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Image and Imagination
December 30, 2014
— art, dreams, image, imagination
psyche
psyche
Each night our psyche brings us images in dreams. We connect with them and live within the dream during our sleep. Upon awakening we sometimes lose the dream images as we file that dream somewhere within our unconscious and decide it is not part of our true reality. Notice that we are within the dream while asleep, and then the images are considered to be unreal when we are awake. We live within a gallery of art and image, dramas with set and costume, in our sleeping world. Our awakened ego is concerned with gathering information and meaning rather than absorbing art for art’s sake. We wake up and enter the world with an explanation for everything. By dismissing the power of the imagination we loose the opportunity to individuate. We diminish our own imagination by interpreting our dream images rather than interacting with them.
We run two systems in our awakened world, an economic system and a therapeutic system. All of our activities are divided into economic obligations and challenges or curing our ills. We are concerned with “growth” of our personal economy or “healing” our wounds. It is easy to see the connections that contribute to the cyclical nature of this limited spiral. What is not so simple is to break these cycles. If our addictions are fed by information, image is converted by the mind into interpretation. The ego prides itself on its ability to interpret everything. Since the ego determines that it alone is conscious, all the rest of reality can be fit into the unconscious basket. The ego explains the image and then its importance is belittled. We cease to interact with it once it has an explanation. Imagery has no explanation. Art and image are animate and inherently charged with insight.
I intend to respect the imagery inside of me by embracing a more poetic view of life. By bringing focus to imagination and imagery I want to contribute to my own creativity. I will investigate how I can interact with my psychic and artistic life through practice. This intention can only be controlled to a certain extent, and it is not my hope to contain my psyche, but to explore it. It has a lot to say.
comments
“Psyche” looks like Icarus’ device which is almost like a therapeutic system’s dream come economic.
I love the commentary. the question I would ask is how you can interact with your psychic and artistic life. One can get caught up in that world and ignore some of the pragmatic, practical issues of everyday life. Being psychic can take you down a merry path too if not balanced by the checks and balances of “reality” (whatever you consider to be reality)
Good points, Stevie. I think we tend to make psychology an internal personal thing, but the “outer world” can be taken as psychology as well. I took that workshop last summer from the Contemplative people. James Findley left us with 7 years of very monkish difficult homework. I am not disciplined like they are, but am talking about pragmatically bringing out the images in my dreams. I can do on a small scale what the big, serious meditators do. In the process I will crank out some art.
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