Imagination: Becoming Homo imaginus

Part One of a Two-Part Series on the Eros of Imagination in Response to the Meta-Crisis

IMAGINATION

Sex models the erotic, but it does not exhaust the erotic. One of the core qualities of the erotic is imagination. The Zohar, the magnum opus of Hebrew mysticism, says explicitly in many places, “Shechinah is imagination.”

In common usage “imagination” is implicitly considered to mean “unreal.” Indeed, “unreal” and “imaginary” are virtual synonyms. To undermine the validity of an antagonist’s claim, we say it is “a figment of his imagination.” In marked contrast, the Hebrew mystics held imagination to be very real. Indeed, it would not be unfair to say that they considered imagination to be “realer than real.”

The power of imagination is its ability to give form to the deep truths and visions of the inner divine realm. Imagination gives expression to the higher visions of reality that derive from our divine selves. Language and rational thinking are generally unable to access this higher truth. But the imagination is our prophet, bringing us the world of the Infinite, which speaks both through us and from beyond us. This is what the biblical mystic Hosea meant when he exclaimed that God said, “By the hands of my prophets, I am imagined.”

But who are these prophets who so handily imagine God? Why don’t we all have access to the experience of prophecy? “Because the Shechinah is in exile,” respond the mystics. The erotics of imagination have been exiled into the sexual. The sexual is the one place where virtually everyone is able to access the full power of imagination. This means that the core erotic quality of imagination no longer plays in all the arenas of our lives, where it is so desperately needed. For it is imagination that allows us to access the wisdom and vision we need to re-chart our lives.

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Photography by Kristina Tahel Amelong

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THE SEXUAL MODELS THE EROTIC: IMAGINATION

One of the core qualities of the sexual is fantasy. To be sexual is to fantasize. Virtually every man and woman has sexual fantasies. To fantasize means simply to imagine. Fantasy is a quality of imagination. Sex models Eros because in the sexual we learn the power of fantasy. The sexual models Eros when it teaches us how to access the potency of imagination in every realm of our lives. What would it mean to fantasize about a world without hunger and sexual abuse? What would it mean to fantasize about a world in which every person’s unique gift was received and honored? It is the power of fantasy and imagination that arouse us in the sexual. We require the power of fantasy and imagination to arouse us in the personal and the political as well. That is what it means for the sexual to model the erotic. When we only access the full power of imagination and fantasy in the sexual, then the Shechinah, Eros, is in exile.[1]

But it is in the sexual that we practice the art of imagination. The modern erotic classic Vox by Nicholson Baker takes place in a series of conversations between Jim and Abby. They never actually touch each other. All of their contact takes place in the realm of imagination. In this drama, their imagination is aroused in a series of phone conversations on an erotic phone line. It is precisely in the sexual where we are able to access the power of imagination. Jim evokes Abby’s imagination in the sacred text of his erotic description.

. . . I run my fingers just down the long place where the insides of your thighs touch, all the way to your knees, and then I’d let go of your legs, and they’d fall slightly apart, and as my hands started to move up inside them, with my fingers splayed wide, they’d move farther and farther apart, and then I’d lift your knees and hook them over the arms of the armchair, so that you were wide open for me, and in the darkness your bush would still be indistinct, and I’d look up at you, and I’d move on my knees so I’m closer, so I could slide my cock in you if I wanted, and I touch your shoulders with my hands, and pass my fingertips all the way down over your breasts and over your stomach and just lightly over your bush, just to feel the hair, and then I say, “I’m going to lick you now . . .”[2]

The Eros of imagination is exiled to the sexual. The liberation of Eros, which is the liberation of the Shechinah, will take place when the power of erotic imagination becomes available as a potent technology in personal, political, and social imagination. This liberation happens when the sexual becomes our guide—when the sexual models the erotic—and teaches us how to access the power of imagination in every dimension of our lives.

This exile of the erotic Shechinah’s power of imagination is reflected both in our language as well as in our most intimate experiences. Our English word fantasy derives from the Greek word phantasia, which derived from a verb that meant “to make visible, to reveal.” For the Greeks, fantasizing had nothing to do with sex. It meant “a making visible (through imagining) the world of the gods,” the realm of pure spirit and forms.

So why in modern usage does the word fantasy first and foremost conjure up images of the sexual? We very rarely talk about economic, political, or social fantasies. We don’t even talk about food fantasies. But we do talk about sexual fantasy . . . all the time. Just like the adjective erotic, the verb fantasize has found itself relegated to the narrow confines of the merely sexual. The reason is clear. In modernity, we have lost much of our ability to make visible—to imagine—the deeper visions of the spirit. It is mainly only in sex where we use imagination to conjure up images of that which is hidden.

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THE EXILE OF IMAGINATION

A year ago, at a workshop on arousal and Eros, I (Kristina) was attempting to teach an important idea about the erotics of imagination. I wanted to give the students a deep embodied experience of how we have exiled imagination to the sexual. I began with a classic visualization script and instruction “take a moment to relax your body, take a deep breath in, breathe out . . . and continue to breathe slowly, deeply. Imagine there is a protective white light shining, glowing around your body . . . Feel how relaxed and calm and safe you feel as this light surrounds you . . .” I continued on for another fifteen minutes or so, saying, “Imagine being protected head to toe by this light,” and then I proceeded to go through every part of the body asking them to imagine the light filling each and every body part. I ended with “feel a shield of protective light” and then asked people to share, asking, “How many of you had a clear experience?” Almost every single hand went up. I then, somewhat cheekily, challenged their claim and accused my surprised audience of being perhaps a bit dishonest. After a funny and impassioned dialogue, most of the crowd confessed to having much less of a clear visionary experience than they had initially claimed. We realized together that the New Age, with all of its good qualities, also fosters spiritual inferiority complexes: “What do you mean you can’t see the colors of my aura? No high sense perception at all? You can’t see my guides or angels? I’m sorry, but this just isn’t going to work.”

I decided to try again, but this time I was going to go all the way. I began again with another trajectory for an exercise in imagination. Without being totally raw and explicit, I invited them to imagine a sexual scene. “Imagine that your perfect lover, passionate, burning hot, and wildly sexy, has you pressed up against a wall, holding your hands firmly above your head. They whisper hungrily into your open lips, ‘Your mouth tastes like a rare Cabernet . . . and I know other parts of you that taste even better.’ They begin to trace the outline of your mouth with their tongue; quivering, you swallow your hesitation and respond, ‘Are you going to find out?’ They answer back, ‘You bet your ass I am, in more ways than you can count. The very first moment I saw you, I wanted to rip your clothes off and both tenderly make love to you and ravish you deep and hard, watching as you scream the name of God!’” I continued on in graphic detail, aroused and flushed myself by my own internal thoughts! At the end of this process, I asserted with complete certainty that virtually every single person in the crowd was able to feel and sense in graphic detail the complete sexual visualization for most, if not all, of the time. We all laughed out loud. Slowly everyone realized that we had just grasped the point we were struggling with in the previous visualization. Imagination, that gorgeous erotic quality, has been exiled into the sexual.

The simplest evidence of this is that we all have no problem accessing the power of imagination when it comes to sex. As we just saw in the erotic novel Vox, Jim and Abby, two ordinary people, are masters of imagination in the realm of the sexual. But we have enormous difficulty accessing that same faculty of erotic imagination not only in a nonsexual visualization but also in all aspects of our nonsexual lives. The Shechinah—Eros, incarnate in imagination—has been exiled into the sexual.

THE EROS OF IMAGINATION

Mirrors of Desire

Eros and imagination hold the keys to many gates, not the least of which is the gateway to our freedom. We saw in the mirrors story of an earlier chapter how the erotic imagination of the Hebrew women in Egypt set into motion the process of the Jews’ liberation from slavery. Pharaoh had insisted that the male slaves sleep in the fields separated from their wives. In defiance of the decree, women visited their men in the fields, teasing them with mirrors. Their men, wilting under the oppression of slavery, had lost their potency, but the women, in response, found tools to evoke their men’s desire. With these mirrors, they engaged the men’s imagination, even when their bodies would not respond. The mirrors are a symbol of the women’s erotic play, which resulted in the men of Israel reclaiming their potency.

Throughout the ages, sex play has often involved using strategically placed mirrors. The mirror can amplify the quality of imagination. The mirror offers us an image, allowing us to see in a way that was previously hidden. If you hold a mirror in front of you, you can suddenly see behind you. A rearview mirror is so helpful precisely because it shows you something your normal eyes cannot see. Or position a mirror at a sharp curve in a road, and you can suddenly see around the bend, catching a glimpse of something to come that would otherwise have been hidden.

In the women’s mirrors of imagination, the men were able to reclaim vision, to see the lost images of their women’s sexual beauty, which the oppressive burden of slavery had rendered invisible. It was, however, not primarily the women’s bodies that were made visible by the mirrors: it was the men’s. The women taunted them to see their own beauty. “Look, I am more beautiful than you.” Mirrors are a tool of imagination because they allow us to see images of ourselves that would otherwise be inaccessible. To see oneself making love reveals a whole other image of the erotic self.

According to one biblical tradition, this erotic play was itself the beginning of the liberation. In erotic play, the imagination is engaged.

Once the men were able to re-access their imaginations, the images of freedom were not long in following. The Exodus from slavery became just a matter of time. Sexually erotic imagination was then the model and catalyst for politically erotic imagination. About this the Talmud writes, “In the merit of the righteous women of the generation, the Hebrews were redeemed from Egypt!” When we think of typical “righteous” women, we rarely imagine troops of women with sex toys going to seduce their men in the fields. But that is the precise righteous act to which the tradition is referring. The fact that our idea of righteousness is at odds with the sexual is yet another sad example of the Shechinah in exile.

CRISIS OF IMAGINATION

The greatest crisis of our lives is not economic, intellectual, or even what we usually call religious. It is a crisis of imagination. We get stuck on our path because we are unable to reimagine our lives differently from what they are right now. We hold on desperately to the status quo, afraid that if we let go, we will be swept away by the torrential undercurrents of our emptiness.

The most important thing in the world, implies wisdom master Nachman of Bratslav, is to be willing to give up who you are for who you might become. He calls this process the giving up of pnimi to reach for makkif. Pnimi, for Master Nachman, means the old familiar things that you hold on to even when they no longer serve you on your journey. Makkif is that which is beyond you, which you can reach only if you are willing to take a leap into the abyss.

Find your risk, and you will find yourself. Sometimes that means leaving your home, your father’s house, and your birthplace, and traveling to strange lands. Both the biblical Abraham and the Buddha did this. But for the Kabbalist, the true journey does not require dramatic breaks with past and home. It is, rather, a journey of the imagination.

In the simple and literal meaning of the biblical text, Abraham’s command from God is lech lecha—“Go forth from your land, your birthplace, and your father’s house.” Interpreted by the Zohar, it is taken to mean not “go forth” but “go to yourself.” For the Kabbalist, this means more than the mere quieting of the mind. The journey is inward, and the vehicle is imagination. Imagination is the tool that allows us to visualize a future radically different from the past or even the present. That is exactly what Abraham was called to do—to leave behind all of the yesterdays and todays and to leap into an unknown tomorrow.

It is only in the fantasy of reimagining that we can change our reality. It is only from this inside place that we can truly change our outside. The path of true wisdom is not necessarily to quit your job, leave your home, and travel across the country. Often, such a radical break indicates a fail-ure rather than a fulfillment of imagination. True wisdom is to change your life from where you are, through the power of imagination.

THINK “COOKIES!”

Virtually every crisis, at its core, is a failure of imagination. Some years back, I (Marc) took off three years from “spiritual teaching” to get a sense of what the world tasted like as a householder. I took a job at a high-tech company, and from that relatively undemanding perch began to rethink my life and beliefs.

During this period, I did a bit of consulting with Israeli high-tech start-up firms. Truth is, I had little good advice to offer, but some of the high -tech entrepreneurs who had been my students would call me anyway. At one point, I received a call from a small start-up firm in Ramat Gan, Israel. The problem: They were almost out of venture capital, their market window seemed to be rapidly closing, and their research and development team was simply not keeping pace with their need for solutions.

Apparently, the problem lay with the elevator. The company was on the top floor of an old warehouse. The elevator was small, hot, and inordinately pungent. By the time the R&D teams would get through the daily morning gauntlet of the elevator, they had lost some of their creative sparkle. The president was convinced that this experience dulled their edge just enough to slow down the speed and elegance of their solutions. What to do? I have to confess that I hadn’t the slightest idea. Our meeting was on a Friday. As was my custom, I went home for the Sabbath and met with my own private consultant, my then-eight-year-old son, Eitan. When I asked him what I should tell the company, he laughed and said somewhat mockingly, “It’s simple, Dad—cookies.” I did not find this particularly funny. I raised this subject with him several times, but he would only respond, with maddening gravitas, “Cookies.”

Finally, I gave up on him. Several days later I went to tell the president I had found no solution. I was going up the same malodorous elevator when in a blinding flash I realized what Eitan meant. Cookies! Of course! We had all been focused on elaborate ways to fix the elevator or to move locations. Eitan—with the simple brilliance of a child—reminded me of the true issue at stake. The crux of the matter was not the elevator; it was how the R&D team felt when they left the elevator. So what to do? Cookies. We set up a table with juices, fruit, and healthy cookies right outside the elevator. So even though the ride up the elevator was terrible, people would spend the whole ride eagerly anticipating the goodies that awaited them. No one else could envision Eitan’s simple yet elegant solution because their imagination was “stuck in the elevator.” A simple paradigm shift was inspired by reimagining.

Just as we fear so many of Eros’ expressions, we fear imagination, for imagination holds out the image of a different life. It challenges our accommodation to the status quo. It suggests that all of the compromises upon which we have based our lives might not have been necessary. Our fear of imagination is our fear of our own greatness. So we work hard to kill it. We tell children to grow out of it. “It’s only your imagination,” we tell them, as if this were somehow an indication that “it” was therefore less real.

It was Albert Einstein’s gift of imagination that allowed him to formulate the concept of relativity. Einstein imagined what it would be like to travel on a beam of light. What would things look like? What would another traveler, on another beam of light going in the opposite direction, look like to him? Without leaps of imagination, no growth is possible, and the spirit petrifies in its old frozen masks.

DREAM TO BE FREE

Erotic imagination is about the ability to see beyond the status quo. This is the deep intent of a second group of wisdom masters, who, like those we met earlier in the chapter, also credit the liberation from Egypt to the power of imagination. The great Exodus began with a man who had a dream. He was a man by the name of Nun, a Hebrew slave under Egyptian rule. One morning he awoke, stunned by his night imaginings. He had dreamed what seemed to be the unimaginable: he saw a time when the Hebrews were free! More than free—they were courageous warriors responsible for the dignity of their own destiny. News of the dream spread. It is said that the hope inflamed by this vision unleashed the dynamics of revolution, which ultimately led to freedom.

Although it would take many years for it to become real, this dream was the true beginning of the Exodus. Slavery ends when we can reimagine ourselves as a free people. Nun was none other than the father of Joshua, successor to Moses, who led the people into the Promised Land. All freedom begins with our willingness to stand and say, “I have a dream!” And even if we don’t get to the Promised Land, we may well set into motion currents of redemption that will eventually heal our world. If we don’t get there, perhaps our children will. Nun’s entire generation died before reaching Canaan. Yet all of his grandchildren grew up in the Promised Land.

THE POSSIBILITY OF POSSIBILITY

Nikos Kazantzakis, a prophet of imagination, writes, “You have your brush and your colors, paint paradise, and in you go.” This is a near-perfect description of the spirit that animates the biblical ritual that yearly celebrates the Exodus from Egypt. Every year on the anniversary of the Hebrew Exodus, people gather for Passover. Unlike the Fourth of July or other freedom anniversaries, it revolves around not commemoration but imagination.

The guiding principle of the holiday is: every person is obligated to see himself as if he had left Egypt. This Talmudic epigram, the guiding mantra of the ritual, is explained by the Kabbalists as an invitation to make a personal reimagining of the most fantastic kind. You are in Egypt—your own personal Egypt. The word Egypt, Mitzrayim in Hebrew, means “the narrow places,” the constricted passageway of our life’s flow. Egypt, which kabbalistically is said to incarnate the throat, symbolizes all the words that remain stuck in our throats, the words we never speak, and the stories of our lives that remain unlived, unsung, unimagined.

We are slaves. Slavery for the Kabbalist is primarily a crisis of imagination. Consequently, healing slavery is a ritual of imagination. For an entire evening, we become dramatists, choreographers, and inspired actors. Our first step on our path to freedom is to reimagine our lives. As playwright George Bernard Shaw reminds us, “Imagination is the beginning of creation. You imagine what you desire; you will what you imagine; and at last you create what you will.”[3]

God is the possibility of possibility—limitless imagination. The first of the Ten Commandments begins, “I am God.” When this God is asked to identify himself, He responds, “I will be what I will be.” That is, “You cannot capture me in the frozen image of any time or place. To do so would be to destroy me.” It would violate the second commandment against idolatry. Idolatry is the freezing of God in a static image. To freeze God in an image is to violate the invitation of the imagination. It is to limit possibility.

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This is part one of a two-part series—an essay written by Dr. Marc Gafni in 2017 and published as part of the book A Return to Eros. Stay tuned for part two, next week.

Also read our newest book First Principles and First Values: Forty-Two Propositions on CosmoErotic Humanism, the Meta-Crisis, and the World to Come:

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Footnotes

[1] There are different forms of fantasy, some which emerge from early childhood dynamics and others that emerge from the gorgeousness of our desire. We hope to publish a full volume focused entirely on the dynamics of sexual fantasy.

[2] Nicholson Baker, Vox (New York: Vintage, 1993), ch. 4.

[3] The Serpent, in George Bernard Shaw, Back to Methuselah (1921), Part I, Act I.