IMAGINATION

123 / Involution

         The question was asked in our small group, “how does imagination prevent me from coming into contact with Being?”  There was a consensus regarding Imagination as an impediment in one’s life, a barrier that prevents one from fully interacting with the world around one.  The question was asked, what is it that drives us, impels us, into the negative world of imagination.   Perhaps, in the effort to analyze its origins, we lost sight of the taste of it.   I think in preparing the following paper I immersed myself partly in Imagination, losing sight of the aim of the whole group, thinking, imagining that I understood, that I had answers.

            It was observed in our group (by Serafin) that the initial triad of Imagination merges very quickly into other negative triads.   From negative imagination can arise an inner considering that feeds self-love that can lead to fear, waste of energies, subjectivism and finally identification.   It is a dark world, an upside down mirror of the progression of essential triads that begin with Involution, being able to receive higher energies, go through Evolution, Identity, Interaction, Order, and end with Freedom.   

            “Imagination”, Orage said, “as we use it, is simply an excess of desire over ability”. (1) My world of imagination, besides making me appear not as I would wish, keeps me from seeing and participating in what is real.   My imaginary world often resides in my thoughts of right & wrong, good & bad, my concepts of who I am, my feelings about others.    In a world of imagination I am either low, worthless, inept, undeserving, or, at the other end of the same stick, superior in some way to others.

            There are other worlds beyond one’s self-limiting world of imagination, the world of bodies, the world of spirits, the world of possibilities, and the unknowable world.   To have tastes of these worlds, and tastes of the realities of involution, evolution, identity, interaction, order, and freedom, it is important for me to be able to begin to learn to have discrimination, to differentiate between my self created thoughts and feelings that carry me into the world of imagination and the real needs that exist around me.

            Imagination can begin with a strong feeling, either positive or negative.   It can be a dark negative emotion (feeling injured, hurt, jealous...) or even something approximating Wish to Be, and the mind, which is in love with its own associations, takes this feeling and starts playing with it.  

            But I want contact with the Real World.   I can manifest, I can Be, only in the world where there exist real possibilities.   A tree needs soil and water and earth in order to grow and be a tree.   Bennett gives this as an example of the triad of involution, or true creativity, in which the initiating seed calls down a higher energy, and through interaction with a receptive field, is able to produce a result.   A tree cannot grow in thin air.  

            Just so, it often occurs that I, worse than not creating anything, through imagining that I am creating something, or solving some problem, actually am, through Imagination, destroying the real possibilities that do exist for the creation or solution.    Bennett writes that the negative world of Imagination is one in which “there is the appearance of doing something, but in reality nothing happens”. (2) One thinks one is doing something, one is under this illusion, or delusion, but the actual energy is spent in talking about it,  (or feeling it, thinking it, having self-doubt).   “it is not even self-centered; it is totally unreal. “ (3)

            It is important to see the role Imagination plays in one’s life.   It is particularly important to distinguish between one’s Imagination and “the creative imagination that results when we are able to place ourselves under higher laws that open the way to new possibilities.”  (4)

Nina Sybil S.

(1) The Unknowable Gurdjieff   M. Anderson p. 98

(2) Deeper Man   “The World of Delusion”  chapt.7

(3) Ibid.

(4) Ibid.