Imagining and the Soul

"What converts this "it" into me"?  --The Force of Character by James Hillman*

Writing about character isn't so fashionable these days; in our psychologically steeped society, we are conditioned to think more about personality, ego, identity, integrative structures, and other such rational terminology for what has been thought of in previous generations simply as "character". And despite the apparent Oneness which most religions teach, you each have your style, your set of traits both physical and emotional, and a destiny. "You are essentially different from me,' says Hillman, 'by virtue of the lasting sameness of each of our individualized characters." Hillman argues that despite all the changes in a single lifetime, all the progressions made into the future, you are the unique sum of character; character provides 'a lasting core.'

"It's refreshing to discover that some of the oldest and most basic ideas of philosophy-- Same and Different, Form and Matter-- are actually at work in our daily lives... [What] keeps us who we are and holds our body to its form? Imagine the body as an ancient philosopher, the body as a place of wisdom... character, this governing wisdom... an active force...  the hustlers of materialism [form counters materialism, advances function] who ask us to buy the idea that we are complex pieces of biotechnology, compared to computer chips... results from underlying bio-genetic impulses.'
'Form can be reduced to matter." Equally fashionable and in doubt, in Hillman's eyes, is the discipline of Cognitive Sciences. Here the temptation is overwhelming to reduce a human being to an "organ of computation," a reptilian brain and so forth. Equally fantastic is the absence of myth or reductionism in its presentation. Rather there is an air of statement or axiom, self-evident 'truth.'

In contrast Hillman, the philosopher, the scholar, turns to thinkers such as Aristotle, especially Aristotle whose idea of Form in relation to the body and soul has guided much Western thought for more than two millenia. Aristotle believed that the soul is the form of the body, the original of its movement... the interests of body and soul are the same. The soul forms the body, in this view; while without a body, a soul cannot be located. Because of this Aristotle believed that the soul's beauty was harder to detect than beauty of a bodily form. The soul is, in tradition, the element concerned with goodness and beauty, justice and courage, friendship and loyalty. The soul is also variously described by its actions, such as courageous, timid, vacillating, or kindly, loving. "Through these characteristics we come to know the nature of our soul and to assess the souls of others."

Insisting that the soul has a definite, intentional, intelligent idea, Hillman strikes against the cliche idea of soul today that concludes it "all gossamer, no fiber; a refuge, a fairytale land, a mood, a symbol... He counters these cliches, insisting "the idea of  Form gives shape and character to soul, and demands more rigor in thinking about it. Further the character in this reckoning fulfills itself "by doing what it is naturally suited to do, which is also its pleasure. Aristotle called this natural activity, energy." Thus, the character imagined is as much a product of our imagination as our experiences; this "does not mean that our images are purely personal fantasies and that imagination is a function inside each privately enclosed skull."

Imagination is more than a mental function. The creative forces in the world, as the world soul, produce the images that we perceive; some come to us in idleness, in daydreams, in sleep, in sudden, clear insights, or after long struggles in meditation. The philosopher Emmanuel Kant remarked that without imagination, we should have no knowledge whatsoever.  We do not have to visually perceive these imaginings to feel feelings, think thoughts; we do not have to optically view poems, or characters in stories or movies to 'see' them or their character in our imagination. More than anything, imagination is one of the great "archetypal principles like love, order, beauty, justice, time. We sense these principles coursing through us." Beauty and order, for example, are not placed in the world; we find them there. Thus if  "character is a complex of images, then to know you, I must imagine you."

* author James Hillman is a well known thinker, Jungian psychologist and scholar.

Jung: The Psyche, an Androgyny

“The most important aspect of the psyche is the “soul-image.”
--Inner Work by Robert A. Johnson

For psychologist Carl Jung, the understanding of dreams and making the unconscious conscious are at the heart of the individual. While there are, in his view, other significant factors influencing one’s behavior and thoughts, for Jung archetypes and dreams are a pathway. The concept of archetype comes up frequently in reference to dreams and what he calls “Active Imagination.”

Archetypes as described by Jung are a most provocative concept. While an ancient idea, Plato also held a like concept he called, “ideal forms,” or forms pre-determined to come into the world as the divine pattern. Jung took the idea and fused it with individuals.
In his view, individuals hold in common primordial symbols which express their deepest motives, the world over. Even if an individual has not personally experienced something, the mind, in a dream state, may still conjure the symbol.
In the dream state then, symbols appear to represent universal human themes and individuals appear to represent “energy forms,” or those distinct, inner personalities, the inner-self.

Dreams often aid in the resolution of conflict through symbolic means by bringing the unconscious and the conscious into harmony.
In his book about the subject, Inner Work, Jungian psychologist, Robert Johnson writes, “Most people can’t face inner conflict at all; they impose a kind of artificial unity on life by clinging to the prejudices of their ego and repressing the voices of the unconscious.
If there are parts of ourselves who have different values, or needs, most of us would rather not hear about it.”

Thus, the categories which we determine to be good or bad are mostly arbitrary and subjective. They are without absolute.
In Jung's view, we are actually all plural beings, possessing any number of conflicting and opposing, distinct personalities co-existing in one body.
This is familiar to most us; we like some things, love others, dislike, or are uncomfortable about still more.
Making the self conscious or transparent is a life long task. It is the move towards wholeness and wellness. The most important aspect of the psyche is the “soul-image.”

As part of the sense of plural being, Jung proposes the theory that the psyche is, as a result, an androgyny. It manifests itself as ‘containing both feminine and masculine energies.' While every man needs “to connect his masculine energy” to his feminine energies, women also need to connect their feminine energy to their “masculine” self.
Doing so creates balance within the individual. The psyche spontaneously divides masculine and feminine, appearing to the conscious mind as complementary opposites like yin and yang, dark and light. “They are destined to make a synthesis, one stream of energy.”

Visionary Experiences

Our twenty-first century has a tremendous collective prejudice against the imagination
--Robert Johnson

No one in fact, "makes up" anything in the imagination. The material that appears in the imagination has to originate from somewhere; that is the unconscious, asserts Robert Johnson.
Writing, "the prejudice against imagination... is reflected in things people say like, "You're only imagining it," or "that's a fantasy, not reality," yet imagination more properly understood, is a channel through which unconscious material flows to the conscious mind. Johnson writes, "to be even more accurate, imagination is a transformer that converts the original material into images the conscious mind can perceive."

The prejudice against imagination is so strong in modern society that experiences understood almost intuitively by our ancestors have become swamped in a sea of rational, scientific thought. Modern thinkers have need to rediscover what the ancients knew: the mind is conceived with a power to convert the "invisible" realm to conscious, visible, forms that can be detected and contemplated. As the Catholic Christian creed records, "we believe in the seen, and the unseen..." The ancients thought of it too, as the place of the gods, the region of pure spirit. It was, and is, a place of power to make images, enabling us to see.

In ancient Greece, the place of fantasy, or place of producing poetic, abstract and religious imagery, was nearly unquestioned. This inner world was thought of as a place of ideal forms, of the expression of the gods; they gained meaning from imagination and dreams, both in the spiritual and aesthetic realms. "These meanings could then be held in memory and made the basis of thought and reasoning."

"In religion, the imaginative faculty was the legitimate path of religious inspiration, revelation, and experience." The simple fact that information comes to one through the unconscious mind, or imagination, in no way discredits it as a form or a reality. Experiences of poetic imagining are not mere whimsy; rather they express in symbols the real happenings of a human life experience.
"Humans depend on the imagination's image-making power, and its image-symbols for creative endeavors such as poetry, visual arts, literature, sculpture, and essentially all philosophical and religious functioning." Without imagination, Albert Einstein, for one, would not have deduced the intricacies of the natural world; indeed he states that many of his most important ideas came to him through imaginative intuition. This imagination, then can serve as a great contribution to both individuals and society.

In Carl Jung's positing, he came to the thought that humans are endowed from the eons with archetypes, powerful symbols that spring from deep within the universal, collective, human nature. In all "cultures and religions since the beginning of history, the idea of a soul has sprung up spontaneously... human kind has always intuited the existence... that was invisible, yet active." The soul has often been referred to as feminine, present in poetic, and religious symbolism. Sometimes the soul is seen as an inner woman, regardless of one's exterior gender. Muses have often inspired great thoughts of religion or arts. And not only does the soul function as an inner reality, but it generates a set of symbols, universal to all.

These symbols are, in part, what makes us human-- universal, yet unique individuals. Carl Jung deduced that the psyche manifests itself as androgyny, neither male nor female, but both, one and the same. Within our collective conscious there exists the seed of both the male and female, the anima and the animus.

Thus the inner self is a plurality, like the Chinese idea of pairs, such as yin and yang. While they may appear to us as opposites, the great challenge in the spiritual life is the reconciliation of this paradox. Because in fact, the two are one; they are two parts of one stream of energy.

The end product of this evolution, writes Johnson, "is something that we can sense, feel and describe intuitively--even though we have not obtained it, a sense of wholeness, of completeness. This wholeness is the totality of our being," our Oneness. Totality can be expressed symbolically in ways such as mandala or divine geometry.
Failing this, "the self may well lapse into a place of mental disorder, of compulsions and neurosis."

Often we refuse the awakenings of conscious, repressing the best parts of ourselves, both the light and the dark; we come to view large swaths as negative. In viewing the offerings of unconsciousness negatively, as good and bad rather than in degrees of integration, in oneness, our richest parts bear no good fruit for us in our lives. We reject them, relegating their energies to some dark place where we just will not look.

"Even the voice of God, can be and is rejected." The soul is then left to "stealing or appropriating" what it needs-- our time, our energies, falling into dark corners "where incomprehensible and odd behaviors arise, in unprotected places the ego lets down, and the part of us that would otherwise accept, and believe this is gold, is left without a place to turn.

"Curiously people usually resist their own good qualities even more emphatically than they resist facing their negatives." Yet to achieve a balance, both must be regarded evenly. A practice of writing out your imaginings, dreams and musings will help to balance oneself, bringing clarity and peace to a life. Most importantly, actions make initial imaginings concrete, into a form that can be seen clearly. The use of rituals, both in symbol and in religion, are also quite valuable and lend a concrete avenue for modern man to attend to his own unique, spirits and longings.

What part of it do you believe?
~Robert Johnson, Inner work