Imagination Part Two

marc gafni
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Imagination – Part Two

Note for the scholarly reader of blogs: this is written in third person because I know scholars feel much better in third person.

The following is an article by Marc Gafni published in Parabola magazine in 2007. It is an adaption of material published in Marc Gafni’s book The Mystery of Love in the chapter on imagination. The only difference being that in Parabola the imagination is discussed separately from the context of Eros, which is the major theme and context for the imagination discussion in The Mystery of Love.

The Zohar, magnus opus of Hebrew mysticism, says it explicitly in many places: “Shechina [the feminine incarnation of the Godhead] is imagination.”

In popular understanding, imagination is implicitly considered to be “unreal.” Indeed “unreal” and “imaginary” are virtual synonyms in common usage. To undermine the reality of an antagonist’s claim, we say it is “a figment of their imagination.” In marked contrast, the Hebrew mystics held imagination to be very real. It would not be unfair to say that they considered imagination to be “realer than real.”

The power of imagination is its ability to give form to the deep truths and visions of the inner divine realm. Imagination gives expression to the higher visions of reality that derive from our divine selves. Language and rational thinking are generally unable to access this higher truth. It is the imagination that is our prophet, bringing us the word of the divine that speaks both through us and from beyond us. This is what the biblical mystic Hosea meant when he exclaimed the words of God, “By the hands of my prophets I am imagined.”

Crisis of Imagination

The greatest crisis of our lives is neither economic, intellectual, nor even what we usually call religious. It is a crisis of imagination. We get stuck on our paths because we are unable to reimagine our lives differently than they are right now. We hold on desperately to the status quo, afraid that if we let go, we will be swept away by the torrential undercurrents of our emptiness.

The most important thing in the world, implies wisdom master Nachman of Bratzlav, is to be willing to give up who you are for who you might become. He calls this process the giving up of pnimi to reach for makkif. For Master Nachman, pnimi means the old familiar things that you hold onto even when they no longer serve you on your journey. Makkif is that which is beyond you, which you can reach only if you are willing to take a leap into the abyss.

Find your risk and you will find your self. Sometimes that means leaving your home, your father’s house, and your birthplace, and traveling to strange lands. Both the biblical Abraham and the Buddha do this quite literally. But for the kabbalist, the true journey does not require dramatic breaks with past and home. It is rather a journey of the imagination.

In the simple and literal meaning of the biblical text, Abraham’s command is Lech lecha…: “Go forth from your land, your birth place and your father’s house.” Interpreted by the Zohar, the command is taken to mean not “Go forth” but “Go to yourself.” For the kabbalist this means more than the mere quieting of the mind. The journey is inwards, and the vehicle is… imagination. For imagination is the tool that allows us to image a future radically different from the past or even the present. That is exactly what Abraham was called to do–to leave behind all of the yesterdays and todays and to leap into an unknown tomorrow.

It is only in the fantasy of re-imagining that we can change our reality. It is only from this inside place that we can truly change our outside. The path of true wisdom is not necessarily to quit your job, leave your home, and travel across the country. Often such a radical break is a failure rather than a fulfillment of imagination. True wisdom is to change your life from where you are, through the power of imagination.

Think “Cookies!”

Virtually every crisis at its core is a failure of imagination. Some years back, I took off three years from “spiritual teaching” to get a sense of what the world tasted like as a householder. I took a job at a high-tech company, and from that relatively nondemanding perch began to rethink my life and beliefs.

During this period, I did a bit of consulting with Israeli high-tech start-up firms. The truth is I had little good advice to offer, but some of the high-tech entrepreneurs who had been my students would call me anyway. At one point, I received a call from a small start-up firm in Ramat Gan, Israel. The problem: they were almost out of venture capital, their market window seemed to be rapidly closing, and their Research and Development team was simply not keeping pace with their need for solutions.

Apparently the problem lay with the elevator. The company was on the top floor of an old warehouse. The elevator was small, hot, and inordinately pungent. By the time the R&D teams got through the daily morning gauntlet of the elevator, they had lost some of their creative sparkle. The president was convinced that this experience dulled their edge just enough to slow down the speed and elegance of their solutions. What to do? I had not the slightest idea.

Our meeting was on a Friday. As was my custom, I went home for the Sabbath and spoke with my own private consultant, my eight-year-old son Eitan. When I asked him what I should tell the company, he laughed and said somewhat mockingly, “It’s simple, Dad. Cookies!” I did not find this particularly funny. I raised the subject with him several times, but he would only respond, with maddening gravitas, “Cookies.”

Finally I gave up on him. Several days later I went to tell the president that I had found no solution. I was going up the same malodorous elevator, when in a blinding flash I realized what Eitan meant. Cookies! Of course! We had all been focused on elaborate ways to fix the elevator or to move locations. Eitan―with the simple brilliance of a child―reminded us of the true issue at stake. The crux of the matter was not the elevator, it was how the R&D team felt when they left the elevator. So what to do? Cookies. We set up a table with juices, fruit, and health cookies upstairs, right outside the elevator. So even though the ride up the elevator was terrible, people would spend the time in eager anticipation of the goodies that awaited them. No one had envisioned Eitan’s simple yet elegant solution because their imaginations were “stuck in the elevator.” His was a simple paradigm shift inspired by re-imagining.

We fear imagination, for imagination holds out the image of a different life. It challenges our accommodations to the status quo. It suggests that the compromises that we have based our lives upon might not have been necessary. Our fear of imagination is our fear of our own greatness.

It was Albert Einstein’s gift of imagination that allowed him to formulate the concept of relativity. Einstein literally imagined what it would be like to travel on a beam of light. What would things look like? What would another traveler, on another beam of light going in the opposite direction, look like to him? Without leaps of imagination, no growth is possible and the spirit petrifies.

The Possibility of Possibility

Nikos Kazantzakis writes, “You have your brush and your colors, paint paradise and in you go.” This is a near perfect description of the spirit that animates the biblical myth ritual that yearly celebrates the Exodus from Egypt. Every year, on the anniversary of the Hebrew Exodus, people gather for a uniquely dramatic biblical myth ritual, Passover. Unlike the Fourth of July or other freedom anniversaries, it revolves not around commemoration but imagination.

The guiding principle of the holiday is, “Every person is obligated to see him/herself as if they left Egypt.” This Talmudic epigram, the guiding mantra of the ritual, is explained by the kabbalists as an invitation to personal re-imagining of the most fantastic kind. You are in Egypt―your own personal Egypt. Egypt, Mitzrayim in Hebrew, literally means “the narrow places,” the constricted passageway of our life’s flow. Egypt―kabbalistically said to incarnate the throat―symbolizes all the words that remain stuck in our throats: the words we never speak, the stories of our lives that remain unlived, unsung, unimagined.

We are slaves. Slavery for the kabbalist is primarily a crisis of imagination. Consequently, the healing of slavery is a ritual of imagination. For an entire evening, we become dramatists, choreographers, and inspired actors. We re-imagine our lives as the first step on our path to freedom.

God is the possibility of possibility―limitless imagination. The first of the Ten Commandments is “I am God.” When this God is asked to identify himself, He responds, “I will be what I will be.” That is, “You cannot capture me in the frozen image of any time or place. To do so would be to destroy me.” It would be to violate the Second Commandment, against idolatry. Idolatry is the freezing of God in a static image. To freeze God in an image is to violate the invitation of the imagination. It is to limit possibility.

Homo Imaginus

“It is for this reason that man was called Adam: He is formed of adama, the dust of the physical, yet he can ascend above the material world through the use of his imagination and reach the level of prophecy. The Hebrew word ‘I will imagine’ is adamah.”

For Hebrew mystical master Nachman of Bratzlav, the core human movement that gives birth to our spirit is the evolution from adama to adameh. Adamah is ground, earth, Gaia. Yet it can also be read as adameh, I will imagine. Man emerges from Nature to live what philosopher Joseph Soloveitchik called “a fantasy-aroused existence.”

Imagination is not a detail of our lives nor merely a methodological tool. It is the very essence of who we are. We generally regard ourselves as thinking animals, Homo sapiens. Descartes’ “I think, therefore I am” is hardwired into our cultural genes. Yet biblical myth offers an alternative understanding of the concept of “humanness.” The closest Hebrew word to human, or the Latin homo, is “Adam.” The word “Adam” derives from the Hebrew root meaning imagination (d’mayon). The stunning implication is that the human being is not primarily Homo sapien, but “Homo imaginus.”

At the very dawn of human existence, man is described as being created in the divine image. “Divine image” does not mean a fixed and idolatrous copy of divinity. God has no fixed form. God is, instead, the possibility of possibility. The human being’s creation in the divine image needs to be understood in two ways. First, humanity is not so much ‘made in God’s image’ as we are ‘made in God’s imagination’. A product of the divine fantasy. Second, the human being himself participates in divine imagination―Homo imaginus.

We long for goodness, beauty, and kindness in a world perpetually marred by ugliness, evil, and injustice. For the biblical mystic, our imaginings of a world of justice and peace is the manifestation of the immanence of God in our lives. The creative discontent that drives us to imagine an alternative reality is the image/imagination of God beating in our breast. The cosmos is pregnant with hints that guide our imaginings. We are called to heal the world in the image of our most beautiful imaginings. Imagination is the elixir of God running through the universe.

Creating God

Imagination is powerful. Very powerful. “Think good and it will be good,” wrote Menachem Mendel Schneerson, the last master of Chabad mysticism. This is true not merely because of the psychological power of positive thinking, but also because every imagining gives birth to something real that eventually manifests itself in the universe.

Imagination is transformative not only on the human plane. It has a powerful effect on the divine scale as well. Kabbalists teach that each dimension of divinity, known as a sefira in kabbalah, has a color that incarnates it. By ecstatically imagining the colors of the sefirot and combining them according to the appropriate mystical instructions, one can actually have an impact on the inner workings of the divine force. The Zohar goes further in audacious formulations that, upon first reading, describe man creating God in his image―that it to say, in his imagination. For the Zohar such imagination simply reinforces the substantive reality of God. Or to put it slightly differently, while there is a limited truth in saying that God is a figment of human imagination, we need to remember that imagination is a figment of God.

The difference is simple. For the kabbalist, imagination is not childish fancy. It is the spiritual reality called forth by the sacred child within. The God we do not create doesn’t exist. Yes, there is a divine force that exists beyond us. Yet there is also a powerfully manifest current of divinity that is nourished by our being. The act of nourishing, sustaining, and even creating divinity is called “theurgy” by scholars of mysticism. The term expresses the human ability to dramatically impact and even grow God. One of the great tools of theurgy is imagination. In fact, theurgic imagination is the medium and message of a kabbalistic re-reading of “In the beginning…” The first string of letters in the Bible, “bereshit bara elokim…” can be re-read as “b’roshi tbara elokim”―in my mind God is created.