The Imagining Mind

Imagination, Expectation and the Thin Places Between Worlds

The thought that changes what we experience

We tend to make a simple distinction between imagination and reality.

Reality is what is actually there. Imagination is what we make up.

The distinction seems so obvious that we rarely stop to examine it.

Yet there are circumstances in which the boundary becomes surprisingly difficult to maintain.

Consider the placebo effect. A person is given something pharmacologically inactive but believes it to be an effective treatment. The belief may nevertheless alter the person's experience — sometimes reducing pain or changing other symptoms. The effect is not necessarily a matter of consciously pretending. Expectation can become part of the physiological and psychological experience itself.

Then consider its darker counterpart: the nocebo effect. Tell someone that something is likely to cause an unpleasant sensation, and the expectation itself can contribute to the experience.

Something imagined has entered the experience of something real.

That doesn't mean that imagination can simply override physical reality. I cannot imagine myself having wings and expect to fly from the roof. But it does suggest something more modest — and perhaps more profound:

We do not experience reality independently of what we expect reality to be.

Our expectations influence what we notice, how we interpret sensations, how we behave and, consequently, what happens next.

Perhaps imagination is not quite as separate from reality as we thought.

From expectation to visualisation

Visualisation takes this a stage further.

Instead of merely expecting something to happen, we construct an internal representation of it.

An athlete visualises the race. A speaker imagines standing confidently before an audience. A musician mentally rehearses a performance. Someone preparing for a difficult conversation imagines how it might unfold.

The imagined event has not happened.

But something has happened because it has been imagined.

The person may approach the actual event differently. Anxiety may be reduced. Attention may become more focused. A sequence of actions may become more familiar. Confidence may increase.

Visualisation therefore occupies an intriguing middle ground:

The imagined future can alter the present from which the future is approached.

This is not magic. It is a plausible consequence of the way expectation, attention, emotion and behaviour interact.

But creative people know that imagination can do something more mysterious than rehearse an intention.

It can surprise us.

When the imagination begins to create

Suppose a novelist is trying to write a scene.

She imagines a man standing in a room.

She didn't consciously plan the room. It simply appeared.

Then she notices that there is a window behind him.

Why is he standing beside the window?

Perhaps he is waiting for somebody.

Who?

And suddenly she knows that he has been waiting for his daughter.

But she didn't know she was going to write about a daughter.

The image has generated a question, and the question has generated a possibility.

Something strange has happened.

The writer created the image.

Then the image began to create the story.

This is one of the experiences behind the familiar expression that a story sometimes seems to write itself.

It need not imply anything supernatural. Once an imaginative world has acquired enough internal coherence, one element begins to constrain another. If this is true, then that must be true. If this character behaves in this way, then she cannot plausibly behave in that way later.

The writer is no longer simply inventing.

The writer is discovering consequences.

And this may be one of the deepest distinctions between ordinary imagination and creative imagination.

Ordinary imagination can reproduce what we intend. Creative imagination can reveal what we did not know we intended.

That distinction will become important.

Ophiel and the operative imagination

Few writers on creative visualisation have taken this idea further than Ophiel, the pseudonym of Edward Peach.

His The Art & Practice of Creative Visualization presents visualisation not simply as a motivational technique but as a disciplined practice in which an internally created image is intended to have consequences in external circumstances.

Ophiel's system includes such ideas as the Sphere of Availability and the Law of E-motion.

The first is particularly interesting because it places a limitation upon the simplistic idea that anything imagined can simply be manifested.

There are circumstances within which a possibility can become available.

This can be understood psychologically without accepting Ophiel's metaphysics.

Imagine a person who has spent twenty years thinking:

“People like me don't do things like that.”

Their possibilities are correspondingly narrow.

Then, somehow, they begin to imagine another possibility:

“Perhaps I could.”

Nothing external has necessarily changed.

But the sphere of what appears possible has expanded.

The person begins to notice opportunities that were previously invisible. They ask different questions. They meet different people. They acquire different skills. They take actions they would previously have dismissed.

The imagined possibility has altered the range of possibilities that the person is capable of seeing.

Ophiel's Law of E-motion adds another element. The imagined circumstance is not supposed to remain a cold intellectual proposition. It is to be experienced with emotional vitality.

Again, whatever metaphysical interpretation we put upon this, there is an obvious psychological observation beneath it:

An idea that is emotionally experienced is different from an idea that is merely intellectually entertained.

We can know something propositionally without it becoming psychologically real to us.

Creative imagination closes some of that distance.

But is imagination creating reality?

Here we reach a dangerous word: manifestation.

There are versions of visualisation teaching which imply that if we imagine something sufficiently vividly, reality will arrange itself accordingly.

That proposition needs to be treated carefully.

There is abundant reason to believe that imagination affects perception, expectation, motivation and behaviour.

There is not equivalent evidence that merely imagining an external event causes the universe to rearrange itself to produce it.

The distinction matters.

But perhaps there is another possibility.

Perhaps imagination does not necessarily create reality.

Perhaps it sometimes discloses possibilities within reality.

That is a subtler proposition.

And it brings us to an ancient phrase.

As above, so below

“As above, so below.”

The expression is associated with the Hermetic tradition and the Emerald Tablet. It has often been interpreted as suggesting a correspondence between different orders of reality.

The phrase is sometimes used almost as a slogan for magical manifestation:

Think it above, and it will appear below.

But there is another way of approaching it.

What if the relationship is reciprocal?

Above ↔ below.

The inner affects the outer.

But the outer also affects the inner.

I imagine something.

I act upon that imagination.

The action produces a consequence.

The consequence changes my understanding.

That new understanding changes what I imagine.

And the cycle begins again.

This is not occultism.

It is a description of an extraordinarily ordinary feature of human existence.

Our inner worlds and outer worlds are continually informing one another.

The writer experiences this especially vividly.

The imagined scene becomes a sentence.

The sentence becomes a paragraph.

The paragraph becomes a manuscript.

Then the writer reads the manuscript and discovers something that the writer did not consciously know before writing it.

The below has become the above.

The physical words have returned to the imagination and produced something new.

Perhaps this is one modest, psychologically intelligible version of as above, so below.

But there may be a deeper version.

Thin places

There is a phrase from contemporary Celtic spirituality that seems almost designed for this question:

thin places.

A thin place is understood as somewhere the boundary between the ordinary world and transcendence seems unusually permeable.

The phrase is often associated with Celtic Christianity, although its supposed antiquity is sometimes overstated. What matters more than its precise historical pedigree is the intuition it expresses.

Perhaps the sacred isn't absent from ordinary life.

Perhaps we are simply not ordinarily very good at noticing it.

A landscape can become a thin place.

So can a church.

So can music, silence, prayer, grief, beauty, a conversation, a piece of literature. Or, strangely enough, washing the dishes.

The dishes remain dishes.

But something happens to the person doing them.

The deliberate mind relaxes.

The problem that could not be solved at the desk suddenly seems to solve itself.

An unexpected connection appears.

A memory surfaces.

A sentence arrives.

Where did it come from?

We could call it unconscious processing.

We could call it associative thinking.

We could call it creative incubation.

A Christian might call it inspiration.

A mystic might call it grace.

The experience itself does not tell us which explanation is correct.

But the experience is real.

The contemplative imagination

This is where contemplation becomes particularly important.

The modern mind is extraordinarily good at deliberate production.

We decide what we want.

We formulate it.

We pursue it.

We optimise it.

We measure it.

But creativity sometimes seems to require another posture.

Not production.

Receptivity.

The contemplative writer does not merely ask:

“What shall I write?”

The question may become:

“What is trying to emerge?”

That is a radically different question.

It doesn't mean abandoning intention. The writer still chooses the subject, establishes the conditions and begins the work.

But at some point the writer stops forcing the answer.

Something else is allowed to happen.

This may explain why creative breakthroughs so often occur while walking, washing dishes, driving, gardening or lying awake in bed.

The conscious problem-solving mind has temporarily loosened its grip.

And when it does, the imagining mind has room to work.

The writer as provocateur

There is another consequence of this.

If imagination can alter the way we experience reality, then writing has a power that is greater than merely communicating information.

A writer can change the reader's field of possibility.

This is where I think the idea of provocation becomes important.

The provocative writer doesn't necessarily say:

“Here is the conclusion you must accept.”

Instead, the writer places two things beside one another that the reader had never previously connected.

A question is opened.

A familiar assumption becomes strange.

Something previously invisible becomes visible.

And the reader thinks:

“I've never looked at it that way before.”

That moment may be more significant than persuasion.

The writer has not supplied a new worldview.

The writer has created a space in which a new worldview can begin to form.

In that sense, literature can create a kind of psychological thin place.

The boundary between what the reader has always believed and what the reader might now believe becomes temporarily permeable.

The reader has not been instructed to cross the boundary.

But suddenly the doorway is visible.

And what about God?

At this point the Christian reader may reasonably object.

All this talk of imagination, manifestation and thin places could easily slide into a spirituality in which human consciousness becomes the creator of reality.

Christianity cannot simply accept that.

God is not something we manufacture by visualisation.

The transcendent does not become real because we think about it.

And this produces an important reversal.

Perhaps the deepest Christian interpretation of contemplation is not:

“I imagine another reality into existence.”

but:

“I become capable of recognising a reality that was already there.”

That is a very different proposition.

The thin place is not necessarily a place where God suddenly arrives.

It may be a place where we become less incapable of noticing that God is already present.

And that distinction may be the dividing line between spiritual receptivity and magical thinking.

The imagining mind and faith

This also gives imagination a more respectable place within Christian spirituality than it is sometimes given.

Faith is not simply the acceptance of propositions.

Christianity is full of imaginative acts.

The believer imagines the Exodus.

The wilderness.

The manger.

The cross.

The empty tomb.

The Kingdom of God.

The new creation.

These are not merely illustrations added to theology after the theological work is complete.

They help make theological realities inhabitable.

A person can know the proposition:

“God is with me.”

But there is a difference between knowing it propositionally and being able to imagine what it would mean if it were actually true here, now, in this particular circumstance.

That imaginative movement can change the way the circumstance is experienced.

And perhaps that is one reason why Jesus so often taught through images, stories and parables rather than through abstract propositions.

He didn't merely tell people what to think.

He gave them something to see.

So what is the imagining mind?

We began with something apparently simple:

Why can a placebo work?

Then came:

Why can expectation alter experience?

Then:

Why can visualisation alter behaviour?

Then:

Why can creative imagination produce ideas we did not consciously intend?

Then:

Could imagination have a deeper relationship with reality?

Ophiel offers one metaphysical answer.

Hermeticism offers another language: as above, so below.

The language of thin places offers another: perhaps the boundary between ordinary and transcendent reality can sometimes become perceptually thin.

Contemplation offers a practice: become quiet enough to notice what deliberate thought cannot produce.

And Christianity introduces the most radical possibility of all:

Perhaps the purpose of imagination is not ultimately to manufacture reality, but to become receptive to reality.

That changes everything.

The imagination is no longer merely a faculty of invention.

It becomes a faculty of attention.

A faculty of possibility.

A faculty of discovery.

Perhaps even, in the deepest sense, a faculty of receptivity.

Conclusion: Beyond imagination

We often imagine that imagination takes us away from reality.

Perhaps sometimes it does.

But perhaps, at its best, the opposite is true.

Perhaps imagination can take us more deeply into reality.

It can expose the assumptions through which we normally see.

It can enlarge the range of possibilities we are capable of recognising.

It can rehearse futures and thereby alter the present.

It can allow a writer to discover what the writer did not know was there.

It can make the familiar strange enough to be seen afresh.

It can create the psychological conditions in which something unexpected emerges.

And, perhaps, it can make us receptive to something beyond ourselves.

There is therefore a profound difference between imagining a reality and allowing imagination to disclose reality.

The first is an act of construction.

The second may be an act of discovery.

And perhaps the contemplative life begins precisely at that point where we stop asking:

“What can I make reality become?”

and begin asking:

“What is reality trying to show me?”

That may be the deepest mystery of the imagining mind.