The imaginal is a confluence between two different realities. Let us feel into this image above. Relax into your body, and you have never been here before. As you gaze, sense with your body, what draws your attention? Stay in your body as you start to feel the movement in the picture. Can you feel the crunch of the gravel? Smell the dirt and water? Do you feel the air? See if you can begin to get up close in your inner eye to the border between the land and river and let your body resonate with this meeting place. What starts to reveal itself? Slow down, take your time, rest in this place. It is not a mental exercise. Feel the aliveness, feel it animate and participate in this animation and see where it takes you.
The meeting place between two seas. Meeting and Seaing, The imaginal is an activity. Images are not something we look at but look through. We become like, get up close, open into, taste it, smell it, hear it. We feel the energy. We love our way inside the image. A fantastic thing starts to occur, our world turns inside out.
A profound event of the soul in which the image of reality so carefully and reasonably established is seen finally as to be a product of soul-the soul’s own projection of its own inmost reality. The world is our projection, and to become conscious of this and to realize the symbolic and “personal” nature of reality allows us to escape the bondage that so-called objective truths can impose.
-Tom Cheetham
Imagination is an organ of perception, which manifests through our hearts. Through our hearts, this opens us up to the infinite and personal realm. The world is speaking to us. We are feeling into the aliveness of the presence of the world. We can begin to be an awareness of the world, rather than being an individual aware of the world based on our needs and desires. Imagination becomes the centerpiece of reality, and this can deepen our imaginal sensibilities in every moment. The boundary between you, the veil of separation, falls away.
How we become aware of our experience, how we experience manifests to live in the imaginal.
- We suspend beliefs, judgments, habitual patterns of operating.
- We redirect from object to source.
- We let go and allow what comes. Letting go Letting come.
Now I will leave you with an image that will challenge you to try this out. I tried to pick an image loaded with pitfalls.
Let the image speak to you and see what reveals itself.
Credits- the title the meeting places between two seas is from Henry Corbin’s description of the imaginal. This is from his book Temple and Contemplation.
The list how we experience the world was developed by Francesco Varela and Otto Scharmer has run with this in his work of listening with the heart.