Printed in the Summer 2024 issue of Quest magazine.
Citation: Smoley, Richard "From the Editor's Desk" Quest 112:3, pg 2
Imagine a green lion—in any shape or size you like.
Whatever you come up with, it is obviously a creation of your imagination and nothing more: green lions do not exist.
But say you have some talent for cartooning. You draw some sketches of your green lion, give it an adorable name, and create a comic series about your imaginary friend. It sells very well, and a major studio buys the rights to make an animated film.
Suddenly you have become very rich from something that, as we agreed above, doesn’t exist.
This example points to the countless questions that come up about imagination.
Perhaps the most important one has to do with imagination versus perception. The ordinary view places these in two distinct categories: perception is of something in the real world, while imagination is just a figment of the mind.
Unfortunately this tidy distinction quickly falls apart under scrutiny.
We can begin with an esoteric example, discussed by Jay Kinney and Rasoul Sorkhabi in this issue: the views of Ibn ‘Arabi, the greatest of the Islamic metaphysicians, who taught the existence of what has been called the imaginal realm. This is the exact opposite of imagination as usually understood. It is an interior vision (like ordinary imagination), yet it is not of a fictive world. Rather, it is one that exists objectively on another plane of reality, accessible (a Theosophist might speculate) through the faculty of buddhi. The Neoplatonic philosopher Iamblichus expressed a similar concept: “The imaginative faculty is divinely inspired; and since it is roused into modes of imagination that come from the Gods, not from itself, it is utterly removed from what is ordinarily human.”
This matter is abstruse and far from ordinary experience: indeed we are unlikely to attain an experience of this imaginal realm except through rigorous mystical practice and devotion.
Yet as it turns out, even ordinary imagination raises problems. We conventionally distinguish imagination from reality—the latter term applied to experience that is obtained through the five familiar senses and is more or less publicly available: if I see a chair in the room, you will too. Such things are taken to be real in some objective sense.
But perception turns out to be like imagination: it is a mental construct. We do not see the world as it is (whatever that might be) but through the filters of the five senses, which are extremely constricted. Our eyes can see only a tiny bandwidth of the electromagnetic spectrum; our ears can hear only another. We have expanded the bandwidth through the apparatus of science, but there is no reason to believe that this apparatus gives a complete picture either; it merely expands the narrow slit through which we perceive the world.
What do we use to fill in the rest? Mental constructs. Although sensory perceptions are commonly regarded as objective (and in some naive way literally true), they are in their way figments of the mind just as imaginary objects are. As neuroscientist Donald Hoffman showed in his recent book The Case against Reality, the five senses have evolved principally to promote survival: to find food and avoid being found as food by other creatures. That is their value, and it is a great one, but we have no reason to believe that they give a complete picture.
The matter becomes still more complicated when we consider that perception is learned: we recognize an object because we have seen it before. This faculty is, again, useful but misleading: we frequently jump to mistaken conclusions about what we are seeing. In her recent book The Rationality of Perception, Harvard philosopher Susanna Siegel uses the term “hijacked perception” to describe such distortions, which, among other repercussions, play a major role in racial prejudice.
All of this would be reasonably simple if the five senses were all that we had. Although this is usually assumed to be the case, it is not: we do possess powers of extrasensory perception, and they are more extensive than many believe. Theosophists are familiar with clairvoyance and can see representations of clairvoyant perception of auras in books like Man Visible and Invisible. Although very few have this power, most of us possess the same faculty, but it is expressed kinesthetically. Not many people see auras, but just about everyone can feel the atmosphere of a place or person: “That guy gives me the creeps.”
We could not say that these extrasensory senses give a picture of reality in an absolute sense either, but they are an important extension of our sensory capacities. It has been ruinous for the West to sneer at the idea of their existence. This may be one cause of the pandemic of mental illness that is ravaging America: if you were to see something with your eyes but were constantly told that you could not see it because your sight does not exist, you would go mad in short order.
The implications of these ideas are endless—certainly far more than can be broached in a one-page editorial. In any event, it seems clear that the distinction between objective and subjective—between the “real” and the imaginary—is far more intricate and paradoxical than is usually believed. We could even say with Ibn ‘Arabi that just as perception is in many ways a form of imagination, imagination can be a form of perception.
Richard Smoley