Imagination as the Next Step in Healing Pain – by Marc Gafni
marc gafni
published on marcgafni.com
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It is Sunday morning. I am at home in Salt Lake City. I just woke up; said the morning blessing on the study of dharma and torah. I am sharing with you some initial musings of the morning. A gorgeous and wondrous day to you my friend…
Yes, yes, I meant YOU!
Good morning, good evening, good day, just that it should be good for you!
Feel free to respond to this blog at info@marcgafni.com
Leadership and Imagination
Adam in Hebrew means, in one etymology, Imagination. Dancing with the Hebrew word Dimayon. Imagination.
Most of what goes wrong in our world emerges from crisis. Crisis―when normal life is derailed and trauma and tragedy strike terror into our hearts and bodies―a crisis has taken place. More often than not, however, the source of our trauma is not a crisis of finance or economics; not a crisis of resources or power. More often than not, pain is caused by a crisis of imagination.
A crisis of imagination.
There are some Chinese linguists who suggest that in the original Chinese characters, the word crisis means both danger and opportunity. Whether or not this is an accurate read of the original Mandarin, a subject of some controversy among linguists, is beside the point. It is a simple and powerful truth.
A crisis in imagination. An inability to feel into what or where is the possibility which lines the rupture. An inability to find the spark of light hidden in the apparently shattered vessel.
What happens in crisis, when we have not evolved enough in love to call forth the power of imagination, is a freezing of images. Imagination, fantasy, that which calls forth the fantastic.
When we lose touch with imagination, we get stuck in one image, one snapshot of reality, of the situation.
This is called idolatry. We worship a frozen image―a graven image, as idols are sometimes called in the King James translation of the Bible. An image, which is already dead and in the grave. An image too grave and serious to find the power of laughter.
For it is the faculty of laughter which so often unlocks the power of imagination.
A crisis is unexpected. It is a surprise, and therefore a gift of the Gods. Surprise is the divine whisper caressing our ear softly yet insistently saying, “Grow, grow grow…”
We need to imagine ourselves out of the old and tired “us and them” thinking. We need to imagine ourselves out of the ‘thinking’ in which we need to demonize the other, or make the other bad or wrong in order to make ourselves right. We need to imagine ourselves out of scenarios in which crisis produces devastation instead of development, humiliation instead of humility, hell and hatred instead of wholeness and healing.
The essential task of the leader is to know how―in a time of crisis―to creatively access the faculty of imagination. To be not only homo hostilis, but what I like to call Homo Imaginus.
The leader cannot be swept away by the crowd, lost in dark brutalities of mass malice or mob mendacity. The leader must free himself from the crowd in his mind and the mob in his heart. The leader guides and gods the crowd to its own highest self by offering a vision. This is what we mean when we say a true leader must be a visionary. The leader must offer the people an alternative imagining so that they might see what is possible. For divinity always lies in the possibility of possibility.
The very definition of a mob is a large group mired in the muck of one possibility, one perspective… rushing headlong into the oblivion of dullness, failing to imagine a way out of their own anger, their own pain, or their own base egoic instincts.
How we handle a crisis reveals a lot about who we are. Or at least who we were at that moment.
Hopefully we evolve.
Even if we did not handle the crisis in an evolved way that accessed the power of imagination, the ability to go back to the pivoting point of crisis and to re-imagine our course of action is―in an of itself―healing. It is never too late―as long as oxygen circulates in our lungs and life throbs in our hearts.
Two years later, ten years later, if we can re-imagine the story, then the story begins to heal. For imagination gives birth to courage, which gives birth to right action.
In Hebrew wisdom this is called the spiritual process of Teshuvah. Healing and Transformation.
-Marc Gafni
