The Power of Story: Imagination is more important than Knowledge.

“I do not know what bounds may be placed on the power of the imagination. It can heal the body, reveal the secrets of divine truth, transform the personality, incarnate God, and open up worlds of infinite diversity and potential.”

Jeffrey Raff, Jung and the Alchemical Imagination

“The imagination is, therefore, not a source of deception and delusion, but a capacity to sense what you do not know, to intuit what you cannot understand, to be more than you can know.”

William Irwin Thompson, Gaia, A Way of Knowing

Albert Einstein said, “Imagination is more important than knowledge.” Samuel Taylor Coleridge called the imagination ‘the living power and prime agent of all human perception’. If imagination is so important to our lives, why aren’t we trained to use it?

What is the power of the imagination that it can move us to tears, to action, to love, to surrender, to death, to transformation? Both mystics and quantum physicists know that the human imagination is the most creative faculty we possess. Imagination is involved in magical workings as well as the transformation of consciousness. The Creative Imagination, like the quantum field, is the source of manifestation.

Imagination is foremost the language of the feminine, of the heart, of life itself. It is a soul language of images and symbols, of music and art, myth and spirituality: a language that has the ability to move us at the deepest levels of our being. It is also the universal language of our species, the one language we all share – the language of the right brain’s connection to dreams and visions. Our modern culture has relegated the workings of the imagination to children, but it is too powerful a tool to leave behind once we leave childhood.

So what is the imagination and how it is more important than knowledge? The first thing you need to know about imagination is that you need to use it to understand it – a very concrete, feminine way of learning! The imagination is playful and non-directed, and needs our conscious focus to work with it successfully. This is what The Secret was trying to show us. Unfortunately, that developed into a form of capitalistic spiritualty when the focus seemed to be to get more money or a new house!

The Creative Imagination is more profound than that. And its true purpose is to open up communication with our souls, so we can live outside the box of conventional morality and thinking in a life that’s unquely our own. I just saw a Disney movie (yes, I know! But the Disney writers are getting very creative!) called Wish. It’s about a magician who promises people security and comfort if they come to his kingdom and give him their wishes, which he promises to keep safe. And once a year, he grants one of those wishes. Once he has the wishes, people forget what they are. They lose their connection to their imaginations.

This is what our society says – forget your deep soul wish and work for the Man who will keep you safe and secure. The heroine wants people to get their wishes back so they can make them happen themselves. Once they do, their imaginations open up. Bravo for Disney on this one! But will people who don’t know how the imagination gives meaning to life recognize this deep message? Hopefully, the kids will.

Stories (and dreams) are the magical tools of the imagination. But we need to sit with them and let their messages perculate down into our souls. Our modern tendency is to just flip to the next station and watch something else.

Human beings are creatures of story. We make sense of our world by telling stories - what our day was like, how we came to understand an experience, what happened to us on vacation. Through stories we imagine our lives into being. As visionary-activist Caroline Casey says, “A good story conjures the reality.” We shape the universe through this storytelling capacity. It is a very right-brain, feminine talent.

When was the last time you sat around a campfire in the woods, listening to a breeze moving through the leaves overhead, and then looking up, been amazed by the brilliant stars playing hide and seek beyond the treetops? The night, the fire, the stars and the breeze in the trees all evoke a response in you, a response of joy and wonder. Before long, you might find yourself telling stories, to others if they are with you, or to yourself if you are alone. Your imagination is awake, and you find yourself meeting the Universe face to face. This is how children feel. This is also how our ancestors felt in the face of the majesty of Life, before our modern rationality and our modern conveniences blinded us. It seems that only at night or in nature are we able to come close to this ancient mystery once again.

The Native Americans lived close to this mystery day and night, as did the Celts and other aboriginal peoples. They lived with hearts opened to the mysteries of the Earth and they were able to penetrate the veils between the worlds. The Aborigines of Australia can still walk in the Dreamtime; Celts might vanish into the Hollow Hills where the Fairy Folk still dance. Is our modern life so full of joy that we dare banish these other realms forever as 'just so' stories? I think not, since joy is one of the things that is singularly lacking in most people's lives today.

We once had joy. Not so very long ago, we Westerners still believed in a cosmos that was friendly and awesome and full of mystery. Nature was alive with spirit and we humans were part of nature. We had a sense of place; we belonged here. Then in the sixteenth century at the beginning of our modern era with its new scientific worldview, we lost our inheritance – we no longer saw ourselves as a part of Nature. Unlike such scientists as Galileo, Newton and Kepler, who combined a deep reverence for the Cosmos as God’s creation and a need to understand and prove how that creation worked, this new scientific philosophy viewed matter as dead. The Earth is only dead matter, animals have no feelings and plants have no consciousness. This belief itself sprang from a religious viewpoint that believed that the Earth was inherently evil. Science slowly gave us a new view of ourselves and suddenly we don’t fit into this picture of a dead world that has to be conquered at all costs. We lost our true home when we stopped honoring this beautiful Earth as our Mother and Sustainer and instead rushed to own, rape and abuse Her.

It’s only been in the last decades that we’ve remembered that plants and animals have their own consciousness and that the Earth herself might be aware of what’s happening to her. I like to think that Mother Earth is in men-o-pause – putting humans on pause as we watch her strong storms and upheavels.

So how do we reclaim our place in Mother Earth’s biosphere? How do we reclaim our imaginations? We do it through a more feminine type of meditation – we ask for images rather than try to ignore them and leave them behind. Most meditation techniques come from masculine religions which think that life here on Earth is an illusion and that ‘heaven’ is better. The ancient goddess religions knew that Earth reflected the magic and mystery of the heavens, and so they listened to what their imaginations, visions, instincts and feelings were to help guide them. While we all share a common imaginal language, we are also spiritual individuals having a human experience, so how we relate to our own imagination will be unique.

The issue with the imagination, or what Jung called ‘the collective unconscious’, is that it is vast and confusing, and it can bring us great insights or cause us to fall into delusion and illusion, as is happening today for many people. Obviously, social media plays a part in that, for it traps the imagination in a fixed story of betrayals and wounds, rather than letting each individual’s imagination work it out. But working with the imagination depends on how connected our conscious ego is to our Self-- the archetype of wholeness within each human being. When we understand how the unconscious works, we can work with it to discover its hidden treasures.

And yet, it is what stories we choose to tell that make all the difference between hope and despair, fullness of life and scarcity, life and death. There are also cultural stories which can feed a people with visions and dreams of their future, or close off all hope of future fulfillment. These stories can make us insecure and fearful, or inspire us to courageously stand up to oppression and death. When a people lose touch with their cultural stories, they lose touch with their souls and with their place in the Cosmos. This has happened with conquered peoples when their stories are taken away from them. It is what is happening in America and around the world today. We are in danger of losing our individual, cultural and spiritual stories to the corporate story.

That’s why so many people can be deluded into voting for people who don’t represent them and their needs politically. Some people in the US keeping sending representatives to Congress who then work for their corporate handlers rather than for the people they’re supposed to represent. They deny their people the medical help they need, they deny children the food they need, they deny people the education they need to do well in the world. It’s because these representatives project their own hidden agendas onto others who are trying to do the right thing. And yet the people keep sending them back to Congress to ‘represent’ them. This is the imagination at its most delusional, when it’s stuck in a story – whether it’s the Christian End-Time story or the story that liberals are socialists, or that there’s an evil cabal drinking children’s blood, or the everyone is out to get me story. The imagination is dead when this happens.

Each of us has to work to reclaim our connection to the Creative Imagination. And we need to do it playfully as well as consciously. It’s never this OR that. It’s always this AND that.

We all need a new story – I’ve been saying this since the 90s. Our lives can change if we change our story. That’s the magic of the imagination. Because we’ve ignored it, we all need to work on understanding the symbolic language of the Imagination. When we do, that’s when the magic happens!

Until next time. Merry meet and merry part. And merry meet again!

Cathy

(Excerpts of this essay are taken from my book Wisdom’s Daughters: How Women Can Change the World.)