Chapter 1 — section 2
Chapter 1
“Man”, said Blake, “is either the ark of God or a phantom of the earth and of the water”. “Naturally he is only a natural organ subject to Sense”. “The Eternal Body of Man is The Imagination: that is God himself, The Divine Body. [yod, shin, ayin; from right to the left]: Jesus: we are His Members”.
I know of no greater and truer definition of the Imagination than that of Blake. By imagination we have the power to be anything we desire to be.
Through imagination, we disarm and transform the violence of the world. Our most intimate as well as our most casual relationships become imaginative, as we awaken to “the mystery hid from the ages” [Colossians 1:26], that Christ in us is our imagination.
We then realize that only as we live by imagination can we truly be said to live at all.
I want this book to be the simplest, clearest, frankest work I have the power to make it, that I may encourage you to function imaginatively, that you may open your “Immortal Eyes inwards into the Worlds of Thought” [William Blake], where you behold every desire of your heart as ripe grain “white already to harvest” [John 4:35].
I am come that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly. John 10:10
The abundant life that Christ promised us is ours to experience now, but not until we have the sense of Christ as our imagination can we experience it.
The mystery hid from the ages… Christ in you, the hope of glory, Colossians 1:26,27, is your imagination.
This is the mystery which I am ever striving to realize more keenly myself and to urge upon others.
Imagination is our redeemer, “the Lord from Heaven” born of man but not begotten of man [The Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed or the Symbol of Faith, 325/381 A.D.].
Every man is Mary and birth to Christ must give.
If the story of the immaculate conception and birth of Christ appears irrational to man, it is only because it is misread as biography, history, and cosmology, and the modern explorers of the imagination do not help by calling It the unconscious or subconscious mind.