Some useful distinctions I gather from Kripal’s Secret Body that are richly suggestive.
"The empirical imaginal names those moments when the dreaming or waking vision corresponds closely but not exactly to something in the objective, historical world. There is a realist impulse here. It is a super-sense for detecting and responding to historical events in the physical world and is of immense adaptive and survival advantage. The “veridical hallucination” of Meyers and his colleagues, for empirically telepathic communications, falls into this type…it seems to work like a camera: it sees and then projects to a visionary what is happening at some distance along the space time continuum. Little or no interpretation is needed, the visionary knows instantly what the vision is about. The vision is about what it says it is about…There need be only one world or order of being in play here.
The symbolic imaginal works very differently. This expression names those moments in which the dream or waking vision is experienced as mediating some other world or hidden reality. Here the content of the dream or vision can be quite baroque, bizarre or fantastic. The sense is that these images and narratives are functioning as ciphers of some other form of mind or dimension of the real. The human imagination is not so much clairvoyant as it is an organ of revelation: it is not clearly seeing in any one- to- one fashion. Rather, the imagination is intuiting or sensing something Other and then translating or picturing what it has known to a human psyche, but always in code. Note that there are at least two worlds or orders of being at play here-the subjective material world of the person and the “other” occulted world being mediated or translated." p.236
Our work on Maps of Time and Maps of Intuition and Alternate Ways of Knowing is an attempt to work with both kinds of Imaginal and they clearly overlap in actual practice. I do believe, these Imaginal capacities, are in everyone but takes a different kind of practice/training ( meditation, prayer, drawing, dancing, trance states, clean language, etc) to bring forth so great an object! As Emily Dickinson said, you have to tell the truth, but tell it slant. Mind has mountains, says, Hopkins. The poets get there first.
It would be hoped that a Psychology of the near future would work out these dimensions and stop getting stuck in the shallow end of the pool. This is not for the timid but will require great fortitude. There are, I am well aware, many who are called, but few who are chosen.
Jesus, when he asks his disciples, " Who is it that they say I am? Know ye who I am? " is not being rhetorical. I dont think Jesus knew who he was. He was a great performance artist and a supreme poet!The Father and I are one was the metaphor he grappled with, which ultimately blew everyone’s fuse. He was running a lot of juice through his system and those around him and I think, as does Kripal, that he was operating out of a taboo homoerotic twin dynamic. He was split between dimensions, and he looked directly into that vast abyss. That is why the Catholic Church still refuses to let women become priests! They wish to preserve this occult homoerotic mysticism. Without that occult element the whole cosmic show collapses.
You are your own metaphor.I hope we can develop these notions in our next conversation around Irreducible Mind.