My friend Gordon, co-author of Your Soul’s Compass, was attending a workshop with Hameed Ali (A.H. Almaas) recently. According to Gordon, people were using the the words “fantasy” and “imagination” interchangeably.
I commented that in fact these were opposite concepts. “Fantasy” is a mental construct–a substitute for reality. Imagination, on the other hand, is an intensification of reality. It is depth perception, the percieving of the divine arising from the absolute that is your lover and also you in this holy instant, seeing the world in a grain of sand and heaven in a wildflower as William Blake did, perceiving the fertile realm of concrete potentiality that lies beneath the surface reality in which we find ourselves embedded. Hameed agreed with me that in fact imagination is indeed a different faculty from the one used for fantasizing.
Your Soul’s Compass deals with how we can intentionally engage spiritual imagination–what Ibn Arabi called “the creativity of the heart”–to open us to a more harmonious and intimate dance with ultimate reality as the realm of our own and the world’s unfolding possibility.
How do you see fantasy vs. imagination?
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