Just as the Eucharist and beer cans in gutters aren’t different, the language of sci-fi and the language of scripture aren’t different.
They’re both the language of revelation.
At least, that’s the way I first wrote that sentence. Then I thought, Nah, that’s not right. It’s more like—I wrote—
They’re both the language of imagination.
Which, when I reread it, I realized still wasn’t right. Then it dawned on me, the word I’d been looking for—
The Imaginal
Let’s start with physicist and Nobel laureate Niels Bohr, the brilliant mind that gave us the Copenhagen Interpretation of quantum mechanics:
The idea of a personal God,
Bohr said,
is foreign to me. But we ought to remember that religion uses language in quite a different way from science. The language of religion is more closely related to the language of poetry than to the language of science.
The fact that religions through the ages have spoken in images, parables, and paradoxes means simply that there are no other ways of grasping the reality to which they refer. But that does not mean that it is not a genuine reality.
“Remarks after the Solvay Conference 1927,” as quoted in Physics and Beyond by Werner Heisenberg. See “Neils Bohr,” Wikiquote (en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Niels_Bohr), retrieved 27 December 2021.
What Bohr means by “a genuine reality”—whether he would’ve actually used the word—is the imaginal.
The imaginal is quite different from the merely imaginary*—the often preposterous fantasies of sci-fi or the equally preposterous, let’s call it, ‘hooey’ of scripture.
*Lachman, Lost Knowledge of the Imagination, p. 93.
As Gary Lachman† puts it in The Lost Knowledge of the Imagination,
The Imaginal is ‘ontologically as real as the world of the senses
—what we can see, hear, touch, taste, smell, measure—
and that of the intellect’‡
—for example, knowing that a tomato and an acorn squash are in reality fruits (because they contain seeds) even though we think of them as vegetables.
†Interesting side note: Gary Lachman is the same Gary Lachman who was bassist in the mid-1970s for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame band Blondie. Which ought to give us hope that there is indeed a future for all those teenage boys out in the garage who haven’t yet realized that the neck of their guitar isn’t actually their pecker.
‡Lachman, Lost Knowledge of the Imagination, p. 94, quoting Henry Corbin, Mundus Imaginalis: Or, The Imaginary and the Imaginal, p. 9.
What Lachman is getting at is that our imagination actually perceives actual things that actually exist in the same very real sense that our eyes and our intellects do.
Okay, fine, what things?
Just as an example to get us started, think about Michelangelo, Handel, van Gogh, George Lucas. The imaginal for an artist isn’t a fantasy, isn’t unreal at all, but more like the flip side of a memory. What sparks the artist to create is what we might call a memory of, an echo from the future.* What sets Michelangelo to work is an echo he sees in his imagination of the Pieta he actually creates; Handel, an echo he hears of Messiah; van Gogh, an echo of Starry Night; Lucas, echos of Leia, Luke, Obi-Wan Kenobi. Like a memory of the past, an artistic echo is sometimes not quite within reach, at other times extraordinarily vivid, but it’s always an unmistakable echo from the future, a ‘memory’ of something that once the artist brings into being is indisputably real.
*As the White Queen famously said, it’s a poor sort of memory that works only backwards
So the distinction between the imaginary and the imaginal is that, on the one hand, the preposterous fantasies of sci-fi, the even more preposterous hooey of scripture exist nowhere but in their creator’s imagination. On the other, the imaginal, like the image I’m experiencing in my head right now of the squirrel I see actually sitting out there on the fence in my backyard, the imaginal in my head and that image of the squirrel in my head are both representations of something real, something really out there.
Okay, fine, but out there where?
No-where
The 12th-century Persian gnostic philosopher Suhrawardi called the place where the imaginal exists Nâ-Kojâ-Abâd, “the country of no-where.” He didn’t mean it’s a place that doesn’t exist, but rather a place that can’t be found on any terrestrial map or galactic star chart. It’s an inner destination, located in what he called ’âlam al-mithâl—the mundus imaginalis or Imaginal World, as Henry Corbin, the 20th-century scholar who devoted himself to Suhrawardi, styled it. Suhrawardi’s ’âlam al-mithâl, Lachman says, is akin to C. G. Jung’s objective psyche, Aldous Huxley’s Mind at Large, or Swedenborg’s heaven, hell, and spirit world.
Lachman, Lost Knowledge of the Imagination, pp. 93,96.
Nikola Tesla visited the mundus imaginalis and described his travels vividly:
In my boyhood I suffered from a peculiar affliction . . . . When a word was spoken to me the image of the object it designated would present itself vividly to my vision and sometimes I was quite unable to distinguish whether what I saw was tangible or not. This caused me great discomfort and anxiety. . . .
To free myself of these tormenting appearances, I tried to concentrate my mind on something else I had seen, and in this way I would often obtain temporary relief . . . . As I performed these mental operations for the second or third time, in order to chase the appearances from my vision, the remedy gradually lost all its force. Then I instinctively commenced to make excursions beyond the limits of the small world of which I had knowledge, and I saw new scenes. These were at first very blurred and indistinct, and would flit away when I tried to concentrate my attention upon them, but by and by I succeeded in fixing them; they gained in strength and distinctness and finally assumed the concreteness of real things. I soon discovered that my best comfort was attained if I simply went on in my vision farther and farther, getting new impressions all the time, and so I began to travel—of course, in my mind. Every night (and sometimes during the day), when alone, I would start on my journeys—see new places, cities and countries—live there, meet people and make friendships and acquaintances and, however unbelievable, it is a fact that they were just as dear to me as those in actual life and not a bit less intense in their manifestations.
Tesla, My Inventions. First published in Electrical Experimenter, 1919. Unpaginated. §I. My Early Life, ¶11f.
The easiest way I personally find to conceive of the Imaginal World is to think of the entire multiverse—with its infinite number of parallel worlds—as one vast mindscape. Some of those worlds are physical, like our universe, others are pure mind space. The mind spaces aren’t any less real just because they’re non-physical, just as the mind space we’re each in this very instant—where we each experience literally everything—isn’t any less real than the stuff out there that we’re experiencing in here.
What’s really exciting to ponder about the Imaginal Worlds of the multiverse is the Celtic notion of a thin place. A thin place is where the boundaries of earth and heaven—the boundaries of our physical world and a pure mind space—touch, a permeable membrane between realities. A nuance I’d add to the Celtic notion is that thin places aren’t always to be found in literal places. The permeable membrane might be in the words of a book or a blog, in the dance of the photons on your computer monitor or the screen at the multiplex.
Equally exciting is the realization that any work of the creative imagination both gets sparked by the imaginal (the artist’s ‘memory’ of the future) and may very well end up as itself a spark of the imaginal (a glimpse of a parallel reality). Handel’s aria “The Trumpet Shall Sound” from Messiah is just maybe, to a mind properly disposed, the soundscape of our inconceivable metamorphosis—not literally, but as close as you can get within the conventions and the physics of baroque music. To a mind properly disposed the aria somehow evokes, inexplicably captures something of the experience of inconceivable metamorphosis.
Lachman tells us that Suhrawardi
wrote what we can call ‘visionary tales’ . . . . That is, he used his imagination to transmute his ‘inner spiritual states’ into ‘vision events’, creating a kind of story symbolizing his level of consciousness. We can say he engaged in what we can call a kind of ‘waking dream’, precisely the kind of conscious fantasy that enabled Jung to pass out of his everyday world and into the ‘objective psyche’.
Lachman, Lost Knowledge of the Imagination, p. 95.
Let’s imagine a spectrum. At one end you’ve got Suhrawardi and Jung—even Tesla—totally focused on voyaging to one of the pure mind spaces out there in the multiverse, skilled in the craft of making careful observations of the phenomena they discover there. At the other end you’ve got sci-fi writers totally fantasizing, cranking out the most wild-ass preposterosities* their imagination can conjure.
*Yeah, I know. That’s not really a word. But it should be.
Remember Richard Matheson’s 1962 Twilight Zone episode “Little Girl Lost”?† Six-year-old Tina’s distraught parents, Chris and Ruth, awaken in the middle of the night to discover Tina missing. Inconceivably, she’s slipped through a portal that’s appeared in the wall next to her to bed—a portal, as next-door neighbor physicist Bill intones ominously, “into another dimension.”
†“Little Girl Lost,” The Twilight Zone, Wikipedia (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Girl_Lost_(The_Twilight_Zone)), retrieved 7 January 2022.
Sometimes sci-fi writers themselves are Little Girl Lost. Sometimes, immersed in exploring their imagination for The Totally Wild-Ass, in dreaming up The Totally Outrageous, lo!, they unwittingly slip through a portal and stumble into a parallel world. There they discover in the gutter of their preposterous fantasies wadded up like a Burger King wrapper lies The Imaginal.
Which is exactly the mechanism by which the symbols of the divine, as Philip K. Dick tells us, show up in our world initially at the trash stratum.
Dick, VALIS, p. 254.
And it’s exactly, I suspect, how it comes to pass that we find on the very first page of Arthur C. Clarke’s Childhood’s End this disclaimer:
THE OPINIONS EXPRESSED
IN THIS BOOK ARE NOT
THOSE OF THE AUTHOR.
They weren’t his, the preposterosities—good gracious, no! He just found them in the gutter. But he sure as heck knew a useful bit of trash when he saw one. So he, ya know, just kinda worked them in.
The Imagination
A mind immersed in the imagination, even if only for the sake of some trash fantasy—a mind immersed is, however unwittingly or unintentionally, a mind properly disposed.
And not only (as I said in the previous post) does The Hack work only for a mind properly disposed, for a mind properly disposed The Hack triggers spontaneously. As Tesla found.
Because imagining—stepping through the portal, stepping beyond Mere Appearance, stepping outside the boundaries of This Is All There Is—imagining is the power that powers the Hack.
Immerse deep enough, long enough, and The Hack invariably triggers. Invariably, even if only for a second there’s a glitch in The Matrix. The Matrix adjusts, sure, almost instantaneously. Almost. But for an instant, there’s a glimpse—the Really-Real Reality out there.
Immerse, and you get a glimpse beyond. Maybe even a trip. Like Little Girl Lost. Like Little Nikola Tesla. Except ye become as little kids, Jesus tells us, ye shall not enter The Many Worlds.
So Alien
The ‘inspired’ writers of scripture are spread out all over the spectrum, too, some skilled and objective like Suhrawardi, some immersed up to their earlobes in hooey like the sci-fi hacks. We are fortunate, as I’ve said—now that science, our dominant cultural paradigm, has consigned the Gospels to the trash stratum along with the greasy pizza boxes and snotty kleenexes—only now can we get to the gospel truth. The hooey of the scriptures are, like the fantasies of sci-fi, just another gutter—exactly where the symbols of the divine show up. Like Handel’s aria “The Trumpet Shall Sound,” the imaginal often, mostly manifests in some baroque contrivance that only a mind properly disposed can penetrate, decrypt, hear. The fact that the imaginal takes a shape so alien, to quote Bohr again,
means simply that there are no other ways of grasping the reality to which they refer. But that does not mean that it is not a genuine reality.
The prophets of the Hebrew Bible, like Clarke, are quite explicit that the opinions—the realities—expressed in their books are not those of the author. But unlike Clarke, they are anxious to give credit where credit is due: the words “thus saith the Lord” appear no less than 413 times in the King James translation.
In an intriguing parallel, Childhood’s End begins with a portentous—echos of Philip K. Dick!—invasion from on high:
The great ships descended in their overwhelming majesty. . . . The human race was no longer alone.
Clarke, Childhood’s End, pp. 7f.
Our alien Overlords—Clarke’s own word—have arrived! And much have they to say unto us, I can assure you.
One wishes Clarke allowed himself to be a tad more impish, a teense more tabloid. His disclaimer might have read:
THE OPINIONS EXPRESSED
IN THIS BOOK ARE NOT
THOSE OF THE AUTHOR.
MY BRAIN WAS ABDUCTED
BY ALIENS.
Which brings me to sci-fi, scripture, and Whitley Strieber.
Hack the Eucharist | Crash the Matrix 