Ways to open images
- Experience of the Energy Body (image emerges from the felt experience).
- Spontaneous images arising out of a samadhi state. Where the perception of things, of body, of world, et cetera, is a bit less substantial, it’s more fertile for images.
- Images can arise from experiences of strong emotion – hold the experience of the emotion in the being (primarily the body)
- Deliberately imagining (dream, figure, archetype, memory that felt imaginal)
- Opening a gateway of the imagination. – walking down a flight of stairs in one’s imagination… an open field etc.
- Daydreaming and then catching an image with resonance.
Tips for relating to images
- Don’t make demands of / kill the image
– Don’t ask it give you something or explain something to you
– Don’t demand it have a clear or fixed meaning
– Don’t demand it be “nice” or “spiritual”. Taboo, ugly, scary is fine. - Stay sensitive to the energy body / emotional body and trust a sense of aliveness above all else
- If you feel connected, a sense of aliveness, that’s all you need.
- Remember images can arise in any sense modality: visual, sound, taste smell, kinesthetic (sense of movement). Or a combination.
- Be sensitive to whether you are actively pushing/analyzing/coaxing the image through evaluation, judgement or planning. If so, try to pivot towards listening/receiving.
Axioms
Definition of Axiom related to Logic, Mathematics. a proposition that is assumed without proof for the sake of studying the consequences that follow from it.
- Images are Inexhaustible, Irreducible
- Images have autonomy
- Images can be trusted (though not necessarily understood)
- Images are primary (“more fundamental, more primary in terms of what drives us, and what moves us, and what orients us in life. Primary in giving meaningfulness to things.” – Rob)
Some things about images…
Not necessarily visual
inexhasustibe, irreducible (no simple meaning) not flat. poetic
Known at least partially through a resonance in the energy body.
Timeless vs. Narrative (iconic).
Might involve interaction, might not.
We might feel a sense of duty towards it (allowing it, being moved in the directions it asks of us)
Autonomous on some sort of level – It’s not just a part of me, or I’m in control of it
Quotes
“One does not penetrate into the Angelic World by housebreaking, one does not move around mentally in the [imaginal realm] by the assistance of a formal logic or of a dialectic which leads from one concept to the next by deduction.” – Spiritual Body & Celestial Earth, xix CORBIN
“Partly what I want to say for now is that through all this, life itself, experience itself, one’s own
narrative, this moment of experience, comes to be seen as image. What is it to see life as image? To see
it through that lens? To sense it through that lens? A different sensibility.” Rob Burbea, “What is an Image (Part 2)”
“When we fall in love we begin to imagine romantically, fiercely, wildly, madly, jealously, with possessive, paranoid intensity. And when we imagine strongly, we begin to fall in love with the images conjured before the heart’s eye — as when starting a project, preparing a vacation trip, planning a new house in a different city, swelling with pregnancy. . . . Our imaginations draw us ever more fully into the venture. You can’t leave the lab, can’t stop buying equipment, reading brochures, imagining names. You are in love because of imagination.”
— James Hillman, The Soul’s Code
“When the Soul wants to experience something she throws out an image in front of her and then steps into it.”
― Meister Eckhart