute nature that it refers to as God. The first stream is the conceptual dimension of mind. The second stream is the awareness dimension of mind. The third stream is the influence of science from its current frontiers. All three streams exist as part of the human terrain and its predicament that we recognize as our universal condition of suffering. I will be using the Buddha’s analysis of the origin and causes of suffering as a doorway to give you my understanding of how all three streams contribute to either mitigate or accentuate our common predicament as suffering sentient beings.

My initial inspiration to write this book came to me in graduate school at Fordham University. My mentor, Dr. Robert Neville, liked the idea, but dissertation protocol in philosophy at that time required that one’s dissertation focus on the work of a particular philosopher from history. As it turned out, this restriction of my inspiration was a good thing. I was not really ready to write this book at that time. What I did write was titled,

Excellency as the Glory of God in Jonathan Edwards (1972). This was an extended essay in the epistemology of discernment. I was still studying to be a Jesuit priest at the time, and discernment in the applied spirituality of St. Ignatius, founder of the Jesuits, is a key concept in his Spiritual Exercises which is a retreat manual primarily designed to help the one making a retreat discern the will of God. The first sentence in the Introduction to my dissertation reads, By ‘discernment’ [in Jonathan Edwards] is meant the discrimination of the active, saving presence of the living God in the heart of the believer. Whatever originality there may be in this work of my youth is distilled into the idea of the virtual image. A virtual image implicates a sense of the whole idea before one is able to unfold or clearly discriminate all the elements that are implicit in that whole. In the philosophic jargon of my dissertation—which I promised in the Preface to spare the reader in this book—a virtual image is a heuristic anticipation on the level of sense and feeling that is law-governed. Heuristic means 1) allowing a person to discover or learn something for themselves or 2) proceeding to a solution by trial and error or by rules that are only loosely defined. (Oxford University Dictionary) For over forty years the idea of the virtual image in relation to the sense of the Divine in my life has been slowly gestating. The virtual image slowly took more complete form in the idea of the virtual self, which is a key concept in this book.

The virtual self will show itself at the confluence of those three streams mentioned above. It is inherently heuristic in that it is by nature the process of discovering or learning something for oneself, often by trial and error, following rules that at first are not clear but become clear with more experience. The virtual self is the key to the subtitle of this book: Seeing Through (or not) the Illusion of Our Separateness. Our imagination influences our feeling, sense, and what we think we know about God in many ways. Without the full functioning of the virtual self, we don’t see through the illusion of our separateness. When we create God in an image of ourselves apart from the full functioning of the virtual self, there is separation, unfortunate distance, opacity, and confusion that exist between ourselves and the Divine unnecessarily. It is the full functioning of the virtual self at the confluence of the three streams that allows one to discover the illusion of our separateness.

On the frontiers of science today discoveries are being made which call into question physical laws that we thought were absolute; for example, instantaneous action at a distance. We thought Einstein’s determination of the speed of light (approximately 380,000 miles per second) was an absolute and inviolable law of the universe; that is, nothing was able to exceed the speed of light. It’s not and stuff does. This and many other concepts that until recently formed the bedrock of normal scientific practice are being shaken and a new scientific paradigm is in the making. It too is now only in the virtual image stage because the full implication of these new discoveries have yet to be unfolded. I use science as a stream of influence because in its own way it is moving us—inspiring us really—to re-imagine our place in the universe and our relation to All That Is.

In my opinion, a litmus test to apply to any institutional practice of religion or an individual’s applied spirituality in personal practice is the understanding each has of suffering in the human condition: its origin, its antidotes and its final solution. The book offers many suggestions for how to consider one’s spiritual practice in this light. In my opinion, the imagination should ideally influence one’s knowledge of God so as to directly address the problem of suffering. On the level of sense and feeling, not just analytically, the influence of the imagination should help produce a reduction in the way one suffers and understands the meaning of suffering.

This book, therefore, is not primarily an academic treatise. It is meant to address the problem of suffering from a profound understanding of the metaphysical nature of both the self and the human condition. As I say later in the book, sometimes there is nothing quite so practical as a good theory. There are theories implicit in every image that we create of the Divine and its relation to the universe. As we know from the history of science, some theories pan out, some don’t. Some manage the solution to problems better than others, but all are provisional in the sense that they are subject to modification based on new evidence. Theories implicit in our image of God are no different. The measurable test that can be applied to each is to what extent it addresses and solves the problem of suffering.

My hope is that the information offered in this book will give each reader some of the tools needed to solve the problem of suffering as experienced in their own life. This is another reason to read the book slowly. Fast acquaintance with a lot of information will not solve the problem of suffering. Only quality information slowly digested and assimilated will do that.

Chapter One

The Impoverishment of the Imagination

When the goal or target of a mission is clear, those moving toward the goal can more easily imagine what decisions to make when the fork in the road requires going this way or that. Martin Luther King’s expression, Keep your eyes on the prize has become iconic in this regard. But the vision of the prize he imagined for his soldiers in the civil rights wars was the non violent overthrow of the systemic injustice that denied full rights of U.S. citizenship—and the expression of those rights—to black people. Non violent overthrow as a goal creates a host of different images to arise at the fork in the road from violent overthrow. Hitler, by contrast, had a vision for Germany whose goal was anything but full accord and harmony with its neighbors. His vision called for the Aryan people to regain their superior pride of place led by the unstoppable warriors of the Third Reich. Dominance through defeat of all opposition was the goal. Ironically, this vision created such megalomania in the mind of Hitler personally that he could tolerate no conflicting counsel from his subordinates. He became isolated because of his imagined superiority, which again expressed its irony so monumentally in the fortified bunkers he built to protect himself. It is said that the concrete used to build just his own personal bunker at the Wolf’s Lair was enough to build three Empire State buildings! Meant to protect him and his staff near the front facing Russia, when the war moved further East and back again further West, his paranoia kept him hunkered down in physical isolation from his troops. The contrast between Hitler entombed in six meter thick concrete and King walking arm in arm at the front with his marchers in Selma could not be more dramatic.

It has been said that war is a force that gives meaning to life. However, where abundance is the norm—as it is for most of us living in Third World countries—waging war is now the specialty of less than 2% of us. Other forces than military combat must activate our search and satisfy our need for meaning. In my opinion, Vaclav Havel’s assessment is unfortunately spot on. He is quoted as saying that the tragedy of modern man is not that he knows less and less about the meaning of life, but that it bothers him less and less.(2) The irony of modern man’s situation is this.

The more saturated with abundance he becomes—information overload included—the more his superficial satiety disguises an inner hunger that goes unnoticed, and so it goes unsatisfied. Surface saturation is a clever disguise for an empty vacancy deep inside.

Contemporary Westerners especially, enamored of the vision of abundance as the goal, are comfortable bunkered into isolation from the front lines of meaning. The myth of Adam and Eve has many interpretations. One reading is clear, however. At one time they enjoyed an abundance that left them feeling invulnerable. Later that paradisiacal state was replaced by an existential vulnerability. The endless search for security has continued to this day. We seek security in abundance. We have allowed ourselves to be conned into mistaking abundance as the bunker against vulnerability. In the 19th century, at a time much less fast paced than ours, the poet Wordsworth lamented this same mistake.

"The world is too much with us; late and soon,

Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers…

We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon."

The boon Wordsworth speaks of is the abundance we enjoy from getting and spending that invites the world too much into our hearts. This abundance is sordid because dishonest. Not because we come by abundance dishonestly, but because we deceive ourselves by mistaking abundance for meaning.

In the gospel of John (10:10), the writer has Jesus saying this, I have come that you might have life, and have it more abundantly. It is interesting to note that the sentence immediately preceding reads, The thief comes only to steal, slay and destroy. It is perhaps an open question just what Jesus meant by the abundant life he came to bring. Nevertheless, it still might be generally conceded that his abundance was not intended to be counter productive to life itself nor to put people at cross purposes with the ultimate meaning and purpose of their life.

So, regarding the mission of being alive on earth, the reason why we are here and the goal or target to be aimed at from being here, in what sense is abundance the answer to the following questions? What is our mission?

What is our reason for being here? And what is our goal or target once we find ourselves here? Furthermore, is not one of the illusions we live with—after having left the paradisiacal clarity of the Garden of Eden—that abundance substitutes itself for meaning? Like a well-dressed and well-spoken thief who ingratiates himself into our house only to steal, and if necessary slay and destroy, abundance utterly distracts us from the thievery of meaning in our lives. Moreover, it bothers us less and less.

Perhaps there is a clue to answering these questions if we recall that Jesus didn’t say, I have come for your abundance, but rather, I have come that you might have life more abundantly. Aren’t most of us surprised to read surveys from very poor Third World countries where people get by on two dollars a day or less and still report being happy? The fact is that studies in this country show that after basic needs are securely met, there is no correlation between increased abundance and increased happiness. Where does our mistaken conditioning come from that leads us to imagine that the more we have the happier we’ll be? One approach to answering this question is to consider the idea that our imagination itself is poor, that we are suffering from a poverty of the imagination.

Maybe some of my readers can recall standing for two hours in gasoline rationing lines back in 1973. Those with license plates ending in an odd number were allowed to fill up on Monday, Wednesday or Friday; even numbers got their chance on Tuesday, Thursday or Saturday. Sunday was a gas free day of rest from these restrictions. As I write this (January, 2015), the price of sweet crude oil has dropped just below $50 a barrel, the lowest price in ten years. My local gas station has regular at $1.89/gallon when two months ago, the price was closer to $3.00/gallon. This year’s annual car show in Vegas touts the latest in gas saving vehicles, but a lot more folks are currently looking to buy SUV’s again. Suddenly, folks can imagine a future of cheap gas. It’s true that recently for the first time the U.S. became a net exporter of petroleum products. The dire warnings of the ‘70’s that the planet’s supply of hydrocarbons might run out seem like a silly Henny Penny catastrophe. The sky has not fallen and currently we are in the midst of an oil glut. So where’s the poverty of the imagination in all this?

We imagine oil abundance makes other abundance possible: bigger cars, longer trips, cheaper commutes that translate into extra dollars for consumer goods. Abundance feeds abundance. We take it for granted that more abundance of things equates to a more abundant life. Our imagination relative to what makes for an abundant life is poor. We’ve become conditioned to imagine that the more the better; the more we have, the more we are, and the more we are the happier we’ll be. The imagination has become so impoverished that it can equate more abundance with life more abundantly.

What is the root cause of this problem? Why does the imagination offer us a vision of abundance which is so often counter productive to actually experiencing life more abundantly? If we examine carefully, we will find that both the imagination and the emotions follow or ally themselves to our beliefs. What one believes to be true about reality then receives backup and support from the imagination and the emotions. In other words, the imagination receives its stimulus or inspiration from the beliefs one has about reality. A feedback loop is thus created where imaginative constructions together with emotional reinforcement support, confirm and enhance one’s beliefs. Therefore, we must look to the mind to discover the root causes of why the imagination is impoverished. Specifically, we must examine the beliefs we hold in our minds about reality which create a template for the imagination to fill in with lush details.

So, the question naturally arises—if the above examination is on the right track—what is the most fundamental belief held by the mind? And can it be clearly seen how such a belief impoverishes the functioning of