Exploring The Imaginal Realm

Consider that there is an imaginal realm accessed through your mind. All of your various classifications of personality-types or characters, as well as all of the relevant experiences or scenes they play out according to their nature, exist in this realm. In other words, there is a realm where everything that you imagine happening really does happen. We have many personality types or characters, and these come with various associations of who they are and their relationships with one another. Imagine them being expressed in their purest form, without limitiation. This is exactly what occurs in the imaginal realm. They fully act out everything that you have considered them doing, that is of their nature, without the censorship of your conscious mind.

This imaginal realm obviously has much more freedom for expression than our physical realm, yet it is the underlying basis for our experience of the physical world. The imaginal realm is related to our imagination, as implied in its name. With our imagination we can play out all of these imaginal scenes, and even edit our understanding so as to alter the characters and scenes to our preferences. Now electronic technology, such as television, movies, music and various things found on the internet, is the external manifestation of the imaginal realm. In other words, our imaginal realm is brought to life through these technologies. Accordingly, these things can be used to help shape our imaginal realm. As we come to understand our imaginal characters and scenes, we can find external manifestations of these things, and use them to directly view them, as well as to help refine our understanding of them.

Consider that your conscious mind limits the potential for perceptual manifestation based on its own ‘energy-levels.' The imaginal realm, in a way, exists just beyond what you can see. The physical world, which we perceive as being what reality ‘actually' is, is no more real than the imaginal realm. It is simply a matter of your conscious-attention limiting the possibilities, and the imaginal realm is where those possibilities exist unbounded. Think of the physical world, then, as a jumping point into the imaginal realm. You can also see it as consisting of props that can be used to spark imaginal thinking, which can more and more increase perceptual-possibilities, which can allow your physical world to become an extension of your imaginal world.

As you go through your day, that which you cannot absolutely see, that you are not sure of what is there, even if you think you know, ‘pretend' it is the greatest thing it could possibly be. Fill in the blanks of uncertainty with fantasy. As I say, what ‘actually' happens will just be material to give some structure to your imaginal world. Whenever you are not yet certain of what is happening in your life, imagine that it is the greatest thing it could be. This uncertainty will come to be your greatest friend. Beyond this filling in the blanks of uncertainty, the events that ‘actually' happen should be given ideal interpretation by you. In other words, stick to the absolutely raw data, free of what you may think of as the ‘correct' interpretation. From there, give it your ideal interpretation.

 

I think the tendency of 'science-types' to be overly materialistic and un-inspiring lends itself towards others being perhaps overly 'mystical' in their interpretation of the same events. The more 'realistic' interpretations of things come to take on meanings that have connotations of being bland, boring and uninspiring. The fact is, there doesn't need to be such a vast dichotomy between the spiritual types and the scientific types. It is an unfortunate dichotomy we have created, and it is false.

In the example discussed, for instance. The likely interpretation that can be derived from these quantum experiments is that the results of any given experience or experiment naturally follow the way in which it was framed. In other words, a detection of 'objective reality' in any sort of describably way is for all intents and purposes impossible, and is more like 'given this way of looking at it, or framing the observation, these results follow.' Now that may perhaps sound semi-bland to some, less fanciful than 'we create our own realities,' but it is not, really. Our brain registers, let's say millions, of signals per minute. That may even be a conservative estimate, I've heard a pretty broad range up to much more than that. Regardless, a very large number, of which our conscious mind is only aware of a minute fraction.

What determines the signals we are aware of? Your total being, the whole mind-body system, filters through this massive amount of information, and feeds it to 'you' based on common repetitive patterns, and in general what it thinks is important. The great majority of the information is just 'discarded,' not viewed by your conscious mind. Just by virtue of this sorting process, our reality IS a construction of our mind, at least in terms of chosen signals that compose our perceived reality, as opposed to total signals that make up the 'real' reality. Now if we look at energy-organization at larger scales, beyond our individual mind-body complex, this could potentially lend itself towards even more 'fanciful' interpretations, but that is perhaps a bit more theoretical, and the facts are plenty exciting in and of themselves if seen with the right mindset.

 

There are different layers and aspects to it. In its most basic form, it is simply imagination, intentionally cultivated and pursued. This can be helped through things like meditation, or basically shutting down external pulls in favor of internal imaginings. Marijuana can certainly help in this, as your mental happenings as well as overal sensory perception is vastly improved, and can be channeled in this way. Certainly psychedelics are probably the most intense, direct and easy way to access it. Dreams can also be incorporated into this exploration, and this is something I have been trying to work on.

 

There's really no way for me to characterize you in any way based on your sentence. My observation on 'science-types' wasn't directed towards anyone in particular, just a general observation. Your statement brought it to mind in me, but I know very little about your overall approach, and wouldn't pretend to. Sorry if it sounded like I was saying something negative about you.

And again, with objective reality, observations on objective reality come about through narrowing your focus, and framing your observation in a certain way. This narrowing inherently implies a limited explanation, and the way in which the observation is framed inherently brings about certain results, based on the nature of the observation or experiment. For us to perceive every factor that goes into any given event would be incomprehensible to us, we would just call it chaos, and this is why we must narrow our focus, to make it comprehensible. This is fine, and useful, it's simply not the whole story. And as for the framing, the way you pose the observation or the experiment requires that the data be put into its framework, and that is already 'tampering' or pre-ordaining the results to some degree.

This is all quite far away from the OP, though, just getting into it since it is something that arose during the posts. This is getting into empierical science and the like as a broad overview, whereas OP is about the power of subjectivity, and the inter-mingling of the subjective and the objective.