The Heart as the Organ of the Imagination

"The work of the eyes is done. Go now and do the heart-work on the images imprisoned within you." Rilke

The Two Fridas, 1939, Frida Kahlo, oil paint, Museo de Arte Moderno, Mexico City.

I would like to begin today’s piece with a section from the book Imaginal Love by Tom Cheetham. If it isn’t part of your library already I would heartily recommend it does. Essentially, Cheetham proposes that one of the reasons fundamentalism and dogma are able to take over the imagination is due to the inaptitude of our emotional faculties. He puts it this way:

Mostly what prevents our opening to the richness and complexity of the world is not intellectual hesitation or inadequate critical distinctions but a dysfunction and crippling of the emotions. It is, as Jung would have it, usually the feeling function that is out of order. We wall off portions of our inner life because they hurt. It happens unconsciously for the most part, and for a while it works. But because everything is connected in unknown and unpredictable ways the frozen parts of our life begin to spread. Cramped, crippled, dead, and cold – whole terrains of our experience begin to solidify. This is one way that literalism begins to dominate the imagination. And static imagination is not imagination at all – it is dogma and ideology. It gives rise to idolatry.¹

If we don’t have an open pathway to our heart, we can’t access the full spectrum of the human experience. We get stuck in a one-sided mode of being. An approach to life that is somewhat robotic. Untouched and unmoved.

According to Cheetham and other scholars who I’ll mention shortly, a lack of skill and ability in the realm of the heart fundamentally stops us from accessing the faculty of the imagination.

Without imaginative capacity, we cannot enter the depths of ourselves or our lives. We end up living peripherally, the full potential of our life always slightly out of reach. We become onlookers rather than active participants. Never quite fully stepping into who we came here to be.

So what might it take to stop living our life on the surface of ourselves?