Eligio Stephen Gallegos, Into Wholeness: The Path of Deep Imagery, Moon Bear Press, 2018 --- There are 3 types of imagery: - visualisation: where you follow the directions that someone else gives you - fantasy: where you are satisfying some inner yearning, but it feels false - deep imagery: an image provided by your unconscious that you can't control, but you can interact with # Thinking Thinking is dependent on language. Our first exposure to language is from our parents, which more often than not teaches us that language is used for giving instructions and directions, rather than describing. Our education system makes us identify thinking with facts. But thinking is founded in storytelling. Thinking works by focusing our awareness on differences. We then capture those differences under generalisations. We can see how things are both different and similar. But because of our tendency to polarize, we often become lodged in only one end of a difference. Poles gain their identity through difference, and we find ourselves stuck on one end, without being aware of this stuckness. We assign the other end of the pole to other locations and other people. We believe that understanding is the endpoint of living. But experiencing is the ultimate encounter with aliveness. # Feeling Feeling is the direct knowing of energies. Emotions are the energies that originate from within us and that we emit and set into motion. Our bodies are both the creators and receptors of energies. But we often confuse the two. We react in anger to someone else's anger, but we attribute the cause of the anger to the external situation. Because we are raised in nuclear families, we have limited opportunities to experience and express a broad range of energies. Feeling is so different from thinking that we have polarized it into nonexistence. Energies are continuous, whereas thinking is discrete. The energy that drives us is "spirit". When we are spiritual, we are energized. # Imagery > Any world we envision is carried by imagery. It precedes all. It carries all. Even knowing through sensing has little persistence, is fleeting and delicate, like the jellyfish. It is imagery that connects it all together and gives it presence and persistence. > Imagery provides us with the inner knowing of everything that exists. Our sensing presents the knowing of the outside of objects, our feeling allows us the knowing of the energies of objects, our thinking allows us to conceptualize and tell stories, but our imagery allows us the knowing of the inner aspects. > The path of deep imagery is a path whose knowing includes a knowing of healing, of gathering the disparate parts of oneself together again, of filling out those potentials that have not yet come into being, and of bringing all of these dimensions together into a single whole. # Healing > Ultimately the body is like a womb, or like a doorway. It is the means of passage by which we come forth into this greater realm. I was also shown over and over again the way in which my thinking had been calcified, had become predictable, not living its own creativity but available to whoever wanted to test its knowing and its memory. My thinking had become a slave to others rather than the participant in the journey of this being that I am in all of my complexity. My understanding had to arrive at an acceptance of the fact that I am a multitudinous being with innumerable facets, many of them quite mysterious, rather than the predictable machine I had been raised to believe I should be. # Imagery as a Path to Wholeness > As I began this book by speaking about the confusion, terror, loneliness and hopelessness that engulfed my early life, and which motivated me to search for answers, let me end it by describing as best I can how I experience myself now and the world around me. My body is not an object, not even a biological specimen, but a magical dimension that has evolved over millions of years and that carries within itself the energies and knowledge of all of creation. It is a kind of doorway that allows me, whoever I may be, to come into the world always right now to act in whatever way the multitudes of powers in me formulate themselves into doing. I am both innocent of my acts and fully responsible for them; I inherently trust the goodness of their intention and am willing to be startled and amused by their own knowing. Many times I am not privy to that knowing until the event itself. I love the splendid creativity of the present moment. > >I am fully comfortable with not knowing and I realize what a narrow domain “knowing” is. I spent most of my years of schooling hiding my not knowing behind the memorized thoughts and answers. “Not knowing” is an exciting place, adventurous, like a never ending landscape. Occasionally I have a feeling about or with someone else and a sense of puzzlement. I have learned that the feeling itself knows why it is there and if I just embrace that feeling and give it space within my own being, it eventually opens itself like a flower and shows me things that I had not known about the person and about myself. > >People are treasure houses of creativity, and to spend time with a roomful of people, helping them come into a relationship with their deep imagery, is to be present with a roomful of living works of art in creation. It is thrilling. > > The place of deep imagery within each of us is a place of deep original aliveness. Unfortunately we have come to treat it as a thing, somehow separate from us. Freud even called a part of it “the It” (das Es, which has been classically translated as “the Id”). We are separated from this place of deep original aliveness early in our childhood and spend much of our lives then searching for an anchor point in the world when it is there already, hidden deep within. > > The place is kept hidden through the development of a tendency toward symbolization and interpretation. Whenever we are invited to journey deeper into our being we have a tendency to jump back into our thinking by interpreting, thus confounding the invitation, thinking we are fulfilling the invitation when we are actually avoiding it. We are afraid of leaving thought. > > We feel that we must instill in children rules of behavior within society but those rules are already inherent in every child, and in a much more natural, organic way than our verbal laws. The child is born to be raised in a natural environment, including the presence of a loving tribal community. One or two people loving and nurturing the child is way too few. > > The nuclear family is an injured fragment of a larger familiar whole, injured in the sense that it tries to sustain itself independent of the larger tribe. The child does not have the natural energetic pull from other caring adults in order to allow the fullness of its blossoming. Instead, in our present world, it must develop a protective callus around its being which, having happened much too early in the child’s life, becomes a constriction of being rather than a support of being. We even have a name for this callus: the Ego. > > Our society has become a social organization concerned with imposing patterns on growing children rather than supporting them in their own discovery. We treat them as if they were products going through an assembly line, trying to make them predictable and controllable, rather than exciting them about their natural creativity. We are systematically wasting the greatest natural resource there is, the whole human being. > > The way back to wholeness is direct and simple, although it may be painful, and it could be accomplished globally in one generation. This would be a Manhattan Project worthy of who we are! > > We must first recognize that we are the storytelling animals. We also need to know that all the stories we tell are just that: stories. No story is the equivalent of living. Yet most people today try to live a story instead of living their lives, and for this reason also, when their story goes wrong, many people take their lives. > > One of the main stories we have learned is that the world is divided. We seldom learn that it is we who are divided. We are an incomplete being searching for completeness. We learned to abandon our completeness as a means of surviving in a synthetic environment where words and concepts have become more important than the reality that supports them. > > Our way back into wholeness is simple: we must embrace in our awareness all of those dimensions of ourselves that we have seemingly lost. But this does not mean to act them out. Our awareness must stretch and grow to the point where it is capable of containing the multiplicity of energies that we in fact are. All of the polarities, complexities, confusions, conflicts, pains, joys, and qualities of greatness not yet developed are parts of our wholeness. But we must have a center around which these aspects can assemble. > > If we have the mistaken understanding that our aliveness is already ripe then we think that all we need to do is to is to act, or to learn, or to accomplish. But if we acknowledge that our aliveness can always expand, grow, extend itself, either outward or inward, then we can be less complacent and recognize that one of our functions is to constantly accumulate aliveness. > > One clear way to begin is by meeting with the council of the Chakra Animals. Their alignment and relationship with one another forms the nucleus of our wholeness. The embryo that we once were when in the womb did not stop growing; it kept accumulating and connecting greater and greater aspects of aliveness that had preceded humans, modifying them into new functions and gathering them together increasing their ability to interact and develop new relationships with the Universe. It was the ongoing unification of these various living capabilities which together then formed the child that you were born as. > > But we need to recognize that our development does not end with our birth. It continues on, initially dependent upon the people that are around us and then becoming more and more dependent upon our own recognition and acceptance. The acceptance cannot take place haphazardly. It needs to proceed systematically. However we do not know the proper pace and sequence. Neither does our social milieu. The place where this is known is deep in the imagination, and it is through our development of a trusted ongoing communicative relationship that our aliveness, our awareness, and our maturity continue in their development. And just as our own aliveness originated out of that single mother-cell that was in our mother when she was born, we also need a center around which our continued growth and maturation can proceed. And this is the function of the aligned centers of aliveness that have been known since antiquity as ‘chakras’. > > As we embrace more and more of who we are we experience a deep and longed for healing. At points along the way these fractious dimensions jell suddenly into a new and larger being. This is the process that C. G. Jung referred to as transcendence. > > Imagery is the most ancient living dimension of ourselves, and unfortunately, it is also one of the aspects that we learn early to abandon. Our relationship with deep imagery needs to be direct and simple: the reestablishing of a relationship that is respectful, where we are willing to be present, to communicate directly and immediately those thoughts, feelings, anticipations, expectations, hopes, fears, longings, loneliness, and love. And to listen in return. To open up a full and expressive dialogue with the deepest living part of who we are leads us back into our wholeness. Once we see it, it is so simple. And the alternative is so dangerous. > > There is a positiveness and a natural goodness at the core of every human being. By journeying into our wholeness we reawaken and re-include this goodness. People are not naturally bad. It is buried injuries and inner divisions that cause people to do bad things. > > Communication was intended to take place within ourselves as well as between people. That communication leads to a communion. And that communion leads us back into relationship with our fellow beings, the earth and nature, and the very Universe itself. We then experience our natural umbilication to the Universe. > > I encourage you to begin your journey into wholeness today. Say hello to the deepest part of your imagination and allow room for a reply. The reply will occur in its own way which is perhaps not in the way that you expect. This will provide a good opportunity to look at the expectations you carry about your relationship to yourself! If you communicate what you are experiencing faithfully, and if you allow yourself to learn from your deepest living part, you will begin to change. It will be like a young shoot growing toward the light and recognizing that the roots are essential for its stability. > > You are the only one who can make this journey. No one else can do it for you. Growing toward wholeness is a process that will continue your entire life. As each new day arrives there will be new opportunities for inclusiveness. Embrace them and relish the abundance of creation and the beautiful mystery of who you are. Being on the path of growing will itself bring a deep satisfaction, like making arrangements to visit the ultimate love. --- ![[Into Wholeness#Highlights]]