The Role of Imagination in Self-Inquiry

“You must deal with the ‘I’-sense if you want to be free of it. Watch it in operation and at peace, how it starts and when it ceases, what it wants and how it gets it, till you see clearly and understand fully. After all, all the Yogas, whatever their source and character, have only one aim: to save you from the calamity of separate existence, of being a meaningless dot in a vast and beautiful picture.
You suffer because you have alienated yourself from reality and now you seek an escape from this alienation. You cannot escape from your own obsessions. You can only cease nursing them.”

-Nisargadatta Maharaj (I Am That: Notion of Doership is Bondage)

Yoga has long accessed the imagination faculty of the mind as a pathway toward deeper self knowledge and spiritual understanding.  Imagination is a form of practice that helps to streamline the mind and focus the senses.  

Some forms of imagination used in yoga include visualization, meditation on specific sound or imagery, and certain techniques like placing mental energy onto the physical centers of the body, like the chakras, and focusing there until the body begins to respond somatically.  In using the mind to imagine an energy center, that center can begin to concentrate and form.  This is very common in subtle body practices and is even considered a yogic technology of high regard, effect, and power.

Actually, so many of what we call yoga practices rest on the faculty of imagination that anyone who has any kind of dedicated “practice” should understand the concept because they are almost certainly wielding that tool in some way.

Humans are using their imagination at all times in order to achieve a practical purpose throughout daily life.  Our minds are constantly coming up with fanciful scenarios that we yearn for in the future or that give us fear toward the future or that represent and then re-represent the past.  I have described the forms of attachment before. The hope, anxiety, shame, and nostalgia that the mind spins can seen clearly as forms of desire moving away from the present moment and either toward the future (hope and anxiety) or toward the past (shame and nostalgia). 

All desire is very problematic because it pulls our energy in all directions away from the present: toward the imagined future or toward a manipulated and scrubbed over past.

So why not use the very dysfunction of the mind in a way that actually helps to focus and concentrate us?  The analogy out of ancient yoga, indeed in the Vedas themselves, is that of reigning in a galloping horse in order to turn it purposely in this direction or that. You may also think of taking flood waters and directing a river away from one disastrous location and toward another less harmful (or even a beneficial) purpose, such as taking the force of the flood plain and building aqueducts and canals that temper the force and sustains agricultural success.  The mind has so much power, so much energy, that directing that energy by all means necessary and by using the language that it has plenty of familiarity with becomes the potent path of spiritual practice.

Practice is a form of imagination: we create a structure and a goal and then we create a way to move toward that goal.  In Vedanta you might hear a teacher say “Pretend, Tend, End;” that is, imagine the goal, pay attention to it and nurture it, and then achieve the state of Self that is eternal, beginning-less and endless, where practice dissolves and all that remains is the whole, complete Now of your Being (the so-called end of self-inquiry). 

So when we are beginning our practice we are in a critical stage of our Yoga path.  When we are utilizing our imagination and following an idea or an inspiration at that beginning stage we are actually taking on a very large commitment. For what you pretend is what you will tend to- where you will focus all of your attention and all of your vast mental, physical, and psychic energy.

In the West you might hear “fake it ‘til you make it,” which in typical fashion glosses over the all-important process and nods only to the beginning (fake it) and the result (make it). That middle realm of harnessing our attention and cultivating what I call “notice what you notice” is the entire bread-and-butter of Eastern philosophy and religious tradition. We need the process of attention, or rather of attending to, deeply. Critically.

Children spend a lot of time pretending.  Creating worlds, destroying worlds, adjusting the rules of the game in so many ways- wether they are playing with a stick and some mud or playing in a whole group of other children where complex roles are built and then, just as fluidly, changed.  As children grow the games begin to shift.  Rules become less haphazard and more based on codes of internal ethics or morals.  

The beginning spiritual practitioner is like a child in this way.  In the beginning there is a lot to test out, a lot to try, a lot to explore.  But then things start to become more defined and focused. A mature adult, spiritual or householder, is often described as a focused one: someone who is responsible, can manage and complete a task, can achieve a purpose without entangling others or themselves in their process.

Does the child in her game appreciate the adult that comes over, picks up her stick, and throws it away?  No!  So in this way we must remember to be kind toward ourselves and toward others.  To be gracious and patient with our spiritual ideas and aspirations, especially when we are just beginning to play the game that morphs into the serious path of Self-Realization.

Our codes of ethics become sacred. Kindness must always come first: compassion for ourselves and our vastness as well as for others and their vastness. I have observed before that honesty without kindness is a form of violence. So kindness must always come first, something the early Jain, Buddhist, and Yogic ethics codified. Be patient with the tools that you have used to get you where you are right now, today. Be compassionate with the history that has brought you and your loved ones to the crisis point, to the point of spaciousness, or to the point of emotional overflow at the heart and soul.

It is always movement that reveals the stillness within. It is always movement and change through which the divinity of your ground is experienced and expanded as faith and boundlessness.

We are so complex. And we are also so simple.

Do not rush the path.  For even to find that elusive “End” of imagination does not mean what we often believe that it means: it does not mean a complete cessation of roles, characters, dream playing, or imagining.  On the contrary, these roles, characters, and dreams become far more curious and inspiring.  Far more fascinating and divine.

After you kill the Buddha of your imagination you are free to fall in love with her. In fact, only then are you allowed the complete understanding of what loving her means.

Imagination needs never disappear on the yogic journey.  It simply goes from being an unconscious living out of fantasy, to that which focuses and concentrates us inward, to the very flow of the divine as life and living of which we are simultaneously a part and untouched by.

Suffering is what happens when the “I” goes looking for itself in order to find happiness with grit and determination but without the dance of imagination. It’s as though the mind is throwing darts in the dark trying to find itself, but because it does not know anything other than itself, it just follows the arc of the dart and the target and fixates on totally futile and deeply narcissistic tasks like trying for samadhi through self-annihilation, meditation practices that become more and more austere and time consuming, and routinely denying the self while hypocritically adhering to self-improvement strategies on what “is” and “is not” You. Suffering is the end of imagination and the onset of forced, dry purpose:
”This is my practice.”
”These are my experiences.”
”I’m working on finding myself. I love myself. I hate myself. I ___ myself.”

This whole process happens without ever leaving the realm of the mind. You remain snugly held in the very container that you are trying to move out of, but all of the maps pull you back to the deep gravity of your inner “I.” Of course they do!

You can see that it is a hopeless task and have moments of deep dissatisfaction and despair in those small hours when you realize what you are up to, but the fact remains: the uninspired and uncompromising spiritual seeker lives in a unique realm of hell tugged at by its own vast center while expending enormous amounts of energy shooting to get beyond the event horizon of the Self and “out” into “freedom.”

Yoga and self-inquiry provide small pauses intended to break the momentum of all of the movements of the mind. How many of us in the process of self-investigation believe that we are trying to seek out the peace that is our inheritance? It has been said before time and again that the seeking process is itself the prison. The seeking movement is exactly the tug on the water that creates the whirlpools where we are trapped in cycles that just keep us churning.

So spiritual self-inquiry does not mean moving beyond, overcoming, or going past the mind. Once that project becomes exhausted you have a chance to actually step foot on the path that leads to the heart. That path must include a wild and probing imagination to keep us curious, inspired, and to buoy our ethical call to self-compassion and kindness toward ourselves and others as we walk back to ourselves in the stillness of Now.