Treasures, Our Abundance, Our Gift

While many of us have "stuff," collect stuff, keep stuff, we hang on to it-- even things we may no longer need or use. Sometimes we forget what stuff we have!
The more the stuff, the more the distractions taking us further from that really matters to us.  And while we are not all required to keep or give everything up, such as trading our day to day lives for that of a hermit, we might consider what we do have-- can we share?

While we may not feel an imperative to sacrifice, there are things we can do. First there is our treasure. Each one holds a treasure, stored up for just that moment. There is the tug then to share, because a candle loses nothing by lighting another candle.

Your personal treasures are your wealth, your abundance, be it knowledge, your wisdom or experience, ability, faith or talent. Often treasure is the things we value the most, and paradoxically have the least control over.
Spiritually your treasure is you, unique. It need not be perfect nor inimitable, but it is something you have a lot of and can share. Treasure encompasses wonder.

Treasure for French philosopher, Descartes, is among the Passions of the Soul, first published in 1649. Describing what he calls generosity and wonder he writes that these particular passions are caused, strengthened and maintained by some movement of the Spirit. And he admits to his correspondent, Elisabeth, that it is difficult to 'disentangle these from the body and soul.' Further, he makes an attempt to classify the passions in this same writing. And he addresses both generosity and wonder, "generous people do good without self interest, they are courteous, gracious and obliging, living free from contempt, jealousy, envy, hatred, fear or anger for others."
Finally he contends that the imagination plays a significant part on the imaging of ones' treasures and what one may really hold.

The Imagining Heart

"The images that we carry about in our reverie, in our dreams, in our deepest waking hearts become vividly real to the aware, awake heart."   --J. Hillman, author of the Force of Character

Reading the book, The Force of Character by James Hillman carefully, one stumbles upon many great and grand insights. It may take a few reads to grasp its themes. "Character used to be spoken of in terms of 'the heart of courage,' or the 'heart of generosity and loyalty.' " It is this heart which Hillman wants to address. He says this is also the heart that consoles the weary, that cooks a meal and shares its comforts with others, and delights in laughter.
But there is a second heart, he says, that is even more familiar. It is the romantic heart of flowers and sweets; we 'give our heart away,'  'we are broken-hearted.'

And  Hillman writes of still another, a third heart. This heart is the one observed and practiced by early "great Christian writers, especially  Saint Augustine." This third heart is the one of inmost feeling, of true character. It is the me-mine, the closet of intimacy, an inward dwelling place." Because this heart is so deep and so private, "Augustine often refers to it as an abyss." Writers over time have elaborated upon this heart, calling it also 'the sacred heart.'
Many practice devotions to realize and awaken this deepest heart. "The Sacred Heart is the heart of compassionate mysticism; it sets out a discipline of love parallel with the path" of Bhakti yoga, a part of Hindu tradition; it sets its path likewise with Jewish mystic tradition, the Kabbalah, Binah a mothering, discriminating intelligence-heart, leading one into an expanding character with regard to charity, compassion and mercy.

The "oldest heart of all, is the Egyptian Ptah, who created the world from the imagination of his heart! While the more recent Christian bible dares to state that the world was created by the Logos, the word which was with God, Ptah states "the same idea, except that for ancient Egypt, the words start out from the heart and express its imaginative power. The world was first imagined, then declared."
Imagination, the 'ability to see things as images, is an ability of the heart, according to Arabic philosopher, Ibn Arabi."
The images that we carry about in our reverie, in our dreams, in our deepest waking hearts become vividly real to the aware, awake heart. "Otherwise we assume them to be inventions, projections, and fantasies," Hillman writes.

This "imagining heart converts such indefinables as soul, depth, dignity, love and beauty-- as well as character and the idea of 'heart' itself into felt actualities, the very essence of life." Without it we only have a bio-mechanical pump to keep us going. And many of us do, when the occasion warrants, write to others, "I love you with all my heart."

Imagination, An Ability of the Heart

"I love you with all my heart." --by the many, the millions who have said and felt so.  And J. Hillman, author of the Force of Character

Reading the book, The Force of Character by James Hillman carefully, one stumbles upon many great and grand insights. It may take a few reads to grasp its themes. "Character used to be spoken of in terms of 'the of heart courage,' or the 'heart of generosity and loyalty.' " It is this heart which Hillman wants to address. He says this is also the heart that consoles the weary, that cooks a meal and shares its comforts with others, and delights in laughter. But there is a second heart, he says, that is even more familiar. It is the romantic heart of flowers and sweets; we 'give our heart away,'  'we are broken-hearted.'

And  Hillman writes of still another, a third heart. This heart is the one observed and practiced by early "great Christian writers, especially  Saint Augustine." This third heart is the one of inmost feeling, of true character. It is the me-mine, the closet of intimacy, an inward dwelling place." Because this heart is so deep and so private, "Augustine often refers to it as an abyss." Writers over time have elaborated upon this heart, calling it also 'the sacred heart.' Many practice devotions to realize and awaken this deepest heart. "The Sacred Heart is the heart of compassionate mysticism; it sets out a discipline of love parallel with the path" of Bhakti yoga, a part of Hindu tradition; it sets its path likewise with Jewish mystic tradition, the Kabbalah, Binah a mothering, discriminating intelligence-heart, leading one into an expanding character with regard to charity, compassion and mercy.

The "oldest heart of all, is the Egyptian Ptah, who created the world from the imagination of his heart! While the more recent Christian bible dares to state that the world was created by the Logos, the word which was with God, Ptah states "the same idea, except that for ancient Egypt, the words start out from the heart and express its imaginative power. The world was first imagined, then declared." Imagination, the 'ability to see things as images, is an ability of the heart, according to Arabic philosopher, Ibn Arabi." The images that we carry about in our reverie, in our dreams, in our deepest waking hearts become vividly real to the aware, awake heart. "Otherwise we assume them to be inventions, projections, and fantasies," Hillman writes.

This "imagining heart converts such indefinables as soul, depth, dignity, love and beauty-- as well as character and the idea of 'heart' itself into felt actualities, the very essence of life." Without it we only have a bio-mechanical pump to keep us going. And many of us do, when the occasion warrants, write to another, "I love you with all my heart."

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.

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

The Idea of Maya, or What Part of Me Believes That?

The woman who gave birth to Buddha Shakyamuni is called in the scriptures, Mahamaya, meaning Great Maya, or Mayadevi, the Goddess Maya. In Tibetan, she is called Gyutrulma. In English, she is generally called Queen Maya, a designation that obscures more than it reveals.

Maya is actually the Sanskrit term for Illusion. So Mahamaya actually means the 'Grandest Deception, or Illusion' of all -- that which convinces us of Existence. Maya along with the other two who are 'Shakti,' that is Activity, and Prakriti or Matter, what we can call Nature.

There can be no life or existence without any of them, but we rely especially upon Maya. It is her conduct that makes the others perceptible, for without her we would have no access -- we would not be able to read existence or, reality.

Maya is not a Trickster in the sense of an spirit that purposely misleads or misguides. She is not Mara in disguise. Her majesty, ingenuity and intricacies generously permits us, or inspires us to glimpse the possibility of "enlightenment." It is our own self-preoccupations that distract us from this objective.
--Source unknown

Maya as the giver of insight is also a focus of many of the books written by Robert Johnson.In his book, Inner Work, he writes "sometimes the generative power of the inconspicuous is so strong that it creates fantasy (meaning:to make visible, to reveal) filled with vivid, symbolic images, capturing the mind so completely it holds our attention for a length of time." These "mini-movies" are a primary way our unconscious mind attempts to express itself--through the imagination (meaning: to transform to visible images), using the symbolic language of charged feelings. It just has to get our attention!

Another way we may experience unconscious thought is through a sudden surge of emotion, emotion of all types. There may be profound joy, love, anger, sadness which invades the conscious mind, and takes it over. These flooded feelings make little or no sense to the conscious mind, because the conscious mind did not produce them. We are often left with a feeling or thought later wondering, 'where did that come from? ' What was that about? ' Why did I do that? 'we often think or feel that the emotion came from somewhere outside of ourselves. "

In fact, these riotous, fractious, ungovernable emotions come from deep within oneself, from a place unseen, unknown by the conscious mind. It is precisely because it is intangible that it is called the "unconscious." At times we sense that we have carried these unseen, unknown elements within us for a long time, but how--but where? There is another part of the mind's self which lies completely outside the boundaries of the everyday, conscious mind.

It is a world of possibility, of promises, hopes and fears. It is also a world of energies, forces, and forms of intelligence, even distinct personality, lying within the unconscious. It is the source of much of our daily thoughts, feelings, and daily behaviors. We are more under the influence of the unconscious than we might suspect. Many of us have an intuitive feeling about the unconscious. We have had the feeling of being somewhere else, or perhaps, have driven or taken ourselves from one place to another, all while in deep thought, and not recalled the trip--only that we've arrived. This is the unconscious taking over some of the conscious functions, freeing the mind to do its imagining work, some call "daydreaming."

At times, feelings and emotions arise, and suddenly we are confronted by them, "I didn't know that I felt that way." When we suddenly blurt out these things, learning to recognize them by asking, "what part of me feels that way," is a very valuable exercise, and tool for self realization.

Sometimes these previously concealed identities or attitudes are embarrassing, or even violent and we are humiliated by them. At other times they reveal themselves as our own strengths and good qualities. For example, we may find that they are resources available to us that were previously hidden; we may express new wisdom, or speak in ways that show love or understanding previously unknown in our day to day life.

By gaining a true sense of our self through better acquaintance with the unconscious, we become more whole, more complete; our self is strengthened. By developing a relationship with the mind's eyes, the conscious and unconscious, we live richer lives. Most people however in todays modern, scientific world have lost touch with that place of dreams and imagination; they most often encounter the inner world only when they must--in times of psychological distress.

The mature self is a balanced self between conscious awareness and developing creativity derived from the power-storehouse of the unconscious. When out of balance, the power of the one or the other can become frightening, paralyzing us in our tracks. Unable to perceive the world outside or inside, we find many types of decision impossible in this state.
The purpose of learning to work with a whole, complete mind is not simply to resolve psychic distress or simply resolve conflicts; rather it is the source of our deepest feelings, our strongest religious longings, our great strength, and growing wisdom.

A great wind of energy originates in the integrated mind. We, in fact, as human beings, depend upon it, whether we know it or not, for all its image and symbol making power, for poetic, literary images, for math, scientific discoveries, for all artistic endeavors and for religious functioning. Without our native ability to generate these sense-symbols, we would not have the ability to function as a person in the day to day world. Thus it is hasty to denigrate the imagination--it is essential for much of our living.

In the case of dreams, imagination has the utmost power to convert the invisible forms of the unconscious into symbols and images that are perceptible to the waking mind. Sometimes dreams are so vivid, it's as if we were awake and experienced, in the day to day way, the contents of the dream. However real the symbols may seem, Johnson in his book, Inner Work cautions that one not take them literally. They are after all, unique symbols, your symbols speaking directly to you alone. A "spirit guide" contained within. Listen to their rhythms.
What part believes this? And what do you live for?