Blog: Dreaming Alive
by greggechols

Giving Birth to New Images

In order to truly be able to create a new world, we must move outside of our limited framework--especially our framework involving words. Artists and shamans are the "priests of the imagination" and by following their lead we must create new images for this new world.

Date:   9/22/2005 12:39:48 AM   ( 19 y ) ... viewed 1852 times

Matthew Fox writes in The Coming of the Cosmic Christ that “images are closer to our experience than words” (p. 58). Living a life filled with dreams and experiences in other spaces, I find that his words are so true.

How can I go about my life in a way that properly uses images in a way that gives them their role as “midwives between experience and language?” When engaged in ritual or dreams, I experience nothing but images and the “felt-sense” of things. These have a powerful healing effect. Why not this experience in actual, waking life? Why wouldn’t images and a “felt-sense” of things create tangible experiences that are as real—or, perhaps, more real—than the experiences themselves?

It is the imagination from where this springs forth, and it is the artists, Fox writes, (and shamans?) “whom writer James Joyce calls the ‘priest of the imagination,’ who articulates the journeys of depth for people” (p. 58). Truly, shamans, too, are these “priests,” evident by journeys many have taken into the imagination—into psyche and soul—via the South American brew known as ayahuasca.

César Calvo writes of the shaman Ino Moxo talking to his apprentice in his essay, “The Three Halves of Ino moxo” in the book, Teachings of the Wizard of the Upper Amazon:

 

 

 

I am now speaking for you. Otherwise, I would surely do so in a different way. I would not develop the concepts in order to fit your understanding. But I’m forced to use your words. I have to fit my words inside yours and adapt my thoughts, silencing others that do not fit, that rebel against that confinement you call coherence. If we had enough time to be worthy, perhaps I might show you how to use my eyes, to speak with my mouth. Maybe you would understand. As it is, I have to reduce everything. The obstacle is time. (from The Ayahuasca Reader, pp. 190, Luna and White, eds.).

 

 

 

So often, words don’t do justice to the imagination, to the image. One must be able to speak a language outside of words—beyond words. In that space that one might term “beyond time,” words are not necessary, as thoughts and images do the work. Perception is of a different order. The confinement of words and language is not a requirement.

Here’s another example from Calvo’s commentary from the shaman, Ino Moxo:

 

In order to see and understand and name a world like that we must be able to speak in that same way. A language that can decrease or ascend without warning, containing thickets of words that are here to day and may wake up far away tomorrow, can in this very instant and inside the same mouth be populated with other symbols, other resonances…Our words are like people, and sometimes much more, not simple carriers of only one meaning. They are not like those bored pots holding always the same water until their beings, their tongues, forget them, and then crack or get tired, and lean to one side, almost dead. No, you can put entire rivers in our pots, and if perchance they break, if the envelope of the words crack, the water remains: vivid, intact, running, and renovating itself unceasingly.

 


They are live beings who wander on their own, our words: animals that never repeat themselves and are never resigned to a single skin, to an unchanging temperature, to the same steps. And they couple, like panguanas, and have offspring…words therefore, have descendants (p. 188).

 


We fail to look at our words as being “live beings,” and certainly we wouldn’t even dare to imagine that our words have “descendants” and “offspring.” Imagine that! Would we not pay a little closer attention to our words? Could we be in a state now where we have killed off our words, so that they are not alive—at least in our culture?

Fox writes that words that “Jesus’ ministry was one of birthing images” (p. 71). C. G. Jung often spoke about modern religion failing to provide modern man with an “alive” image or symbol of religion. The religion created around Jesus was one resulting from that man “birthing images.” The time is now for new images to come around. Might the creation of new images be a possibility in this culture? Will this come from dreams, from work with indigenous traditions—or from the stillborn oratory of modern-day politicians? Jung writes:

 

 

 

Tribal lore is always sacred and dangerous. All esoteric teachings seek to apprehend the unseen happenings in the psyche, and all claim supreme authority for themselves. What is true of primitive lore is true in even higher degree of the ruling world religions. They contain a revealed knowledge that was originally hidden, and they set forth the secrets of the soul in glorious images (“Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious,” in Collected Works, Volume 9, Part 1, pp. 7).

We are in the midst, perhaps, of these new images being born from old traditions—such as those of the shaman, the dreamers, sacred plants—that are coming to us today. Psychology is at the edge of these revelations—a door, perhaps, but not the true vessel of these new symbols coming to us.

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