The Creative Act: The Imagination as Hermeneutical Tool

The Creative Act: The Imagination as Hermeneutical Tool

The question that must be posed at the beginning of this exploration of the nature and function of the creative act, is simply, why is it necessary to consider this phenomenon in the first place? My answer is a personal and simple one. The cognitive experience of the creative act, specifically poetic in my case, is the conscious mind’s greatest hermeneutical tool with which to understand the symbolic and imagistic capacities of the human mind. Understanding the creative, or artistic, capacity of the mind is important precisely because it is this psychic faculty and process that differentiates human beings from mineral, plant, and non-human animal life. In other words, to understand the creative process is to essentially understand what it means to be a human being, possessing a human mind.

The mind has an incredible capacity to think in images that transcend the discursive thoughts of our daily mundane experience. In moments of poetic reverie one can experience images and motifs that are not simply individual representations of ones unconscious mind, but also posses a universal or transpersonal quality. These images are both personal and impersonal. They are personal in the sense that an individual experiences them and hence the images are somewhat colored and interpreted through the subjective experience, understanding, and imagination of the individual. By this I mean that when one experiences the archetypes of the collective unconscious they bring an understanding and significance to ones life that on a certain level cannot be passed on to anyone else. This is so because the collective unconscious gets mixed together with the personal conscious/unconscious mind of the individual and hence the way that these images and symbols are represented to a given person become a hermeneutic tool through which one is able to better understand the seemingly meaningless and random events that happen in ones life.

On the other hand, there is a level to the experience of these motifs and symbols that arise in the unconscious, or the creative imagination as Herny Corbin called it, which by the way has significant differences from Jung’s idea of the collective unconscious, that belong to the World Soul or the World Psyche. These images and symbols are collective, not in the sense of socially collective (i.e. socio-cultural conditioning), but rather truths that are common to all people in all times and places. These symbols that arise in the mind of the individual are basic to the nature and structure of reality. By and large, in today’s world we have forgotten about this level of reality and psychic experience because for the most part we understand nothing other then material reality. These images are like a guide map that is sent to us from a source beyond our limited ego-selves which is attempting to give us the clues which will lead us back to our original and primordial nature.

The key is to understand these symbols. In this case, our main guide is the intuition. The intuition will lead us to those experiences, books, and people that will be able to shed some light on the realm of the creative imagination. In fact, intuition is the handmaid of the creative imagination. It is the creative imagination itself which utilizes the tool of intuition to guide the individual back to itself. So in a sense we could say it is actually the creative imagination itself that helps us to understand the symbols that is has presented to us. As human beings we are far more then simple material automatons who can experience only a very limited range of reality and hence die in confusion or disbelief of the existence of any realities beyond the scope of our mundane experience.

The symbols belonging to the World Soul which manifest through the medium of the creative imagination are closer to the truth of who we are. They are hieroglyphs that we must learn to read if we wish to unlock the deeper secrets and meaning of our existence. Each symbol presented to us by the creative imagination is the representative of a certain energy that exists in the unconscious. By learning to read and understand these symbols, or as Jung would say, by bringing them to the clear light of conscious awareness, we deeply enrich our being and open up to dimensions of experience and understanding which surpass anything the mundane mind can fathom. The interpretation of these symbols is really endless because part of their function is to bring together all of the disconnected parts of the human psyche into a unified whole which in turn repairs the psychic fragmentation that causes so much suffering and misunderstanding in the world of nature. Any particular symbol can have attached to it a wide variety of associations and interpretations. In fact, the deeper one goes into his or her understanding of the creative imagination the more possible interpretations present themselves to the seeker.

The point of these symbols is not to understand them for their own sake. For when it comes to the apprehension of the most subtle and divine realities, any given psychic manifestation is but a pointer to a deeper level of experience. Swedenborg called this the law of correspondence. The deeper we go into the experience and understanding of the creative imagination the more we are able to penetrate the veil of the symbols, which are but the creative imaginations external forms, and experience the energies that lie beyond these symbols. We can equate these with the Divine Names and Attributes of God that are spoken of in the mystical interpretations of Islamic doctrine. Again these energies are not in and of themselves the deepest realities that one is able to explore and experience. In other words, the multiplicity of energies embodied in various psychic symbols have their source in a deeper level of reality.

The idea here is that the deeper we go into the subtle dimension of psychic experience the more approach tawhid or that Unifying principal which is the source of all creation. We should not try to imagine this source as anything in particular. In fact, to try to understand it with or rational mind, or even with our intuitive faculties, is impossible because we can never imagine a form for that which is the giver of all form.