Toward a Phenomenology and Methodology

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Imaginal Reality

Toward a Phenomenology and Methodology

Jim McNamara, , 1 416 418 3035

List of Contents

Introduction, p1

Phenomenology, p4

Imaginal, Mundus Imaginalis, p4; Soul, p6; Spirit Soul Distinctions, p6; Poetic Basis of Mind, p8; Alchemy, p9; Archetypal, p10; Polytheistic, p12; Holotropic Participatory, p13; Awe, p15; Romantic Irony, p16; Non-representational Reality, p18; Existential Absurd, p19; Postmodern Nouveau Roman mis-en-abyme, p19; Duende, p20; Apophatic Existential Absurd Poetry, p23; Apophatic Aphorisms, p27; Spiritual Emergence, p28.

Holistic Experiential Process Method (HEP), p 29

Experiential, p29; Holistic, p30; Process, p30; Event/Experience Dialectic, p30; Author/Character Dialectic, p31; Nowhere No where Now Here, p32; Story, p33; Redemption, p33; Fate, p34; Homo Dei, p35.

Imaginal Clinical Methods, p36

Musing, p36; Imaginal Amplification Meditation, p36; Star Group Visualization – an Astral Travel Meditation, p38; Subtle Body and Divine Individuality – a Defeat of Death Meditation, p40; Clinical Vignettes, p41.

Imaginal Reality

Toward a Phenomenology and Methodology

This paper focuses on Imaginal Reality, with an eye toward descriptive evocation of imaginal phenomenology and toward delineating an imaginal methodology I will give a brief outline of imaginal phenomenology and methodology here and explore further in subsequent sections.

The imaginal has the characteristics of a dream that mediates between spiritual and material levels of existence as an archetypal, soul realm. It has qualities of the ungraspable, particular individuality of the alchemical philosopher’s stone. The imaginal is holotropic, structured by and moving toward wholeness, with mutually transforming, co-creative, participatory, open ended dynamics. It has a phenomenology that is not comprehensible from a rational empirical perspective and cannot be understood utilizing a rational empirical epistemology, as epitomized in an evidence-based, medical model, scientific method. The imaginal does not provide facts, explanations or access to linear causality. It has quantum characteristics of non-locality, atemporality and paradoxical, irreducible uncertainty. It is acausal and nonlinear. It is chaotic, with an emergent self-organization that may be understood through the model of complex adaptive systems theory. It cannot be grasped. It is apophatic in that whatever is said about it must be unsaid, though not literally. It must be given. It has fractal characteristics of wholeness, with identity (and the reality that emerges from and informs that identity) scanning across all levels of the whole in a surrealistic, abstract expressionistic form. It has a surreal, existential absurd style of exposition, where nothing can actually be taken as given, since ‘giveness’, as a final statement of identity and reality, is absurdly surreal. It has the qualities of romantic irony in which authorial and characterological themes co-creatively intermingle, where character grounds author in narrative (the movement of which provides an unfolding of identity and reality toward a tentative wholeness), with author as arche and telos (providing a mythology of origin and an ontology of emergent meaning and received purpose, corresponding with the ancient Greek idea of fate). The imaginal is orchestrated – yet in an improvisational, existential absurd, romantic irony style. It has duende, and enacts in a romantic, dialectic dance of eros/pathos/thanatos. It is a polytheistic, archetypal play of subtle body figures, characters from the collective unconscious, the Buddhist Samboghakaya, a dimension of radiance. It is the world of subtle body, Chi and chakras.

A methodology for facilitating the awakening of awareness of identity in imaginal reality must follow an emergent phenomenology that is experiential, psychodynamic, existential, archetypal, holotropic and participatrory. A gnostic methodology that dreams the dream onward, with awareness of the need to surrender into the self-created nature of imaginal identity and reality.A never completed, evolutionary process in which awareness and acceptance of the never-ending process is the ‘end’ point goal. A mystical descent and return motif threads through this method with the lived world as a grounding, reference theme. The intermediate, mediating nature of the imaginal means that spiritual experience is facilitated along with awakened, alive, sensate experience – a tantric method. Imaginal methodology draws on imaginal phenomenology and points toward an imaginal epistemology.The clinical methods of musing, imaginal amplification, a divine individuality meditation and astral travel visualization are given. Two clinical vignettes are given. One of these is the basis for a clinical video.

Epistemological implications include a critique of the hegemonic nature of the rational empirical model of existence and medical model of treatment, particularly in their application to psychotherapy. The rational empirical tradition, specifically through its enactment in the scientific research method and medical models of treatment, holds itself out as the arbiter of what is valid knowledge and what are valid methodologies for establishing such validity. Its epistemological methods, however, do not provide accurate, fully complex access to the reality of the imaginal dimension of being. The linear, reductionist, cause and effect model and methods of the rational empirical tradition cannot see, hear or feel the details of the experience of imaginal reality. This paper explores models and methods for attunement to, and validation of, imaginal experience and what it says about life, identity and being, specifically in the field of psychotherapy. There is an attempt to suggest ways to illuminate the term ‘epistemology’ with imaginal qualifiers.

Phenomenology

Imaginal, Mundus Imaginalis

Henri Corbin, drawing on contemporary 12th century Sufi mystics Ibn ‘Arabi and Suhrawardi, has characterized the imaginal as an intermediate, and mediating reality, (the ‘really real’ or ‘True Reality’ in Sufi terms) between the transcendental, super-sensible world of Platonic Ideas and the mundane specificity of the everyday human world of natural materiality. In Corbin’s terms, the imaginal is materialized spirit and spiritualized matter. (Henry Corbin, 1972, Mundus Imaginalis or The Imaginary and The Imaginal, Spring, Zürich, originally published 1964, and Corbin, Henri, 1969/1997, Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn ‘Arabi, NJ, Princeton University Press)

In his 1964 paper (Corbin, 1972), Corbin suggested using the term ‘imaginal’ to distinguish the reality of these intermediate, mediating experiences from the ‘imaginary’, a term typically used in a derogatory, dismissive way to characterize idiosyncratic, personalistic fantasy. He also uses ‘mundus imaginalis’ to characterize this reality, highlighting a cosmological aspect of the imaginal, as the ‘imaginal world’.

He says that in the imaginal, “we are no longer confined to the dilemma of thought and extension, to the schema of a cosmology and a gnoseology restricted to the empirical world and the world of abstract intellect. Between them there is a world that is both intermediary and intermediate … the world of the image, the mundus imaginalis: a world that is ontologically as real as the world of the senses and that of the intellect. This world requires its own faculty of perception, namely, imaginative power, a faculty with a cognitive function, a noetic value which is as real as that of sense perception or intellectual intuition…Each of these three wolds has its organ of perception: the senses, imagination, and the intellect, corresponding with the triad: body, soul and mind.” (Corbin, 1972, pg.5)

He delineates a defining characteristic of the imaginal as “(signifying) a clime outside all climes, a place outside all places, outside of where (Nâ-Kojâ-Abâd)”, (Corbin, 1972, pg. 5) and, paradoxically, also says “Rather than being situated, it situates, it is situating” (Corbin, 1972, pg. 8). He characterizes the phenomenology of the imaginal as ontological, having no external criteria by which to judge or analyze it. “(H)erephenomenology becomes ontology…this is the postulate implied in our authors' teaching on the imaginal. There is no external criterion for the manifestation of the Angel other than the manifestation itself.” (Corbin, 1972, pg. 13) This has epistemological implications. “(T)he reality which has hitherto been an inner and hidden one turns out to envelop, surround, or contain that which at first was outer and visible. … Its place … is (nowhere) because, in relation to what is in sensory space…it is… (everywhere).” (Corbin, 1972, pg. 4)

The imaginal may be personified. “(T)he forms and figures of the mundus imaginalis do not subsist in the same manner as the empirical realities of the physical world” (Corbin, 1972, pg. 6) “(T)his is the world of 'subtle bodies', of which it is indispensable to have some notion in order to understand that there is a link between pure spirit and material body.” (Corbin, 1972, pg. 7) He also refers to this ‘subtle body’ as the ‘imaginal body’.

Corbin suggests active imagination as a method for access to the imaginal. “Active imagination is the mirror par excellence, the epiphanic place for the Images of the archetypal world.” (Corbin, 1972, pg. 7) He also suggests this as an alternative to rational empirical modes of knowledge development. “The cognitive function of imagination provides the foundation for a rigorous analogical knowledge permitting us to evade the dilemma of current rationalism, which gives us only a choice between the two banal dualistic terms of either 'matter' or 'mind'.” (Corbin, 1972, pg. 7) “This is why…the mundus imaginalis is closely bound up with … imaginative cognition and … the imaginative function, which is a truly central, mediating function, owing both to the median and the mediating position of the mundus imaginalis. (Corbin, 1972, pg. 7) “active imagination … makes possible a transmutation of inner spiritual states into outer states …All the faculties of the soul then become as if they were one single faculty” (Corbin, 1972, pg. 9). Here we may draw out a possible term for an imaginal epistemology - analogical epistemology.

As does Hillman, Corbin highlights the particularity and individuality of the imaginal. “(I)t refers … to the archetypal images of individual and singular things” (Corbin, 1972, pg. 6) and further highlights the epistemological power of these phenomena, “He who has discovered the meaning of (this) True Reality has arrived at (the) Spring of Life. (Corbin, 1972, pg. 3)

Soul

Active imagination evokes soul experience as this intermediate reality. Dennis Slattery, in his presentation “RevisioningDionysos” at the Climates of Change conference, April 2016, Pacifica Graduate Institute, explores Dionysian energies of psyche and literature in Hillman’s Revisioning Psychology. Hillman says “I suggest that the word (soul) refers to that unknown component which makes meaning possible, turns events into experience, is communicated in love, and has a religious concern” (Hillman, James,1975/1992, Revisioning Psychology, New York, NY, Harper Collins, pg. xvi). Hillman also relates this to Dionysian soul making, “a perspective rather than a substance, a viewpoint toward things rather than a thing itself” (xvi), a reflective perspective that “mediates events, makes differences between ourselves and everything that happens. Between us and events, between doer and the deed, there is a reflective moment, and soul making means differentiating this middle ground” (Hillman, 1975/1992, pg.xvi). The imaginal is this middle ground.

Hillman speaks of the place of soul as “a world of imagination, passion, fantasy, reflection, that is neither physical and material on the one hand, nor spiritual and abstract on the other, yet bound to them both. Psyche or soul has a relationship with dream, fantasy and image. This relationship has also been put mythologically as the soul’s connection with the night world, the realm of the dead and the moon. We will catch our soul’s most essential nature in death experiences, dreams of the night, and in the images of ‘lunacy’”. (Hillman James, 1975/1992, Revisioning Psychology, New York, NY, Harper Collins, pg. 67-69)

Spirit Soul Distinctions

Hillman gives an account of the process of soul making that is also an account of awakening to the reality of the imaginal, distinguishing this from spirit. “At moments of intellectual concentration or transcendental meditation, soul invades with natural urges, memories, fantasies and fears. At times of new psychological insights or experiences, spirit would quickly extract meaning, put them into action, conceptualize them into rules. Soul sticks to the realm of experience and to reflections within experience. The verticality of soul is downward and inward. It moves indirectly in circular reasonings, where retreats are as important as advances, preferring labyrinths and corners, giving a metaphorical sense to life through such words as close, near, slow, and deep. Soul involves us in the pack and welter of phenomena and the flow of impressions. It is the ‘patient’ part of us. Soul is vulnerable and suffers; it is passive and remembers. It is water to the spirit’s fire, like a mermaid who beckons the heroic spirit into the depths of passion to extinguish its certainty. Soul is emotional. Soul is imagination, a cavernous treasury, a confusion and richness both, whereas spirit chooses the better part and seeks to make all 0ne.

Look up, says spirit, gain distance; there is something beyond and above, and what is above is always, and always superior. Spirit is after ultimates and it travels by means of a via negative. ‘Neti, neti’, it says ‘not this, not that’. Straight is the gate and only first or last things will do. Soul replies by saying of the ten thousand things, ‘I am this too’.

The cooking vessel of the soul takes in everything, everything can become soul; and by taking into its imagination any and all events, psychic space grows”. (Hillman,1975/1992, pg. 67-69). In serving soul he says we need to dream the myth onward, translating this as pathologizing the myth onward. “Serving soul implies letting it lead; it leads, we follow. Here we adapt Jung’s famous dictum that analysis is dreaming the myth onward, transposing it to ‘pathologzing the myth onward’. ‘Pathologizing the myth onward’ means staying in the mess while at the same time regarding what is going on from a mythical perspective”. (Hillman, 1975/1992, pg. 74) In this regard he says, “Our concern is with the symptom, that thing so foreign to the ego, that thing which ends the rule of the hero – the hero, as Emmerson says, is he (sic) who is immovable centered. Pathologizing moves the myth of the individual onward by moving them, first of all, out of the heroic ego. Both the spiritual person and the natural person are transformed by being deformed into the psychological person”.(Hillman, 1975/1992, pg. 89) This is echoed by Thomas Moore. “(I)f we take Patricia Berry’s advice – that the symptom always has a telos”. (Moore, Thomas, Dark Eros, 1975/1992, pub?, pg. 148)

Poetic Basis of Mind

In order to receive communications from, and perceive events in, the imaginal, there has to be, in Hillman’s terms, a “poetic basis of mind” (Hillman, James, 1983, Archetypal Psychology: A Brief Account, Spring Publications, Inc., Dallas, Texas, pg. 6).Susan Rowland says “To the Romantics, as to Coleridge, poetry was a larger category that could not simply be confined to the making of poems. Poetry is a quality of writing that emerges from the creative imagination, whether it is directed to scientific, philosophical or literary ends”. (Rowland, Susan, 2017, Dionysus and Magic: Thezoe of ‘active imagination’ for/as ‘close reading’, in Remembering Dionysus: Revisioning Psychology and Literature in C.G. Jung and James Hillman, Routledge: London and New York, pg. 99) Poetic framing of the imaginal, paradoxically, arises from within the imaginal. As in Romantic irony, the author/authorship/authority for the story arises from within the story and must be characterized. The transcendent, in this sense, is a characteristic of the immanent, or perhaps more precisely, an immanence, since, for the imaginal, nothing is absolute. And in a poetic sense, this nothingness is existential – the place where phenomena go to die, a formless, fertile void from which form arises, in Buddhist terms, sunyatā. And, again as in Buddhism, this empty fullness of (the) nothingness is characterized by (the) suchness (tathāta) of what is, in and of itself.

David Miller, in his presentation Changing Climates of Education at the Climates of Change conference, April 2016, Pacifica Graduate Institute, says imaginal learning, learning from and in the imaginal, requires us to sit down in the material (as Jesus did when ‘he taught them’) rather than standing up, which we do to preach, convince, pitch, sell. Miller asks us to sit down into complexity and allow transformation to emerge from the unconscious, ‘reading between the lines’. Reading between the lines is a key feature of imaginal knowledge development. Miller also spoke of Silenos, a classical Greek archetype of the teacher, who was continually drunk, being a teacher of Dionysus and a character in his retinue. Silenos’ drunkenness intoxicates the rational empirical Apollonian consciousness and is, in the imaginal sense, a deep stillness, the paradoxically sobering drunkenness of ‘the self led to itself’ by sitting down in the complexity of the material. When the ‘I’ goes to sleep in imaginal drunkenness, and dies, others wake up – a kind of resurrection that is carried by the breath of the deep, resting in (Silenic) emptiness, filled with divine intoxication. Miller goes on to quote Angelus Silesius (17th century), “A rose is without ‘why’. It blooms simply because it blooms.” [source] According to Miller, this may be contrasted with an unfortunate aspect of most contemporary education. “The soul of contemporary teaching and learning suffers the impact of perspectives of global consumerism in which the student is imagined to be a consumer and the teacher is expected to be a sales person with a product to deliver”. This suggests another term for an imaginal epistemology – Dionysian epistemology.

Alchemy

Hillman’s characterization of the alchemical Philosophers Stone relates it to the phenomenology of the imaginal. He says that in moving torward the Philosophers Stone “imaginatio is both goal and a starting point, the goal as idea serves to remove the mind at the very beginning to a utopic, non-physis condition, comparable with Henry Corbin’s many descriptions of the imaginal.” (Hillman, James, 2014, Alchemical Psychology: Uniform Edition of the Writings of James Hillman, Vol. 5, Spring Publications, Putnam, Conn., pg. 239)

Like Corbin’s account of the imaginal as a locus of particularity and individuality, while yet remaining ungraspable, located ‘no where’, Hillman says, “Alchemy speaks of the stone as … the wisdom of the ‘ultimate actuality’ of the ‘singularity of individuals’ … Duns Scotus (c.1266-1310) spoke of haecceitas, haecceity or ‘thisness’ … the wisdom that logically establishes each thing as itself, individualized ... ‘thisness’ provides a founding rock for William James’s philosophical favoring of eachness over Idealism’s allness, oneness, and wholeness.” (Hillman, 2014, pg. 250) In saying “what we seek is here or nowhere,” (Hillman, 2014, pg. 256), he also says “the stone does not allow itself to be held in meaning. It does not yield to understanding. Its capacity to resist mental penetration is the primary wound to human hybris.” (Hillman, 2014, pg. 246). He gives an account of the stone that relates it to an important characteristic of the imaginal - its evocative, emergent, expressive creativity. “(T)he stone is the perfection of mercury, a compositumoppositorum, unable to be captured by definition, though nothing in nature be more sharply defined. … thelapis is able, because of mercurial fusibility, to participate, conjoin, dissolve, mean anything without loss of essence.” (Hillman, 2014, pg. 247).