Balance and Imagination. - Quareness Series (21st "Lecture").
The late great John O'Donohue (Co.Clare poet, priest) pointed out that to become wholesome we need living connection with the whole, to which our access is always limited and partial, and yet through the imagination we can enter into its field of creative tensions. The mind can often see change and think everything is lost but the imagination can always go deeper than the actual experience of loss and find something else in it. When people stumble psychologically it's often because of something that frightens or paralyses them - something they would never have anticipated in themselves.
Imagination is the faculty that gives the duality within us expression and allows its forms of opposition to engage with each other, and it's what spawns personal depth. There is an indissoluble, radical, subversive connection between mind and reality. The structures of your mind, the way it works, the way your consciousness moves, its patterns, naturally determine the world you inhabit. As yer man Georg Wilhelm Freidrich Hegel said in "The Phenomenology of Spirit" - "das whare is das ganze" i.e. the truth is whole.
Imagination is not one sided but passionately interested in wholesomeness and wholeness. It's never attracted to the flat surface or whatever is safe and perfect. Each human is a threshold with a body made of clay kept alive by invisible air, neither belonging to the earth out of which you came nor to the heavens towards which you strain, but constantly in oscillation on this moving threshold. An authentic life can be said to be one that is aware of and willing to engage with its own oppositions and inhabit the threshold where these opposites meet (rather than deny, etc.).Those who erase the tug of opposition from their lives risk becoming very judgmental/moralistic. They may live half lived lives with little sense of the otherness that suffuses amd surrounds them.
It's somewhat of a truism that all creativity emerges from the spark of opposition where two different things meet. It's the two sister oppositions (e.g. masculine and feminine) that create the lively unity. In today's culture image tends to prevail and the media rarely treats people as individuals illuminated for their own unique depth with their own history, narrative and possibilities. And this insidious reductionism is now one of the most powerful forces of imbalance.
The multi dimensionality of someone or something (e.g. landscape, literature, music, painting, etc.) only comes through intimate acquaintance and not in the Plato's cave media with its parade of shadows that we take for the real world. For example each person is a bundle of contradictions and normally we are unaware of this because there is so much of ourselves we keep completely hidden. Maybe we are on this planet at least partly to try to become acquainted with all that is in us?
Balance may be defined as stability due to the equilibrium of forces within a system. It is in a sense the discovery or unveiling of things, of a secret rhythm of order. In any contradiction, two sides are meeting, an opposition is happening and comes alive with great tension and energy. Balance allows something new to emerge from the depth of crisis and contradiction and this suggests faith in a 3rd wholesome force (Cosmos = idea of order).
If you try deliberately to get rid of something or to stop thinking about something, you only end up reinforcing it. If you make an issue of something, it can expand and possess you e.g. bitterness. Repression is often the outcome when balance is approached as a factual imposed strategy - same as with fear. On the other hand flexibility is balance and balance is flexibility. When a thing hardens it cannot bend, it can only break. Balance is neither a fixed empirical thing nor an invented subjective thing. Rather it's an implicit equilibrium that emerges in the fair play of opposing forces - the dialogue and dialectic of passionate sister forces.
In real dialogue something truly other and unexpected emerges. Rather than an object to think about, the human body is a grouping of lived through meanings which move toward equilibrium. The place where your balance is regulated (semi circular canals of the inner ear) is also the place where your hearing and listening are activated. True balance in the body is linked to listening - an attentiveness that allows you to engage fully with a situation/person/culture/memory so that the hidden balance within can emerge. And in this connection a psyche with a kind of flexibility and a grounding humour can actually level things and balance things out. Sometimes when another rhythm is present, balance becomes possible in the most unpredictable situations.
Sadly the signs of balance and imagination are somewhat scarce on the ground these days. One current major agent of imbalance is the embedded consumerist trend of our modern culture, a reduction of the "who" question about presence and person to the "what" and "how" questions, where the key tenet is that consumption creates identity. In consumerism most of us are moving through such an undergrowth of excess that we cannot see the shape of ourselves any more in the massive functionalism at the heart of our times. Certain key conversations are not taking place e.g. between the privileged and the poor. The duty of privilege is absolute integrity (e.g. not thinking of ourselves as the whole world when in fact we are a tiny minority) which is a large part of balance. Without integrity there's no true integration.
In the world today there's so much violence, destruction and war, seeded in caricature and false imagery and projection. it's indeed ironic that in a culture obsessed with communication technology, the actual art and vital content of communication is shrinking all the time.
However, hope springs eternal (as they say) and Nature's tendency is towards rebalancing (hopefully in good time).
Once after a right few scoops
On my tod in my local hostelry
I was suddenly time travelled
Back to ancient Hellas
To the inebriating company
Of the wisest of men.
As Socrates sat there to the left
And betook a long looking at me
I betook another lingering lapping
At the golden nectar and then
I distinctly heard him say it........
"Better to suffer than to do wrong".
I pondered these words
And wondered how he had
Breached my defenses so easily
You see earlier that evening
I'd been trying to figure out
How to redress things effectively.
I knew what he was saying was no
To the lure of sacrificial vengence
Religiously refusing to scapegoat he
Was pointing to the only real way to
Effectively deal with all trauma through
Understanding, mending and forgiving.
And the greatest of these has to live
As God said and as hard as it may be
Perhaps to understand is partly to forgive
And as we work through these stages
Maybe we can move closer to making
Pardon that little bit more possible.
Before I came back to today time
Wise Socrates proffered me the key
When he intimated with great gravitas
By trying to enter the mind of the other
We could avoid that great unspoken crime
A failure of the imagination.
Sean.
Dean of Quareness.
August, 2012.