Winter Solstice & the Imaginal World

December 21, 2018

Knowing, in this world, needs opposites to build meaning; and yet:

“If we look at the attributes of God’s Essence, such as life and knowledge we see that their opposites—death and ignorance—do not exist as such” (p. 131, Murata in Tao of Islam).

Today marks the winter solstice. This world’s extension of darkness offers an opportunity to reach further for the opposite, to strive toward the essence of light. Rumi gives a marvelous fable teaching the crazy difficulty humans have in finding the true light and in escaping the illusion of color. He illustrates with a rabbit tricking a lion. Nicholson’s commentary tells:

“…the whole fable is an allegory of the Divine Reason (manifested in the Hare) inspiring men to triumph over illusion and realise that essentially they are one with the Logos which knows all things as forms of itself and itself as the hidden ground of all” (pp. 88-89, Commentary on Book I, Mathnawi, lines 1111- ).

In order to further emphasize how susceptible humans are to confusion, Rumi brings in another figure (one close to my heart). Nicholson comments: “Reason or Spirit, the Divine element in Man, is compared to a horse which its rider cannot see, so that he thinks he has lost it” (p. 89). Rumi’s lines are translated by Alan Williams:

     “A man thinks he has lost his horse and yet

         perversely speeds his horse upon the road. . .

     That silly man, in panic and in seeking,

       goes searching on all sides from door to door:

     ‘Who is the one who stole my horse, where is he?’

       ‘Sir, what’s this one you have between your legs?’…

     The soul’s so visible and near, it’s lost,

       lips dry as dust and belly full of water.

     How can you see the red and green and brown

       unless you see the light before these three?”  (p. 109, Spiritual Verses)

As the Solstice pushes us to long for light and as we laugh at the silly rider (who is lost due to human presumption to know beyond human capacity), we might open to the teaching about Life and thus be better equipped to cope with our experiences involving death. Murata continues from the opening quotation about death not existing:

“If we look at the attributes of God’s Essence, such as life and knowledge we see that their opposites—death and ignorance—do not exist as such. What we call death and ignorance are relative lacks of life and knowledge. Only absolute nonexistence—which, of course, does not exist—could possess absolute death and absolute ignorance.” (p. 131, Murata in Tao of Islam).

And yet we are placed in this world where “there are no absolutes within creation” and therefore:

“things can be understood only in their relationships with God or with other things. There are two extreme poles, represented by spirit and body, light and darkness, heaven and earth, subtlety and density. Between the two poles stands a spectrum of created things that are in some ways qualitatively ambivalent” (p. 132)

One source for help in dealing with the inescapable confusion when caught between the poles comes through engaging an “imaginal world.”

“The middle world is ‘imaginal’ because, like an image in a mirror or a dream, it combines attributes of both sides and cannot be discussed in isolation without distorting its reality. It is neither a spirit nor a body, but it has certain attributes that are spiritual and certain that are bodily” (p. 132).

Here and now, this material is helpful to me because I need the imaginal world that helps me hold the invisible horsepower capable of dealing with the longest nights and with the loss of loved ones. By working and playing in this imaginal world, I move closer to the passage:

“Where, O death, is your victory? Where, O death, is your sting?” I Cor 15:55 which references Isaiah 25:8 Hosea 13:14.

Dec 21, "normal" setting for photo

same as above but perhaps into the "imaginal"