Beyond the neat distinction between reason and common sense on one hand, and fantasy and wishful thinking on the other, we enter the vast expanse of the imagination, a dimension tapped into by creative artists of all times, but not acknowledged enough in common parlance.
Analytical philosophy and cognitive psychology have given both abstract and empirical accounts of this “image-making faculty.”
These approaches are not wrong, but partial and reductive, because they rely on a bidimensional anthropology that contemplates a human being composed of mind and body only, functioning in a mechanical way.
As already pointed out, humans are multidimensional beings.
The imagination is more than an individual faculty; it is an elemental force field, the most direct pointer to our multidimensionality, and the existence of psyche and spirit.
Psyche, or soul, is the relational element of the human being embedded in a complex web of relations and interactions. Spirit is the fire, the vital spark in us.
Emotions and intuition are the tools of the imagination, in that they provide energetic information about the way something affects us.
In fact, when we visualize or construct a sensory picture of a situation, our emotions shift and change, and our neural activity is affected too. MRI scans prove that the body-mind does not distinguish between a simulation and an experience of something. In both cases, we feel emotions and register them as “real.” Thus, working with the imagination through sensory detail arousing emotions is effective. The reverse is also true: spontaneous intuition and emotions give us access to the imagination and to the multidimensional body of the human constitution.
Paying attention to the intuitive feelings and emotions we feel in our bodies is a gateway that enables us to retrieve the alphabet of the imagination, as the main language of our whole being.
When we imagine a situation, our physical body is involved too through the experience of emotions. In the same way, embodiment can affect and enhance our ability to tap into the imagination, as in the case of acting out a scenario, for example.
The embodied imagination can help us access new concepts and understandings through veritable shifts, insights that are signalled by a change in the way we describe and inhabit a situation.
In other words, language itself signals these shifts in intuitive understanding through heightened metaphors.
According to Greek etymology, “metaphor” means “to carry across.” This is usually interpreted as transferring a quality from an object to another to stress their common attributes. However, in this light, metaphor is also what carries us across, over and beyond our current ways of understanding and processing experience, into the next.
In this sense, metaphor can signal a shift in the way we come to experience, know and register situations and events.
We can feed the imagination to evolve or manipulate. We can also cultivate imagination as a portal to living with what is from moment to moment: to awaken and abide by the mystery of existence, and become stewards in service to life, in its multiple relationships.
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