TEACHER: Avi Craimer
THEME: Imaginative Contemplation
Avi: The imagination is not just an inner holographic display inside our heads. It is how we perceive and integrate meaning worlds out of the raw materials of sense perception. The true magic of imaginal practice starts when an image or narrative event pops into the imaginal consciousness spontaneously from the depths of the psyche. Yet, we can’t just wait around for this to happen, we need a way to set ourselves up for this sort of revelation. The technique of imaginative contemplation pioneered by Ignatius of Loyola does just this. It begins from a shared mythic narrative as a starting point to stimulate our inner flow of images, but it doesn’t end there. By entering experientially into a pre-existing narrative, our imagination naturally embellishes beyond the source text – interior fan-fic if you will – showing us more than we consciously put into it. Tonight we’ll explore this technique using a text from a well-known fantasy novel as our seed story.
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