Science and Religion: Two Instruments for Seeing Reality

Science and religion are two methods, or two instruments for looking at similar life phenomena--one is like a microscope (science) examining the details; the other is like a telescope (religion) examining the larger picture. It is very important to see that "reality" is never found by any single instrument. "Reason is the organ of truth, imagination is the organ of meaning," said CS Lewis. Both reason and imagination are equally valid and useful organs for experiencing, examining and explicating reality. Both instruments must submit their dogmatic convictions to critiques. Einstein famously said, "Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind." ("Science, Philosophy and Religion: a Symposium" 1941.)

Science typically utilizes rational and empirical approaches yet borrows heavily from imagination; religion typically utilizes intuitive and emotional approaches yet borrows heavily from reason. It is not an either/or situation, but rather one of emphases. There are as many dogmatic scientists as there are dogmatic religionists. There are many brilliant scientists who experience a rich religious life, and many spiritual theologians who experience a rich rational life. The famous philosopher Alfred North Whitehead shocked his rational audience in the 1920s when he told them that modern science would never have come into existence without the Christian theological cosmology which began with the idea of a reasonable Creator in His rationally ordered universe. (See chapter 10 of Whitehead’s Adventures of Ideas). Whitehead noted that the vast majority of the early great philosophers and scientists were practicing Christians who sought to understand the mind of a reasonable deity. This idea of a reasonable deity is not and cannot be found in the Eastern religions which worship Nature as divine--one does not experiment on or question the Natural Gods. And of the Western religions, only the Christian religion stresses "orthodoxy" (ideas) over "orthopraxy" (actions) as in Judaism and Islam. In other words, the Christian emphasis on beliefs and ideas provides a matrix for evolving thought and a rational exploration of a reasonable material universe, even if the ideas develop slowly and receive censure or resistance from the ecclesiastical powers. The Christian "system" of orthodoxy (right ideas) has a built-in default setting that returns it to conversations about beliefs and ideas.  That is why Communist, Islamic and other ideologically frozen territories have been and continue to be terrified by the Bible and free theological/religious discourse. Whitehead makes it clear that one's mythology sets the trajectory of cultural consciousness, discoveries and inventions. This is also significant for politics--something which our Western international policy makers ought to take into account before they try to export democracy or import socialism. 

Our modern academic ignorance of religious, philosophical and psychological big ideas are the bane of our Western education and social institutions. Politicians, journalists and business owners once had an education in the Humanities. Now they learn techniques without the examination of philosophical foundations or an exploration of meaning.

It is important to remember that both science and religion appeal to the innate human compulsion toward certainty, security and order. Every human child is born with equal drives to suckle, walk, talk and seek self-, social- and cosmic-assurance in a world of chaos and fragmentation. The human psyche naturally and autonomously requires and is motivated to acquire assurances of security and order internally and externally. Humans are congenitally meaning-making creatures in a world without human meaning. "Culture" is the result of this congenital condition. 

Such psychological assurances are most often pursued, defined and defended in human personalities largely unconsciously and uncritically during the first 20 years of life. These assurances are acquired ideological stances that meld with the personality and become what seems an unalterable identity of security in a hostile and dangerous world. Many in the West have called this acquired secure identity the "ego". This compulsion toward the solidifying of a specific self-identity most often occurs in the late teen years, but it is not uncommon to experience radical ego-shifts as one matures--sometimes quickly as in a conversion experience or gradually via a lifetime of assimilating new experiences and ideas. The most intractable are those who cannot or will not openly examine a perspective outside of their current secure "identity-stance". This inability or unwillingness to seriously consider differing points of view is often complicated by perceived or real threats to tangible aspects of ones identity—like losses of vocational livelihood, peer bonds, family connections and a sense of internal cognitive harmony. Change feels like death. Tolkien captures this experience in The Hobbit as Gandalf the Grey tries to enlist Bilbo Baggins in an adventure to other worlds outside “The Hill”. Bilbo, seated on his porch, blowing smoke rings, ensconced in his cozy hobbit hole in the ground replies, "Adventure? Nasty uncomfortable things, make you late for dinner."

Religion and science are frequently hobbit holes. Leaving them, seriously leaving them, in order to deeply explore other worlds causes distress and discomfort—making one late for the usual ideological dinner they have been eating for decades. No wonder Jesus said, “Strait is the gate and narrow is the way, and there are few who find it.”

Soul-making and the Colorado Shooting: James Holmes as the Joker, Trickster, Savior

"There is no consciousness without discrimination of opposites."

~ Carl Jung

          In 1965, a broadly published debate was held between two philosophical adversaries named Arnold Gehlen and Theodor Adorno regarding the nature of suffering and violence in the world. At one point Ghelen questions Adorno about the necessity of suffering, incredulous that one would doubt that the aim of human existence is to emancipate people from all suffering. Here is part of that debate:

Gehlen: “Mr. Adorno, you see the problem of emancipation here once again, of course. Do you really believe that the burden of fundamental problems, of extensive reflection, of errors in life that have profound and continuing effects, all of which we have gone through because we were trying to swim free of them—do you really believe one ought to expect everyone to go through this? I should be very interested to know your views on this.”

Adorno: “I can give you a simple answer. Yes! I have a particular conception of objective happiness and objective despair, and I would say that, for as long as people have problems taken away from them, for as long as they are not expected to take full responsibility and full self-determination, their welfare and happiness in this world will merely be an illusion. And will be an illusion that will one day burst. And when it bursts, it will have dreadful consequences.” (Safranski 407-08 italics mine)

          Perhaps 24 year old James Holmes who killed 12 and wounded 70 people at a Century movie theater in Aurora, Colorado on July 20, 2012 is a current example of what Adorno is talking about—"a burst[ing] forth with dreadful consequences" in a world that expects to avoid all discomforts in life. Or perhaps Ghelen is right when he suggests that the aim of human existence is "to swim free of them [problems]". This controversial debate addresses not only the issue of "violence" but the larger role that violence plays in the cosmic scheme of things. Is it possible or even desirable to end violence? Does violence play a necessary role in human existence? Ghelen and Adorno hold two very different positions. Let's explore these positions from a depth psychological perspective.
          First off, such "bursting forths" of violence and public mayhem may be found throughout recorded human history. Mythically, the perpetrators of such antisocial actions have been labeled "Trickster" by academics.[1] Tricksters appear in stories and rituals from every culture as socially disruptive characters who might defecate in public, engage in inappropriate sexual liaisons, deceive without shame, or commit felonious acts of violence and other lawless exploits. The trickster's demeanor covers a broad continuum--ranging from slapstick comic to homicidal-rapist, with many variations in between those two extremes. Paradoxically tricksters are also frequently portrayed as cultural hero/heroines--pulling the rug out from under the established order so that something revelatory and innovative might appear in its place. One such character in popular American culture is The Joker, Batman's archenemy appearing in comics, television shows and movies. The Joker is a highly intelligent homicidal psychopath, always smiling during his antinomian escapades. He, like most tricksters, is a strange concoction of despairing anomie mingled with manic extroverted energy, [2]  which is how James Holmes was described just before his violent outburst in the Colorado movie theater as it premiered The Dark Knight Rises. In fact some sources reported  that Holmes told the police, as they arrested him without a struggle, that he was Batman's nemesis, the Joker.[3]

            In the comic books, Joker makes it clear that he will never kill the Batman because the caped crusader is the necessary counterweight that keeps the Joker animated and thriving. Batman stands for complete law and order, while the Joker stands for lawlessness and chaos. Neither can meaningfully exist without the other. This is an archetypal pattern that can be traced back to ancient Egyptian mythology. The Egyptians imagined two contrasting deities named Isfet and Ma'at  who personified the cosmic drama between chaos and order. Isfet represented injustice, evil, chaos and “socio-political unrest, forming the necessary counterpoint to Ma'at who personified justice, harmony and socio-political law and order. The two Gods formed a complementary and paradoxical dualism that kept each other and the cosmos in balance. According to Maulana Karenga in his book, Maat: The Moral Ideal in Ancient Egypt, the role of the Egyptian pharaoh was to destroy Isfet in order to attain and maintain Ma'at (71-73). In the Batman comics Gotham City is like Egypt, a dwelling where people are trying to carve safety and cultural order (Ma'at) out of terror and chaos (Isfet). The Batman (Bruce Wayne) is akin to the pharaoh working incessantly to attain and maintain law and order. As a boy, Bruce Wayne's parents were killed by the forces of evil, and Wayne grew up to become the Batman, a wealthy corporate billionaire who developed personal discipline and technological inventions to secure an orderly existence in Gotham by subduing all disorder and instability. In both the Egyptian and Batman mythologies there is no possibility of one without the other. As with Aristotle's notion of a great plot, there is no drama without conflict. A similar idea is found in the Hebrew Bible and Hesiod's Greek Theogony  where primordial Chaos is a murky void from which night and day, light and darkness and all created order emerge. Similarly, the Chinese yin/yang symbol portrays light and dark swirling (like gas or air) together as the primeval elements of creation from which all order emerges and returns. Even the secular Freud eventually identified Eros and death to be the two most basic instinctual constituents of the human psyche, locked in a perpetual struggle for obliteration or civilization. Freud writes:

After long hesitancies and vacillations we have decided to assume the existence of only two basic instincts, Eros and the destructive instinct...The aim of the first of these basic instincts is to establish ever greater unities and to preserve them thus--in short, to bind together; the aim of the second is, on the contrary, to undo connections and so to destroy things. In the case of the destructive instinct we may suppose that its final aim is to lead what is living into an inorganic state. For this reason we also call it the death instinct. (Standard XXIII. 148)

            With this background, let's return to the opening words of the debate at the point where Ghelen incredulously asks Adorno if he actually believes that all humans "ought" to go through problems reflectively rather than strive to create a world where we can “swim free of” all problems. Adorno argues that avoidance of problems will not make things better, but will actually bring about the opposite effect, resulting in what he calls “dreadful consequences”. Adorno believes that struggling with problems and overcoming them is the ultimate source of all real happiness. Similar to the struggle between the Egyptian Isfet and Ma'at, Adorno believes that life presents each individual with experiences of "objective despair" (chaos)  which have the potential to be turned into "objective happiness" (order) by taking " full responsibility and full self-determination". If humans do not personally or collectively enter into the grappling match between order and chaos, "their welfare and happiness in this world will merely be an illusion." In other words, if we humans were to live in a problem free world, the resultant "happiness" would be illusory and superficial. But then Adorno adds the troubling conclusion: Whenever humans do succeed in temporarily eliminating the struggles of existence, providing discounted happiness--such happiness "will be an illusion that will one day burst. And when it bursts, it will have dreadful consequences.” In other words, externally bequeathed happiness that is not achieved through personal effort is always ephemeral, and when real life (problematic life) catches up, the consequences will be "dreadful"--not just disappointing, but dreadful--filled with terror, fear, and what Mel Brooks called "high anxiety"!

            Let's consider this from a depth psychological perspective, psychologically--particularly with regard to the Colorado theater massacre perpetrated by James Holmes, as well as other acts of mind boggling social violence in the media these days. Ours is a culture obsessed with law and order, justice for all and equality without discrimination--and I concur that these are all virtuous and worthy goals. I am not for one second denigrating these righteous and humane intentions. Justice and order (Ma'at) are always noble and desired goals for any civilized culture--however, when viewed myopically, as the sole aim of human existence, we set ourselves up for increasing disasters and dreadful consequences.  If, as Adorno suggests, problems are required in the cosmic and psychological pattern of human development, then our efforts to eliminate them entirely sets us up for equilibrating and compensatory consequences that may be devastating. The attempt to eliminate all madness and disintegration from human existence is tantamount to making a bowl of plastic fruit that will never decompose. Everything appears perfect, until one is actually starving--then the happy artifice becomes a nightmare. Let's now apply this to the extreme situation of James Holmes homicidal appearance at the theater. What are we to make of this horrific "problem"? What are we to do about it, or with it?

            Law enforcement agencies, journalists, and politicians on both sides of the ideological aisle immediately made this horrific act a "problem" about guns, mental health, better security, political legislation, functional parenting, school bullying, moral values and 101 other important yet secondary literalisms. While all of these are legitimate concerns, perhaps the deeper unseen problem is our lack of comprehending the nature of cosmological and psychological development. External solutions provide comfort, for a time, but they do not grapple with the "objective despair" that permeates the individual and national psyche in the wake of these unimaginable atrocities. A more psychological solution would find our politicians, educational institutions, media talk shows, churches, community centers, and dinner table conversations revolving the kaleidoscope of imagination in order to "see through" the banal and literal and into the depths of our individual and cultural soul, or lack thereof. Perhaps these disasters arise from Isfet or Freud's death instinct in order to equilibrate our psychological indolence and cultural indifference. In addition to external solutions, we might also explore the effects of movies, movies theaters, shopping malls, university educations and culture in general do to the soul. Will we take this approach? Not likely. And the Joker/Trickster will strike again and again, doing what tricksters have done throughout mythic history--pull the rug out from under human stability—reminding us that we live in a cosmos where chaos and order are always swirling together to facilitate deeper soul-making experiences.  As James Hillmans writes, after berating the usual solution of "showing more love": "Love...[is] neither the goal nor the way, but...one of many means of putting our humanity through a complicated imaginal process” (Re-Visioning 189).

            The ambush from a "trickster" is not meant merely to be managed externally, but to be explored internally resulting in external results based on such reflections--in that order. The chaotic trickster exists to present us with "objective despair" in order to move us along in the soul-making experience toward real happiness and genuine joy. This developmental aspect of the trickster archetype is what makes him a kind of "savior". Jung's points this out by referring to the sociopathic trickster qualities of the biblical savior God, Yahweh:

 If we consider...the daemonic features exhibited by Yahweh in the Old         Testament, we shall find in them not a few reminders of the unpredictable behaviour of the trickster, of his pointless orgies of destruction and his self-appointed sufferings [of human beings], together with the same gradual developments into a saviour and his simultaneous humanization. It is just this transformation of the meaningless into the meaningful that reveals the trickster's compensatory relation to the 'saint'... (Radin 196).

This same trickster/savior paradox may be found in Jesus' frequent violations of the Jewish ceremonial laws, his associations with notorious tax collectors and prostitutes, his  felonious cleansing of the temple and his treasonous claim to kingship--resulting in his crucifixion between two convicted terrorists. Jesus is quoted as saying:

Do not suppose that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I did not come to bring peace, but a sword.  For I have come to turn a man against his father, a daughter against her mother, a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law—a    man’s enemies will be the members of his own household. Anyone who loves their father or mother more than me is not worthy of me; anyone who loves their son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me. (Matt. 10:34-37)

Theologians and ministers often soften these antisocial trickster activities of the "savior", but in Jesus' day they garnered him the epithets of madman, sinner, demon possessed and felon--appellations worthy of all savior-tricksters. Here my point is not to say that Yahweh and Jesus are just like James Holmes, but rather to  suggest that all psychological and social change arrive via some kind of chaotic disintegration. Trickster/savior, Isfet/Ma'at, Batman/Joker, Eros/death always work in tandem in a soul-making universe.

            Chaos is not the problem. How we view chaos is the problem. Chaos is the source of all creativity and psycho-spiritual transformation. I believe that is what Adorno is getting at when he says he sees a world that wields “a particular conception of objective happiness and objective despair”. Without the objective despair, there is no happiness; without the objective chaos, there is no creativity; without necessary destruction, there is no development. Adorno’s point is that when we fail to creatively integrate this dualistic nature of reality into our lives by attempting to eliminate chaos and disintegration, the destructive experiences will burst onto the scene in a compensatory fashion. Pushing the hellish nature of re-creative chaos away from us is like jamming a clown back into the proverbial jack-in-the-box. Eventually the tension will cause the joker to pop out and terrify all who are nearby, calling each to examine his or her existential priorities. Is this a pessimistic view? If we are able to rid ourselves of all suffering and create a legislated Utopia, yes, I am a pessimist. However, if chaos is as necessary to this human existence as is order, then I am providing a very optimistic reminder. If all chaos and suffering exist as part of the package in order to call attention back to the soul-making endeavor of human existence, then to believe we can eliminate all chaos is the real insanity. If we have been put on this planet to conquer all disease and eliminate all chaos, then I am a gloomy naysayer. But if the basic cosmic pattern is that of perpetually moving from chaos to order, and then into more chaos and subsequent order, I am a providing a necessary reminder—that the ultimate and primary aim of human existence is not to end suffering, but to make soul at the personal, cultural and cosmic levels. I am proposing a view that will not end all suffering, but it will help to end the kind of suffering which results from the illusion of ending all suffering. I am arguing that if this Colorado event and others like it are unheeded by the psyche, and if we place all of our energy into “solving the problem” rather than seeing the event as symptomatic, events like it it will be repeated over and over. Such occurrences may become pandemic--perhaps even some rogue nation will take on the role of the World-Trickster as did Nazi Germany in 1939.  

            It would be appear that the tacit assumption, of modern Westerners at least, is that our politicians can eliminate all pain and suffering, creating a society and eventually a world of ease and abundance from the cradle to the grave. Our television shows are filled with Law and Order, CSI, hospitals fixing all medical problems, Judge Judy and half a dozen other court programs distributing perfect justice. We are obsessed with social justice, fairness, equity, and never hurting anyone's feelings. We have come to expect our leaders to make us 100% safe and secure all of the time. We elect politicians who promise to make us free from all possible chaos. Laws proliferate—from wearing seat belts to whom we may marry, dictating what we can smoke or eat. There are often noble and good intentions behind such aims, but when legislated without recognizing the necessary experiences of their opposites as inevitable and even oddly beneficial, we are inviting Trickster to show up with a vengeance in order to equilibrate our hubris and arrogance. The Game of Life will always have two opposing teams, internally and externally. Our primary goal ought to be to find the most creative and humane ways to allow for this necessary process of psychological isometrics to occur. The ancient Greeks did this by creating the Panhellenic Games from which our modern Olympics derive. Jung states that most people will look outside for a savior to correct calamities--to politicians or moralists to "fix" things, but this is looking in the wrong place. He goes on to say:

 In the history of the collective as in the history of the individual, everything depends on the development of consciousness. This gradually brings liberation from imprisonment in agnoia  [agnoia], unconsciousness, and is therefore a bringer of light as well as healing. As in its collective, mythological form, so also  the individual shadow contains within it the seed of enantiodromia, of a conversion into its opposite. (211)

            The role of the trickster in all cultural myths is to fracture the pervading psycho-social structure--to bring fragmentation into the logical order by yanking the civilizing rug out from under us. Trickster's aim is always to overturn the established rules, laws, order, norms, safeguards and the security of a people trusting solely in the laws of the socio-political routine founded on human ingenuity--as if the aim of life were to never experience any distress. Even our medical profession has become a system that aims at pharmaceutically induced orderliness via drugs -- "keep em flat-lined and unaffected" so they can go to work and buy more stuff or pay more taxes. The goal of the trickster archetype is to return us to raw Nature--to creative chaos--to the untidy disorder that precedes new ideas and attitudes of soul. If we fail to see this event with James Holmes as a kind of cultural trickster event--as a collective dream (nightmare) with myriad symbols and a plethora of images for us to gather insights from--such incidents may escalate in frequency and scope. The next Joker may not toss a smoke bomb into a theater while wielding an assault weapon, but a dirty radioactive bomb into a shipping container, or launch a nuclear missile into a major urban center.
            Lastly, let me state clearly that I am neither justifying nor excusing Holmes' or any other heinous acts of violence. I am not minimizing the unimaginable losses and grief of the families. I lost a son to war in Afghanistan and know the reconstructive hell of the trickster pattern. I am not asking people to stop seeking justice as they perceive justice, or to cease seeking cures for deadly diseases or the end to war. Our aim as humans, in my view, is to love and care for others--to bring healing and order to life. However, I am asking that we look more deeply into the significance of cultural and personal tragedies. If Adorno is correct, then this "bursting forth" in Colorado may carry a revelation from the unconscious—that life is comprised of  "objective happiness and objective despair",  and that "as long as people have problems taken away from them... their welfare and happiness in this world will merely be an illusion. And will be an illusion that will one day burst. And when it bursts, it will have dreadful consequences.” If we continue to deny or ignore the necessity of problems by numbing ourselves with distractions and by insisting on creating utopian external solutions—then we can expect greater and greater compensatory nightmares to get our attention. If the pain of ordinary events does not call us to reflective soul-making, the pains of extraordinary events will escalate, forcing us to do what we must do for our psycho-spiritual development.

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[1] In the study of mythology, folklore and religion, a trickster is a deity, spirit, human or anthropomorphizedanimal who violates social standards and plays tricks on others. According to George P Hansen in The Trickster and the Paranormal, the term "Trickster" was probably first used in this context by Daniel G. Brinton in 1885.

[2] This is a state of mind officially designated by modern psychiatry as "Dysphoric Mania". In this state a person may feel depressed and hopeless, while feeling activated and energetic at the same time. (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/08/28/dysphoric-mania-james-holmes-mixed-mania-bipolar-disorder_n_1836744.html)

[3]New York Post. July 20, 2012 by Kate Sheehy.

 http://nypost.com/2012/07/30/redheaded-hooker-says-theater-gunman-james-holmes-copied-her-with-hair-dye/

How is The Imaginal Realm Different from Human Imagination?

Someone recently asked me why I use the term 'Imaginal Realm,' and wondered if it was the same as 'imagination.
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First off, the Imaginal Realm, like the Chinese Tao, cannot be named or defined.

We may examine the Imaginal Realm in the way a physicist studies an atom. Some activities and very limited results of the atoms existence can be observed, but never is the dynamic atom seen. If that is true of the miniscule atom, how much more of the vast Imaginal Realm which originated the atom? Perhaps these are more closely related than we realize as William Blake said, “To see a world in a grain of sand and heaven in a wild flower/Hold infinity in the palms of your hand and eternity in an hour.” (Auguries of Innocence)

I use that term 'Imaginal Realm' to distinguish it from 'human imagination', or the 'imaginary' work of people. 'Imaginary' refers to what we make up with the human will, like making up a story, creating a television commercial or constructing ideas for projects, etc. The Imaginal Realm is beyond and before human imagination, or imaginary human musings. The two areas clearly intersect because all human 'imaginings' are ultimately connected to the Imaginal Realm.

The Imaginal Realm is the arena of dreams. It is the Psychic-Sea in which we swim. It is the Realm of Psyche or Soul. It most often takes us into the depths, into the deep, into the abyss, into the labyrinth, into the matrix, into the womb of darkness, into the caverns of Hades. It is the realm of myth and fantasy - but again, these are not humanly constructed fantasies; rather they are unexpected and alien ideas, daydreams, thoughts and emotions.

The Imaginal Realm transmits those intrusive and often annoying feelings of awe or dread that seem to arrive from nowhere, those waves of overwhelming love or murderous resentment, and those flashes of clarity or confusion that seem to drop in 'out of the blue'.

The Imaginal Realm removes our limiting blinders and shows us, sometimes quickly and sometimes slowly, the evolving Numinous Realm, the sacred spheres, the worlds of the Gods. Sadly, most modern humans try to assign the responsibility of all such experiences to the human mind and 'free will'. That is a huge mistake, and an impossible burden for us to bear. All ancient cultures realized that the Gods were the authors of such 'revelations'.

The Imaginal Realm conjures up the invisible playmates of some children, and sends us sudden insights into deep problems. It manifests itself as puzzling nightmares or shocking erotic interludes that interrupt our dreams. These perplexing images require us to move beyond a current ego-self, beyond the literal 'manifest content' of the dream, as Freud would say, to the 'latent content' wrapped in the dream's symbols. In other words, the Imaginal Realm loves to give us riddles and cryptic psycho-spiritual codes to crack. Humans love codes and riddles! That is why we are always finding religious, political and relational conspiracies everywhere!

The Imaginal Realm reminds us of our inevitable appointment with death, takes things apart we thought were solid and introduces transformational periods of depression, addiction, grief, insanity or other 'neuroses'. These useful psychological terms can also be misleading when we assume there is something 'wrong' with us and the cosmos. These necessary, normal and purposeful chaotic pathologies and painful symptoms, like the knotted root-ball of a potential plant, spread their tentacles into the deep rich loam of the Unconscious and prepare us to blossom.

The Imaginal Realm rearranges our understanding of 'love' and calls us beyond our ego and self will. It always surprises, troubles and nudges us beyond our current world securities and beliefs in what is taken for granted. It is the inner undiscovered jungle, and the Guide into that jungle of the unexplored unconscious, often showing up like Gandalf the Wizard from the Hobbit, prodding us on an adventure and into experiences which we could never have imagined would have entered our lives.

Rod Serling called the Imaginal Realm the Twilight Zone, "We are traveling through another dimension. A dimension not of sight and sound, but of 'mind'. It is the middle ground between light and shadow, between science and superstition; it lies between the pit of man's fears and summit of his knowledge."

The Imaginal Realm is like a stack of 10 trillion kazillion Lego pieces which can be constructed, deconstructed and reconstructed into an infinite number of images - both physical and psychical. It is simultaneously chaos and creation. The Hindu Sankhya philosophy calls this ‘prakriti,’ the eternal substance from which all physical and mental forms arise.

The Imaginal Realm is a crystal ball containing visions which may calm us or scare us. It was accessed by Shamans, Greek Oracles, Hebrew Prophets and Christian Apostles (cf. Apostle Paul, Colossians 1:15ff.). It is described in the Bhagavad Gita, chapter eleven.

The Imaginal Realm captures what we see when we shut our eyes and visualize, or listen to what is beyond the audible senses, and beyond our own intentional thought. Some today call it channeling, others call it being filled with the Holy Spirit or speaking in tongues. It is what Jesus referred to when he talked about 'the Kingdom of Heaven'. It is the Hindu Ganesh, a boy with an elephant's head. It is Alice Through the Looking Glass, Neo Anderson escaping the Matrix, Dorothy entering OZ through a tornado and all fantastic journeys into fantastic lands. It is the Realm of the Living Archetypes, which we call 'gods' and 'goddesses'.

Perhaps most importantly, we must remember that this Realm existed long before the human being, long before the human brain evolved. The Imaginal Realm is NOT synonymous with our neural biology any more than a television image is the result of the televisions internal technology. Both the television and the human brain receive their 'images' from a realm that is beyond the container holding the technology, beyond brains and microchips. To identify human bio-chemical cognition (the brain) with the Imaginal Realm may be the biggest and most deadly mistake in modern psychology, and the cause of our modern pharmaceutical culture.

Industry and technology are modern manifestations of the Imaginal Realm, but not to be confused with it, or seen as substitutes for humanness. The Greek God Hephaestus was the God of technos, constructing and inventing from the world of stuff, but he was homely and limped when he walked. Perhaps the Greeks recognized that technology, as wondrous as it is, contains a kind of ugliness and impairment of humanity. We see increasing numbers of people welded to their iPhone, iPod, television, computer or other techno-gadgetry. This is the shadow side of technology. There is a kind of ugliness and impairment of relational and communal intimacy. The wondrous product of the Imaginal Realm has replaced the Imagination, replaced revelation and creativity. We ought to stop using the ‘hardwired’ metaphor for the human brain. The Imaginal Realm reminds us that we are 'soft-wired,’ pliable – not machines. We need some Totos today who can do to us what the little dog did to the Wizard of OZ trapped behind his inhumane 'computer' screen. Toto drew back the curtain and revealed the human as primarily a receiver of personal contact, not a transmitter of second hand images.

The Imaginal Realm will never be defined, located or controlled. It is the sea of infinite potential and usually beyond human manipulation. I say 'usually' because at some minor level we are allowed to use our thoughts and intentions to create reality. But we do NOT create all reality. Man is NOT the measure of all perceptions, as Protagoras said. The Imaginal Realm created us as an author writes a poem, and It still continues to make us into unique poems. This realm screws with our perceptions in the most annoying ways.

Let me repeat: Most importantly, humans and specifically the human brain with which we are so enamored these days, receives the Imaginal Realm. The brain does not originate it. When this solar system runs down, shrivels into a smoldering ember and eventually fades into a cold, dead intergalactic debris field - after all sentient life has been consumed - the Imaginal Realm will continue to unfold new imaginings, new fantasies and infinite realities beyond our humanly 'imagined' ponderings.

The Imaginal Realm does NOT depend upon us, but we on It. That is why the ancients spent so much time addressing issues of destiny, fate and necessity. That is why even moderns, as they become older (ancient), begin to look in the rearview mirror of time and see forces beyond human will.

I have a series of comments and quotes regarding the Imaginal Realm on my blog site:
http://michaelbogar.blogspot.com/2007/01/what-is-soul-making_14.html