(imagination, orthodoxy, oneness)

or how traditionalists miss the forest and the trees

an orthodox fellow on twix (Nathaniel R. Clark; he is writing a book on the symbolism of bread, which is an interesting topic to me) made a series of posts about the imagination that naturally led me to memories of my time in the orthodox trenches, fighting imaginary devils, and thoughts about oneness and tradition, two of my favorite punching bags (they are favorites not just because of pleasant feelings of purgation, or the fun derived from laughing at absurdity, but also because i actually believe they can lead people to nihilism, and i live to serve).

the position of the church fathers and church doctrine on the imagination, which the posts presented, is rather simple when stripped of all the complex jargon. the summary is: it’s fallen, thus it’s bad. he posted a few books that deal with the subject (Philokalia collection, fr. Seraphim Rose, st. Maximus the Confessor, you know the drill). unfortunately, there was a time not too long ago (if we’re counting only worldly time) when i read stupid amounts of this stuff, always in search of more. until i understood there was no more. not within that tradition. i kept pushing, but that’s a whole other story. the point is i know exactly what those people say, i know the position. more than that i have spent years engaging with this stuff, and testing its implications, which is what led me to reject them.

yet it is still a topic that interests me, it always has. and it became more of interest as i rejected the church doctrine on it, which after all is not surprising. because the position of the orthodox church, specifically, is so very negative towards imagination, and even more so as a means to know anything about God (which they believe is the absolute root of everything). thus, if you are, say, artistically inclined, but also religiously minded and hearted, you are a bit of a romantic, perhaps, then church doctrine is going to conflict with your nature, it will tell you these aspects of yourself are evil, and it may kill any inspiration you are meant to have. i just couldn’t do it.

(much like the vast majority of deep theology and metaphysics, and also of nihilism, which is not far off, it does contradict itself almost always in practice. and in the case of the imagination, even if we accept that it is a fallen faculty alone, it is vital in lots of ways to live pious lives here and now, just because to deal with our neighbors we require imagination, we put ourselves in other’s shoes, but we don’t know, at least not at first. it has to be a leap of faith. and people of course do it all the time, most of it even unconscious (this is the real problem). so in the end the traditional doctrine on this is particularly anti-human, and thankfully only psychopaths are incapable of empathy, and thus even christians and vedantists and nihilists are, usually, at least a little human, and thank God. for some reason i imagine one of them reading this while eating a scone and drinking some coffee, my evil imagination, their evil appetites).

part of the problem when i encounter this type of religious person is that they always say on the one hand that they are open to debate (and the very publishing of an idea, even if not our own, on a public forum is to invite engagement and discussion, dare i say, it tempts us with imagination!), but then will always accept whatever the church consensus is. two things follow from the latter: one is that i can just consult an encyclopedia to know their views, which aren’t even theirs. this is not a sin, but it is boring (and especially if i have read the books from which those views were made canonical, for me it’s like an old card trick, and one i already know the rather uninteresting secret of). even something as fundamental as definitions are already a given. there is only the question according to the canon, and no more experience is admitted, nor expansion on the concept is possible. and thus, secondly, there is no way any discussion can properly lead them to accept anything i say as even valid, since i am not, as far as i know, a church authority. this is outstandingly ironic, as noted above, when the question is imagination.

(of course i know debate, discussion, etc, it’s all for public consumption. i should do my part for the circus, perhaps, but i think i am a different kind of freak)

the views of the church on the imagination are this, if you really strip them down to bare essentials and put it in more natural language: imagination is a faculty we acquired through the fall, which is, if you remember, the worst sin. for the orthodox, the fall was an unmitigated disaster, until Jesus did something about it. well, actually it’s still a disaster. that’s why we must be on our toes against the imagination, not to mention all the other sensations, they are all evil in the end, and tell us nothing about reality. why, because… reality is God, ultimately, it all comes from that one thing. and we acquired imagination by falling away from it, and need to shed it to get back to it. thus imagination is a faculty that we don’t need to reach God, or to accomplish God’s purposes, even perhaps God’s purposes for our meaningless lives here on earth. little amusements that comfort our hearts at the end of a hard day, an inside joke you play with your wife, looking at your children and imagining them grown, a sunset where you see beyond the horizon, all of that means zero, and what you really want is the One. in short, it’s all a lie and a temptation from the devil to get you far from God. and these are not the worse types either, how could God forgive such crimes as painting something that is not there, or arranging sound in pleasant new ways, and boy let us not get started on putting words in front of other words, that is the safest way to hell. so you don’t need imagination, really, and not only do you not need it, but beware, it’s very dangerous, like crystal meth. imagination prevents your merger with the oneness the same way crystal meth prevents your integration into polite society.

my views on imagination are not that complicated either, though just like the church doctrine they do have massive implications. and really it’s not just because of the evidence of my senses, but out of simple logic from my own metaphysical premises, which are not emanationism, nor the intellectual fraud of ex nihilo but not ex deo (that is, church doctrine on creation, an unholy mix). first, i accept creation as working with something that exists, so it is personal, by someone, and to someone, and done for a purpose, and from that purpose comes meaning, and thus obviously i reject as absurd the idea of a creator who has no imagination, an implication of the orthodox doctrine.

(christian metaphysics is even harder to discuss than normal oneness because it jumps at will between personal creator and impersonal emanator, sometimes for the sake of argument this, other times that. but this should be an either or, as far as i’m concerned, the connection is impossible, and the jumping unearned, a foul against the rules of logic. but mostly they always fall back on the impersonal emanator anyway. it’s like they worship the network of fungi that connects all the roots below the forest, but also say they worship the most beautiful tree in it. but really they consider the fungal network superior, that’s what underpins it, quite literally, and they treat it as the highest aspiration. (this analogy of course is unfair to real fungal networks, which are not actually just One, and thus have more personality than whatever void the oneness people worship. my apologies to the fungal realm.)

as for imagination, and if it can be used to know God, it’s so simple and so ancient, and also so perfectly applicable at so many levels of experience, that it’s a testament to the confusing power of abstract theology that people can’t see how absurd it is. God made Man in his Image. regardless of how you put it, this idea is more or less central to all religion, with the basic implication that God imagined men before making them, and perhaps a suggestion that the purpose of men is to do likewise. again, it’s central, not peripheral.

this is impossible for the metaphysical abstraction that lies at the heart of church doctrine, however, which is the same as all the other oneness religions. Jesus and the incarnation really have no meaning at all. not retrospectively, and not going forward. everything humanity has acquired after the fall is necessarily evil, and thus an impediment for connection to the divine.

by default this position removes any meaning to the experience of incarnation, i mean our own, since the oneness view is that taking flesh is a big tragedy with only downsides. (the church people call this view gnostic, which is funny in itself, but funniest of all is that they say it is heretical to believe it while actually believing it). and of course this would make sense for anyone who does not believe gods can become incarnate on the earth. but not for a christian, at least in theory. for someone who worships as the highest the spiritual fungal network, it is precisely impossible to become incarnate, except perhaps as the fungal network. (again, apologies to the fungal realm).

it is of course obvious that imagination can be misused, that is, used for evil purposes. but this applies to a whole range of psychic and even somatic capacities, all with the potential to impede our spiritual progress. but i reject the idea that because error exists, then truth cannot be discovered; that because it is possible to misuse a gift, you are not meant to use it at all. use it or lose it, nerd. (if only a talented storyteller had used his imagination to make up a parable about this).

i also reject as performatively contradictory to go on alive believing that we can add nothing to creation of our own. therefore i reject it as absurd.

now that i have had more time to think on this, i came to the conclusion that the imagination is an actual ingrained quality of spirits, wills, intelligences. there is no act of will without first an act of imagination, thus every choice implies it. disregarding for now the question of whether will can be created from scratch, but thinking only from the moment Adam was given a body in Eden, he had to have had imagination to communicate with God, and tend to the garden, and then talk with his wife (trust me, you definitely need it for the latter, if you have a good wife).

thus it’s not a faculty acquired after the fall, although of course, the more we use it, and with our eyes open to contrast, the more we see. and we can use it more skilfully now, because we are more individual, and for both good and bad purposes, of course. (there is no doubt something of a lag in most modern humans, to the extent that they cannot but use their imaginations, but they are not conscious of it, and this is very dangerous indeed). but i don’t think it’s something acquired by eating from the tree of knowledge, and thus a direct result of the fall, though it was deepened by it. and actually its deepening happened in many subsequent falls and stages of humanity.

(i also disagree that eating from the tree was only a bad thing and led only to bad results, when it is obvious by the very name of the tree from which the fruit came that it was a mixture, so i don’t believe anything acquired through the fall is necessarily only bad anyway.)

lastly, i think the imagination is specifically an activity of the soul (rather than the body or the spirit alone), being the intercourse of the sensual and spiritual eyes. but in this it is not alone, unless we expand the meaning of imagination to be any creative engagement with reality, which of course, we can given the proper context, and we did above, mostly. but what i mean is that there are other faculties of the sort that usually go by other names, like say, charisma or eloquence. although no doubt, church people are also bound to distrust these other faculties as well. it’s all bad news, according to them.

this was longer than i expected, so we should end on a joke.

maybe these people just lack imagination.