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O-ONE
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ANTS TO
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RISONER IN AN
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NLIVED
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IFE
But beauty interrupts restrictions in every place and thing.
STEPHEN DAVID ROSS
THIS IS ONE OF THE SACRED DUTIES OF IMAGINATION: HONOURABLY to imagine your self. The shortest distance in the world is the one between you and yourself. The space in question is tiny. Yet what goes on in this little space determines nearly everything about the kind of person you are and about the kind of life you are living. Normally, the priority in our culture is to function and do what is expected of us. So many people feel deep dissatisfaction and an acute longing for a more real life, a life that allows their souls to come to expression and to awaken; a life where they could discover a different resonance, one which echoes their heartfelt dreams and longing. For their short while on earth, most people long to have the fullest life they can. No-one wants to remain a prisoner in an unlived life. This was the intention of Jesus: ‘I have come that you may have life and have it to the full.’ Of the many callings in the world, the invitation to the adventure of an awakened and full life is the most exhilarating. This is the dream of every heart. Yet most of us are lost or caught in forms of life that exile us from the life we dream of. Most people long to step onto the path of creative change that would awaken their lives to beauty and passion, deepen their contentment and allow their lives to make a difference.
Y
OU
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IMPLY
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HERE:
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MAGINE
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This above alclass="underline" to thine own self be true,
And it must follow, as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man.
SHAKESPEARE, Hamlet
THE WORLD NEVER COMES AT YOU ALL AT ONCE. SOME experiences barely register; others strike you. In the midst of everything, there is one experience that you cannot escape. This is an experience you are having literally every moment, namely, that this is you, in this body, here in the world, now. If someone were to ask you which fact you could not doubt, you would declare this to be the clearest and most intimate fact you know. Yet the strange thing is that the nature and meaning of this fact is neither clear nor obvious. In other words, whoever you consider yourself to be is also the result of your own imagination. You are not simply here. Neither are you definitively and forever ‘you’. You develop and change constantly; each new experience adds to you and alters your shape and image. You imagine who you are. Of all imaginative work this is the most intimate and creative. It is also a powerful and yet vulnerable position to be in regarding yourself. It seems that there is a stranger who has somehow stolen into your life, one who knows all your intimate feelings and thoughts and has gained control of how you understand your life and see yourself. By now this stranger has gained power over you. Your every thought is vulnerable to the stranger’s outlook and consideration. It is an unbelievable way to live: to be tied for ever in this caged inner conversation. The irony is of course: the stranger is you.
No person is a finished thing, regardless of how frozen or paralysed their self-image might be. Each one of us is in a state of perennial formation. Carried within the flow of time, you are coming to be who you are in every new emerging moment. Life is a journey that fills out your identity and yet the true nature of a journey remains largely invisible. Inside each journey a secret harvesting is at work. It is as though the beginning of a journey offers the pilgrim a mirror where something is glimpsed, something that is beginning to form as an image. Over the course of the journey the image fills and fills until finally at the end of the journey the empty mirror has become a living icon of spirit. When the new baby arrives there is barely a blur in the mirror, then at the end of its life when the person lies down to die, the mirror has filled, the image has taken on the depth of a great icon. Now there is a reversal and transfiguration. As the spirit departs it looks into the deathbed and sees barely a blur because it has filled with the invisible harvest of life’s experiences, transfigurations and memories, its inner narrative.
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TORY
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NOWS
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ELLER
NOWADAYS EVERYONE IS CONSCIOUS OF THEIR OWN STORY. PEOPLE identify themselves with their stories. The story is rarely presented for what it is: a selective version. Rather the version is taken for fact and the fact takes on a mechanical and repetitive life of its own. Often when confronted with this kind of self-presentation, one has the difficulty of trying to correlate a fairly banal, predictable biographical script with an individual who seems infinitely more interesting and complex. Literature is the domain where story belongs. In good literature a story is always working on several levels at once; it holds within it a suggestiveness of the other stories that it is not; it has an irony and ambivalence about its own identity and posture and immunizes itself against take-over by any definitive reading or interpretation. From this perspective, it seems that much of what passes for story in contemporary spirituality and psychology is more reminiscent of tabloid pastiche than real story. Even the pre-literary tradition of oral culture had complex tapestries of story that left the most subtle openings into the resonance fields of myth and mystery.
A human life is the most complex narrative of all; it has many layers of events which embrace outside behaviour and actions, the inner stream of the mind, the underworld of the unconscious, the soul, fantasy, dream and imagination. There is no account of a life which can ever mirror or tell all of this. When telling her story all a person can offer is a sample of this complexity. The best stories suggest what they cannot name or describe. They deepen respect for the mystery of the events through which identity unfolds. Consequently, respect for oneself should mean that if one wants to tell one’s story, it should be worthy of telling. Since story is now widely used in psychology, spirituality and sociology, a deepening of the mystery of what a story is would serve to illuminate the beauty that dwells deep in the individual life. As the Jewish writer and human rights campaigner Elie Wiesel once said, God created man because he loved stories.
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MAGINATION
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A REAL NARRATIVE IS A WEB OF ALTERNATING POSSIBILITIES. THE imagination is capable of kindness that the mind often lacks because it works naturally from the world of Between; it does not engage things in a cold, clear-cut way but always searches for the hidden worlds that wait at the edge of things. The mind tends to see things in a singularly simple, divided way: there is good and bad, ugly and beautiful. The imagination, in contrast, extends a greater hospitality to whatever is awkward, paradoxical or contradictory. The German philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer, in an interview shortly before his death last year, said: ‘The integrity of a society demonstrates itself in how that society engages with contradiction.’ The imagination is both fascinated and stimulated by the presences that cluster within a contradiction. It does not perceive contradiction as the enemy of truth; rather it sees here an interesting intensity. The imagination is always more loyal to the deeper unity of everything. It has patience with contradiction because there it glimpses new possibilities. And the imagination is the great friend of possibility. It always sees beyond facts and situations, to the cluster of possibilities in which each thing is shrouded. In a sense, this is what beauty is: possibility that enlarges and delights the heart. Nothing opens up the mind like the glimpse of new possibility. When everything has become locked inside a dead perspective and the consensus is that a cul-de-sac has been reached, new possibility is an igniting spark. This dead identification is made frequently every day in all kinds of situations. For example, the love and affinity between two people becomes sidelined into a repetitive and wearying pattern. They become stuck in a helpless symmetry of conflict. In a company boardroom a project that had great potential becomes suddenly frozen around some unforeseen impossibility. Or something happens to a person that is devastating; or some failure occurs that draws judgement and shame. In all of these instances, the rational mind would devote itself to direct engagement with the situation and soon find itself overwhelmed by inevitability. All of its efforts at direct analysis and understanding, even its efforts to directly loosen the context or break free from it, would only serve to further entangle it.