by Angela Hite of One More Voice in the Chorus
I’m one of those folks who likes to make a mess of her books. I underline things, write in the margins, put little asterisks and exclamation points to indicate passages that I want to look at again.
This morning I picked up Radical Optimism by Beatrice Bruteau to read again. That’s another thing about me. I read many books two, three, four times before they are done with me. And I keep them on my shelves for years and years. I don’t loan books, because of the intimate mess I’ve made of them, and because I never know when they might call me back to them, so I need to keep them close. I will buy you a copy of a book I love, but I won’t loan you mine. Yesterday when Radical Optimism fell off the bookshelf, I knew Beatrice was calling me back to her.
Beatrice Bruteau is a 72-year old Christian mystic, philosopher, mathmetician–and an amazing writer. The title alone drew me in. She’s no Pollyanna in her optimism, however. She is one of the most cutting-edge thinkers I have read, and she goes deep, deep. As a practicing Catholic with training in Vedanta and eastern religions, as well as holding doctorates in philosophy, mathematics and religion, she’s the real deal, someone I want to study and emulate in my quest to be a bridge between eastern and western thought. As Bruteau was told at the Ramakrishna Mission “Catholicism was Vedanta in European dress.”
When I opened Bruteau’s book, I landed on one of my asterisked pages, the one talking about the power of the imagination. Reading Robert A. Johnson’s Inner Work: Using Dreams and Active I magination for Personal Growth was the first time I really understood the importance of the imagination in spiritual practice. Up until then, I saw imagination as child’s play, something to be outgrown–unless you were an artist. I certainly didn’t see the imagination as a force to be harnessed for spiritual purposes.
At the time, I was yearning for spiritual encounter – the movement of spiritual thought and belief into real experiential phenomenon, the experience of Jesus, for example, not just the belief in and respect for his teachings. It never occurred to me that the imagination can be a portal to that kind of encounter. As a matter of fact, I held the imagination in disdain with regard to spirituality. People who “dreamed up” their stories about meeting Jesus or being visited by angels (or the devil) were bogus to me, the most dangerous kind of liars.
Johnson, a Jungian scholar, however, introduced me to the therapeutic technique called Active Imagination in which you actively engage with the images that rise up in your mind and dialogue with them. It involves an encounter with the images, and can be amazingly eye-opening. Our imaginations operate in the realm of symbols, and uncovering what those symbols mean can truly be a spiritual experience.
Becoming awake to this idea transformed my life. It opened the door to spiritual encounter for me, drove me to learn more about hypnosis and guided imagery, and directed me toward a more creative and mystical life. Creativity, beauty, mystery and spiritual exploration are co-mingled within me now as a current that directs my life and has provided me with so much more daily juice for living. I am simply bored to distraction with the mechanical surface of things. Take me deep! That’s where the good stuff is!
So here is my asterisked passage from Beatrice Bruteau that drove me to write all this:
“The imagination is a very important part of us. I don’t know whether it quite gets its full due from us, whether we take it seriously enough….The imagination is powerful, and therefore it is important. We live out of our imaginations. We may think or wish that we lived out of our intellect and will, but actually the proximate cause of our behavior is the imagination. It is what lies next door to our contact with the external or public world….Therefore, it is important for us to cultivate the imagination, to take care of it, to feed it properly, protect it, discipline it, train it….We need to become aware of the role of our imagination in our eveyday, inner life. We should spend more time just watching it until we learn what sorts of things it does, and understand how it is connected to our speech, body language, and behavior. We should observe what kind of reveries and fantasies we revolve in our minds when they are free-wheeling. These will accumulate …until they have constructed a whole world, which for our undiscriminating subconscious mind is indistinguishable from reality.”
That’s some pretty heavy digestion, and a long shot from “child’s play.” Given the state of our world and the evolutionary brink most people say we are edging toward, taking the imagination seriously, and spiritually, may be the most important act of our lives.
Photo credit: cafepress.com from Google Images
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