One way to think about the imagination is as a bridge between our inner and outer worlds. So how could this work? There may be an intermediate place, or field of potential, between our subjective inner world and the outer world, which Frederic Myers, a founder of the Society of Psychical Research, called the imaginal. In this sense, the imaginal could be where the parallel present-tense reality that we create during the affirmation process “lives,” and where affirmations can incubate and become more substantial as we apply our imagination and intention. And, when we powerfully imagine ourselves in our transformed state, if conditions are right, the transformations we are aiming for are more likely to occur.
Our intentions are powerful when our entire being is aligned with them. The bridge is activated. When the imagination is focused in this way, whether conscious or unconscious, positive or negative, we may be surprised as we notice things in our environment popping up all around us that correspond to our inner state. Coincidences? Perhaps. Or, if they are especially meaningful, synchronicities.
As Leonard and Murphy wrote in The Life We Are Given, we can focus our intention to tune ourselves to the outcome we intend, but this is not enough. The striving of the ego gets in the way. Therefore, we must surrender our expectations, relinquishing the ego and its limitations. When we do this, “we open the way for grace: news from the universe, a direct connection with the divine.” Leonard called this focused surrender.
Discussing the view of Alvin Schwartz, a writer of Superman and Batman comic strips for many years, religious historian Jeffrey Kripal writes that Schwartz “came to understand the human imagination as a kind of near-omnipotent mystical organ that can act as a magical bridge between the poles of the formless and its forms -- ‘the phone booth of consciousness’… It is the imagination that creates our different experienced realities, including and especially our social and psychological realities.” Perhaps when working with affirmations we are creating our own “phone booth of consciousness” in which the transformations we affirm can be called into being.
We can take this further. Rather than isolated, individual beings separated from the universe, we are entangled in a reciprocal dynamic relationship with all that is. We are an integral part of the natural world. Poet-scientist Wolfgang von Goethe observed the world in this way, not with objective detachment, but with warm involvement, what he called “active seeing” -- using his imagination as a means of knowledge. According to Lachman, Goethe hoped to recreate this more enchanted view of world, a more enchanted view of nature, through what he called a poetic science, in which, rather than seeing the world as a machine, we see and participate with it imaginatively, as a living intelligence. George Leonard held a similar view. “Each of us is a context of the universe from a particular point of view.”
This sense of entanglement frees us to engage with the world in ways we may not have thought possible. Through the imagination, and with this kind of poetic, intuitive approach to reality, we can explore new ways of relating. Recognizing that we are in relationship with a lively, intelligent universe can allow for a kind of entangled awareness, creating the conditions for seemingly magical things to happen.
With this reciprocity, though, it follows that as we are imagining, we are also being imagined. Even after writing Thinking Impossibly, Kripal will not give a straightforward definition of the imagination, but in his book Mutants and Mystics he muses, “For what it’s worth, I suspect that the deepest roots and reaches of the imagination are the roots and reaches of consciousness itself, and that this consciousness is also an exotic ‘energy’ that has its own super-physics, one that is not bound by what our primate brains have evolved to cognize as space and time.”
We are endowed with an incredible gift, and as we learn to work with it, we can deeply and constructively engage with this extraordinary capacity to envision and empower the world we know is possible. Through developing our capacity for imagination, as we transform ourselves, we just may be able to co-create a more joyous, just and peaceful world -- and actively meet the challenges we face at this time in history.