How Does Our Imagination Actually Work? - Part 3 in the Buried Imagination
“The poet’s eye, in fine frenzy rolling,
Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven;
And as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen
Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.”
In the late 1980’s Walt Disney trademarked a term that had been in circulation during wartime America—the term “Imagineer”. The team at Disney was attempting to create language around the vast creative force as they pioneered theme parks, cruise lines, music, movies, etc. “[We call this] Imagineering—the blending of creative imagination with technical know-how.” They're pie-in-the-sky ideas that seem impossible at first, then become reality with the partnerships of creativity, skill, and of course cash.
One associate of Disney in the 60’s described their culture of imagination this way:
““Walt Disney is involved in every operation of every show,” an associate reports.
“He approves the ideas, the scripts, and everything else. You can’t call this a one-man operation—hardly, with 900 employees working here in the studio.
“But we’re all guided by Walt’s ideas and vision: good taste, imagination, and creativity. A man who worked for him years ago summed it up perfectly. He made up a word.
“He called it imagineering, and it’s applicable.””
Now, with whatever you think about Disney currently, it’s been a powerhouse for imagination—and what I want to focus on is the felt-unity of separate creative acts that become one under a single leader. We experience an animated movie, a day at a theme park, a ride on a roller coaster, etc., as one beautiful experience. But actually, these are the collaboration of a variety of acts and types of imagination that are underneath the head-creator’s creative mind.
And, Disney, with its magic and its faults, is only a microcosm of the power of the imagination that we inherit from the Creator himself.
Our imaginations, too, are multifunctional and if we take a moment to consider them, we’ll see the layers of wisdom God has created in us through the power of image.
Our imaginative capacity can be divided into three different modes:
1) image as our identity, being a creature of God’s own imagination,
2) imagination as a landscape (the primary imagination) and
3) imagination as active choice (the active, or secondary, imagination). [i]
First, we see imagination as identity in the Scriptures—we are created as image bearers of God’s own nature. As the image of God, we are images ourselves. As a reflection of him, we express a finite pattern of the nature of God on earth.[ii] Out of this, our lives, actions and interior world become a vessel by which we interact with God while reflecting his heart and personhood. An image is who we are—we are the live outworking of his imagination.[iii] Not only does this give huge value to our lives and actions, but it makes sense of the layers of personality we find in the imagination—is it any surprise that this vast capacity reflects our infinite Creator?[iv]
Second, imagination is a landscape in which our souls live—the clay of our spiritual formation. Our soul, as God created it, is a landscape of images and forms that make up the texture of our experience of self, God, and others. All these images were once raw impressions, all have been interpreted and reinterpreted over time, and all are God’s original design and dream. Much of the positive and negative spiritual formation in our lives arises from the repetitive use and reinterpretation of these forms. To the degree the landscape of our imagination is in God’s order and under his rule, we flourish. And to the degree it is out of alignment, we wither and perish.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge calls this landscape the primary imagination—the perceptive capacity of our souls by which the symbols and images that make up all of God’s creation arise in our individual mind.[v] These perceptions that become our mental image of a tree, a fish, or a cross are a “repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM.” In a way, God is actually re-creating the image of those realities he first created within our individual perception. How beautiful![vi]
Consider that the very formation of all the ideas and symbols that cross your consciousness from the womb until now are a repetition of God’s work—his voice fashioning once again the things he first delighted in thousands and thousands of years ago. And these forms and images become the metaphors and meanings that fill our language. The content by which we relate with each other and with God.
The primary imagination includes our inner thoughts, emotions, dreams, desires, longings, griefs, anxieties, appetites, perceptions, motives, impressions, even language itself—all the mental and emotional space we inhabit—this is the landscape of our primary imagination. These layers of images and ideas become a playground or battlefield depending on the formation of this space.
The cross of Christ is a great example of how the primary imagination works. We hear the word cross, without our permission our minds imagine the materials, wooden beams fashioned to fit together and stand vertically. Then, equally as quickly, our minds recall the perpendicular wood beams as a Roman device of extreme torture. Lastly, most gloriously, as believers we locate this as that holy and terrible moment where Jesus took on Death and formed it into Life. Our imagination integrates all three of these images into the central Christian symbol that points to our salvation. We may speak of the cross as the truth of the gospel, the reason for our faith, but it arrived in our mind as layered images relying on the primary imagination. And as the layers of meaning impress upon our mind, our heart is moved toward this Jesus, his sacrifice, and we worship him for the cross he bore that we know as our victory.
Third, imagination is engaged as an active choice. In this mode, known as secondary or active imagination,imagination is a creative movement that ancients called “genius” or our “muse” that would impel an individual to create some expression as a cultural act for a community or an individual act of self-disclosure. At times, a savant will create a symphony or poem that moves us to tears. Other times, writers, sculptures, actors, musicians engage lifestyles of creative-acts, making this secondary imagination a specialty profession.
But many of us use the active imagination on an everyday level, creating in meaningful spaces of our homes and work almost without realizing it. Perhaps for you this a gardening space, a sketch pad, designing the interior of a home, or organizing a meeting—all of these are acts of secondary imagination. [vii] If you think about it, the whole of culture and civilization is an accumulation of active imaginations. The goal and work of the active imagination is not to escape or hide in a false reality, but actually to discover more of reality, to follow after the Creator himself and discover how his mind and heart work in all his manifold ways in creation.[viii]
I invite you to talk to the Lord even now:
Lord, what is coming up when I consider these layers of my imagination
What is my initial reaction to being made in Your image? To being an image of You?
What goes through my mind when I think about the landscape of my imagination? Is there a place in me where images naturally flow through my mind? When is that? What sort of images? Have I shared those with you?
What early images in my history might have shaped who I am? Are their longings or hopes? Loss or dreams connected to images when I was growing up?
What sort of ways do I use my active imagination? Is it around the house? At work? With others? When I’m alone? Who does my imagination impact? What sort of things “come out” when I imagine?
What would it be like to share my imaginative space with you, God? What comes up when I think about letting You be in this space? Love me in this space? Reign in this space? Lead this space?
What would this landscape look like if God was there?
We’ve been considering this God-given capacity called the imagination in a series of posts (Click here to check out the first post in the series)
Footnotes
[i] “It is a dull and obtuse mind, that must divide in order to distinguish; but it is a still worse, that distinguishes in order to divide. In the former, we may contemplate the source of superstition and idolatry; in the latter, of schism, heresy, and a seditious and sectarian spirit.” - Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Aids to Reflection; and, The Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit
[ii] “Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion….So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. And God blessed them,” (Genesis 1:26-28, ESV) also, “What is man that you are mindful of him, and the son of man that you care for him? Yet you have made him a little lower than the heavenly beings and crowned him with glory and honor. You have given him dominion over the works of your hands; you have put all things under his feet,” (Psalm 8:4-6, ESV).
[iii] “But when we come to consider the acts embodying the Divine thought….we discover at once, for instance, that where a man would make a machine, or a picture, or a book, God makes the man that makes the book, or the picture, or the machine. Would God give us a drama? He makes a Shakespeare. Or would he construct a drama more immediately his own? He begins with the building of the stage itself, and that stage is a world—a universe of worlds. He makes the actors, and they do not act,—they are their part. He utters them into the visible to work out their life—his drama. When he would have an epic, he sends a thinking hero into his drama, and the epic is the soliloquy of his Hamlet. Instead of writing his lyrics, he sets his birds and his maidens a-singing. All the processes of the ages are God’s science; all the flow of history is his poetry. His sculpture is not in marble, but in living and speech-giving forms, which pass away, not to yield place to those that come after, but to be perfected in a nobler studio. What he has done remains, although it vanishes; and he never either forgets what he has once done, or does it even once again. As the thoughts move in the mind of a man, so move the worlds of men and women in the mind of God, and make no confusion there, for there they had their birth, the offspring of his imagination. Man is but a thought of God.” – George MacDonald, A Dish of Orts
[iv] “He has made everything beautiful in its time. Also, he has put eternity into man's heart, yet so that he cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end,” (Ecclesiastes 3:11)
[v] “The Imagination then I consider either as primary, or secondary. The primary Imagination I hold to be the living power and prime agent of all human perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM.” – Coleridge, Biographia Literaria
[vi] The novelist and poet, George MacDonald, too, describes that the created order is “an inexhaustible storehouse of forms…the crystal pitchers that shall protect his thought and not need to be broken that the light may break forth…God has made the world that it should thus serve his creature, developing in the service that imagination whose necessity it meets.” We are saturated with images and forms that contain the very creative power of God, and we are joined to his first creative act in our very living, thinking, speaking, and emoting. It’s as if the Holy Spirit that brooded over creation, is also brooding over all the beauty of our lives—literally inside the perceptive and cognitive powers of our human mind and heart—to, once again, form order from chaos.
[vii] Samuel Taylor Coleridge calls this the secondary imagination—the intentional, willful creation of a phrase, story, language, poem, song, script, novel, etc. This is what we commonly refer to when we talk about imagination and child’s play—pretend. And yet, for adults, the secondary imagination explains why art, stories, and song move us so deeply—the secondary imagination is singing or sighing with the perceptive-art of the author. Moving deeper, the stories of our lives—the ones we dwell inside—are potent with “crystal pitchers” of light, meaning-filled containers that arise from self or God. This is the sacred space we witness when we listen with God’s heart to another’s story. For this is how God is perceiving our stories, the very capacities, the structure of our imagination is architectured after the Creator’s imagination. And Jesus is both incensed and set-on his disciples using their eyes to see the Kingdom and using their ears to hear the King. This isn’t optional for him in Matthew 13, this is literally the difference between faith and unbelief.
[viii] “Licence is not what we claim when we assert the duty of the imagination to be that of following and finding out the work that God maketh. Her part is to understand God ere she attempts to utter man. Where is the room for being fanciful or riotous here? It is only the ill-bred, that is, the uncultivated imagination that will amuse itself where it ought to worship and work.” – George MacDonald, A Dish of Orts
