The Phenomenal Self pt 8 - Active Imagination
the Universal Energy at the Heart of Experience
Active Imagination
It is of this secret strength that mountain and earth, stars and sea, the most elemental things of nature, sing. Yet the secret is told only to the imagination, capable, as it is, of celebrating what goes nonetheless unseen and unheard. Indeed the secret will always have been entrusted to those imaginings that can fill with song even those things that, like earth itself, remain silent and solitary.
~ John Sallis, Force of Imagination
Deep phenomenology allows us to identify the conditioned aspects of memory, thought, and mind, and enables us to dis-identify from all the symbolic representations of reality stored in our heads. This process of clearing out the structural artifacts of the conditioned mind reveals the active imagination at the heart of all experience.
We discover that the activity of the imagination is what binds the myriad phenomena by ‘minding’ them into a centered whole, in the same manner that the dream self is imagined into existence while we sleep. We realize the self as the terminal bud unfolding at the end of the waveform of moment-to-moment experience. First feeling, then perceiving. In the end a self is image-mind(ed) into existence.
Then, right at the moment when the wave of experience crests and the moment dissolves into the traces of its past, the self, a reflection through the looking glass of imagination, turns around to catch a glimpse… but the moment has passed and the phenomena have disappeared. The self is left only with its apparition… and it too is not there.
Coda
Deep phenomenology is a praxis that realizes the transformational self by shifting the modes of experience from passive to active expressions, from feeling, perception, and knowing, to intuition, insight, and intellect through the practices designed to cultivate sensitivity, clarity, and active imagination. This praxis integrates modern process philosophy, cognitive neuroscience, and meta-therapeutic methods while preserving the essence of Dzogchen and its Mahamudra path.
There is passive feeling, that is feeling whatever I happen to be feeling while I am in this situation. And there is an ‘active feeling’, that is a transformation in affect, closer to ‘sensing the root of the Source as it is present in this situation’, and to a sort of meta-feeling, the act of observing the ways in which I am conditioned to feel and sublimate the compulsion to take the same route.
Passive affectivity is compulsive affectivity, kindling a passive, semi-automatic form of perception, that opens the door for the enactment of default forms of representation of what is real, that crank up justificatory loops, either discursive
or, more generally, behavioral’.
‘I am doing it again.’ Freud called it ‘repetition compulsion’.
Active imagination appears to be the iterative practice of the psychedelic self, unchained (or at least partially liberated) from the tyranny of default fabrications.
"First feeling, then perceiving." Would you say that active imagination begins in passivity, receiving? Before anything can be minded into a whole? In my circles, passive is a bad word.