Imagination

Posted By Mahabodhi on Mar 20, 2024 | 0 comments

Below is an excerpt from my forthcoming book…

© Mahabodhi Burton

4 minute read

This excerpt is taken from the chapter on ‘Buddhist Practice’ and follows on from the section on ‘Insight.’

Imagination

Conditionality has a constructive aspect—when conditions come together to produce something new, just as much as it has the destructive one—when conditions fall apart, as we rehearsed in the latter meditations. In order to build something new—as it were from the ashes—we need to engage what Sangharakshita calls our Imaginal faculty. Just as we used constructive imagination in the metta bhavana, we need to use it to chart the path to Nirvana;

‘lmagination is a power or capacity or even faculty of the individual.… Everyone has that faculty of imagination as a potentiality and it is the essential vehicle of a genuine moral, aesthetic, and spiritual life.… As a potentiality it is intrinsic to the human mind. It does not however actively function in everyone, or at least it does not function as a dominant or controlling force and is not at all conscious. It must be recognized, educated, and cultivated if it is to come into decisive play. The metaphor of faculty teaches us the attitude we need if that cultivation and education are to take place. It is not a matter of constructing something or bringing something into being, but of discovering a capacity we already have, identifying it and giving it importance—just as athletes might develop bodily skills they were born with once they recognize their capacity. We each need to feed the imaginal faculty we already have so it grows in range and vitality and plays an increasingly significant part in our lives.’[1]

The way imagination works is the mind selects an image which it assigns significance to, and then ‘follows’; for example, if we wanted to encourage ourselves to be more courageous, we might identify with a superhero on TV, using their qualities as a blueprint or lead. The challenge then becomes whether or not our life lives up to that vision; if we never actually are heroic in real life, then our imagination in this case is fantasy. But if our contemplation of that person does result in our being more heroic, then we might call that imagination proper. But without imagination in the first place, there would be nothing for us to live up to.

Right View is that view which is in line with Reality—the way that things are, which leads to Nirvana. Man cannot take too much reality, which is why we need poetry, myth and symbol as intermediaries to help us approach it. Symbols are man-made creations designed to do a specific job and have to be treated as such; they are necessary whenever what is being represented cannot adequately be encompassed by the rational mind—when words run out. They deal with the unknown or unknowable. In fact, symbolism, as I argued in Chapter 1, is the means by which human beings have evolved to approach those realities which are ineffable—which therefore cannot be approached by any other way. An example is the Buddha—whose qualities are so far beyond whatever we can imagine, we can only represent him symbolically. Talking of archetypal Buddhas visualized in meditation, Lama Govinda says in Foundations of Tibetan Mysticism:

‘One may object, that such visions are purely subjective and therefore nothing ultimate. However, words and ideas are nothing ultimate either; and the danger of getting attached to them is all the greater, as words have a limiting narrowing tendency, while experiences and symbols of true visions are something that is alive, that is growing and ripening within us. They point and grow beyond themselves. They are too immaterial, too ‘transparent’, too elusive, to become solid or ‘thingish’, and to arouse attachment. They can neither be ‘grasped’ nor defined, nor circumscribed exactly. They have a tendency to grow from the formed to the formless–while that which is merely thought-out has the opposite tendency, namely to harden into lifeless concepts and dogmas.’[2]

Where words tend to harden into dogmas, symbolic visions ‘point and grow beyond themselves’—he means that images, stories and myths gain in meaning over time as we build up associations with them; this is the point of symbolism. It helps us remember the things that are important to us, we need to keep remembering their message; and mindfulness comes into this through the practice of Buddhanusati:[3]

‘Unless we can truly imagine the Buddha and his Enlightenment in a way that stirs us deeply, we cannot mobilize our energies to Go for Refuge to him. … We can only imagine the Buddha wholeheartedly by discovering his image in our own minds … This work is more akin to magic than to science.’[4]

But how do we do this? Hans Vaihinger once wrote an influential book—The Philosophy of ‘As If’[5]—in which he judges the validity in seeing something ‘as if it exists’ by the strategies’ effectiveness.

Buy from Routledge.

For example, if believing in a certain myth makes us a better person, then—according to Vaihinger—the belief is valid and justified. So, when we visualize a Buddha or Bodhisattva in meditation we try to ‘act as if’ they are really present—as if they really exist—and see what the effect is:

‘The visionary Bodhisattvas and gods probably do not exist in any material sense: they cannot be photographed, weighed, and measured, for instance, nor can they be contacted by telephone. But they do embody something deep in reality that is more akin to consciousness than to matter. Sangharakshita invokes a term he came across in recent Japanese philosophy that communicates the ontological character of these images: non-ontic existence. Usually when we say that something does not exist, we assume that it is therefore not important: what is important is what materially exists. However, moral values and spiritual truths have no material existence as such yet they are supremely significant–indeed, they are far more significant for us as human beings than any particular material object. They exist in this non-ontic sense. We should take symbols and other images of the imagination very seriously indeed on their own terms—arguably we should take them more seriously than we take the material world. This is the case even when, perhaps especially when, those symbols present themselves as conscious beings independent of us.’[6]

Throughout his teaching career, the Buddha repeatedly advised against getting ‘stuck’ on whether or not a thing existed; he saw it as a ‘lame’ question irrelevant to the spiritual life.[7] We just need to work with the conditions in front of us—including employing archetypal images in meditation that might help us develop the Enlightened qualities we need to overcome suffering. Questions of existence and non-existence belong to the domain of Philosophy—and specifically Ontology, which relies on abstract argument about existence, rather than Religion—which deals with first-person explorations of Enlightened viewpoints.

The chapter goes on to explore Ritual and Devotion.

[1] Sangharakshita and Subhuti. Seven Papers. Fourth edition. June 2020. Triratna InHouse Publications. p83-4.

[2] Anagarika Govinda. (1989) Foundations of Tibetan Mysticism. Weiser. p92.

[3] Buddhanusati or ‘mindfulness of the Buddha.’

[4] Seven Papers. Fourth edition. p81.

[5] See Bryan Magee (1997) The Philosophy of Schopenhauer. Clarendon. p301-5 for a useful summary of his main argument.

[6] Seven Papers. Fourth edition. p89.

[7] As he taught in the Sabbasava Sutta, which I explored in Chapter 3.