Imaginative Wisdom and Knowledge of the Self - Part 1

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Imaginative Wisdom and Knowledge of the Self[13] - Part 1

 

(p.46) [bruno Barnhart]: Bede's exploration of the world of intuitive experience

in 'The Marriage of East and West' continues, ascending to imagination and

finally to the pure reflexive knowledge of the self which he finds at the heart

of the Hindu Vedanta.

 

[bede Griffiths]: There is, then, a sphere of physical, biological intuition and

of emotional, affective intuition. But beyond these there is the sphere of

imaginative intuition. It is here that the intuitive power of the mind is most

clearly manifest. The experiences of the body with its sensations and emotions

are all reflected in the imagination. The imagination is primarily a passive

power - it reflects the images of the world around us and of our own internal

experiences. It is the sphere of what Jung called the archetypes. (p.47) Human

experience is structured round certain primordial images - the father, the

mother, the child, the bride, the bridegroom, the water and the fire, the shadow

and the darkness - these are all archetypal images in what Jung called the

'unconscious,' but which I would call the subliminal depths of consciousness.

For these archetypes are all forms of intuition; they are images reflecting the

self, rising in the depth of self-consciousness. In most people these archetypes

are hidden, they have not come up into the light of reflective consciousness.

But in the poet and artist, the archetypes emerge into the light of

consciousness. The passive intellect receives these images from the depths of

its physical and emotional experience and sheds on them the light of

intelligence. This is when the intuition begins to emerge from the darkness of

physical and emotional experience into the clear light of knowledge.

 

But this knowledge is not a rational, abstract, conceptual knowledge. The mind

does not 'abstract' (draw out) from the experience of the body to form a concept

and to reason from it. The intellect illumines the actual concrete experience,

penetrates into the physical and emotional world and fills it with light. Not

only poets but most people in a normal society live from the imagination rather

than from abstract reason. It is only the artificial world of Western man that

seeks to educate everyone in habits of abstract thought and creates logical

systems, expressed in the jargon of the scientific mind.

 

In a normal human society, such as still exists in a large part of Asia and

Africa, man lives by the imagination and expresses himself in the language of

the imagination, in gestures and rituals, in speech consisting of symbols, which

reflect the self and the world in concrete images often accompanied by music and

dance. But, of course, it is in great poets and artists that we can see the full

development of the human imagination. They bring to perfection what in most

people is obscure and inchoate [just begun and not yet properly developed], but

it is because they draw on a basic human faculty common to all men, that the

great poets speak to all men. Homer and the Greek tragedians, Virgil and Dante,

Shakespeare and Goethe all speak this universal human language and it is to them

that we go for the deepest understanding of human nature. (p.48) In the same

way, it is to the great novelists like Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, with their

imaginative insight, that we look for the deepest understanding of our human

condition today.

 

What therefore is the poetic imagination? Maritain[14] has defined it as 'the

intercommunication between the inner being of things and the inner being of the

human self.' There is, as we have seen, a presence of the self in every human

experience, but in most people this presence is only half realized, or not at

all. In the poet this self-presence becomes conscious, the latent self-awareness

grows into a conscious awareness through his experience of the world around him.

He is more than usually sensitive to the world of the senses, to sight and sound

and touch and taste and smell, and these sensations with their accompanying

images enter deep into his consciousness. They are reflected in the depth of his

being, in the passive intellect, and become intuitive. That is, the intellect

penetrates into the depth of his self-consciousness and draws forth the images

in it, which focus his experience. The world is reflected in his imagination in

all its concrete richness, where feeling and thought are fused together.

 

The abstract rational mind creates a world of concepts, separated from concrete

reality, but the imaginative mind recreates the concrete world, reflecting it in

symbols, whether of words of rhythmical movements or of painted signs or of

architectural forms. All genuine art springs from this profound experience of

the self in the world and the world in the self. It is a primordial human

experience, from which language itself and every form of self-expression

emerges. It is the neglect of this world of the imagination, of 'art' in the

deepest and widest sense, in favour of a world of reason dominated by 'science,'

that has caused the imbalance of Western civilization. This does not mean that

science and reason are wrong in themselves. They are essential elements in human

nature, and the development of these faculties in the West from the time of the

Greeks is an essential element in human progress. But the domination of science

and reason, and the practical suppression of art and imagination in normal

education, has caused a fundamental imbalance in Western culture.

 

(p.49) This is but one aspect of the domination of man over woman, of the

aggressive male intellect over the feminine, intuitive imagination, which has

affected all Western culture. It is typical of this outlook that it thinks that

man and woman only differ physically and that the different races only differ in

their colour. It does not recognize the profound, psychological difference

between man and woman and between Asian, African and European man. This is due

to blindness to the feminine aspect in human nature. Every man and woman is both

male and female, and in every person the marriage of the male and the female has

to take place. When man refuses to recognize the feminine aspect of himself, he

despises or exploits woman and exalts reason over intuition, science over art,

man over nature, the white races with their dominant reason over the colored

peoples with their intuitive feeling and imagination. This has been the course

of Western civilization over the past centuries. Now we are awakening to the

place of woman in society, to the meaning of sex and marriage, to the value of

art and intuition and to the place of the colored peoples in the civilization of

the world. What has to take place is a 'marriage' of East and West, of the

intuitive mind with the scientific reason. The values of the scientific mind

with the scientific reason. The values of the scientific mind must not be lost,

but they need to be integrated in the wider vision of the intuitive mind.

 

The One Light - Bede Griffiths' Principal Writings

Chapter I, Mind, World and Spirit, p. 46-49

Edited and with Commentary by Bruno Barnhart

Templegate Publishers, Springfield, Illinois

ISBN 0-87243-254-8

 

Notes:

 

[13] 'The Marriage of the East and West', 162-169.