Paul Levy

The God that the alchemists discovered in the philosophers’ stone wasn’t merely a projection of their imagination, however; nor did it objectively exist separate from their imagination. Instead of an either/or universe, where our projections are either unreal or real, there is an area in-between in which they are both/and: both real and unreal at the same time. Instead of the overly one-sided, rationalistic assumption that our projections are merely unreal figments of imagination, for example Jung points out their very real effects by saying, “Whatever their reality may be, functionally at all events they behave just like realities.” Having very real effects, the products of the imagination are not imaginary illusions. Jung elaborates, “What we are pleased to call illusion may be for the psyche an extremely important life-factor, something as indispensable as oxygen for the body – a psychic actuality of overwhelming significance. Presumably the psyche does not trouble itself about our categories of reality; for it, everything that works is real.” The effects of the imagination are so real that they “mold” the imagining subject, “casting” us in a form that we could only imagine. Speaking about the products of the imagination, Jung comments that they are “as real as you – as a psychic entity – are real.” The alchemists’ God was manifesting in, as and through their own imagination, a dimension all its own with a correspondingly subtle, imaginal body.
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We have so lost touch with the profundity of the imagination that the outer world seems to appear solidified in form, which is merely reflecting that our imagination is concretizing. Having lost our acquaintance with the aesthetics of the imagination, we become “an-aesthetic,” numb to our feelings and cut off from the heart, anesthetized from ourselves. Disconnected from the creative organ of the imagination, we lose our sense of aesthetics and our capacity to appreciate beauty. Instead of symbolizing our experience so as to creatively express and liberate it, we become seemingly held captive by a self-reinforcing feedback loop inside of our minds which continually generates a literal, particularized, and concretized viewpoint, both towards the world and ourselves. To the extent that we lose our connection with the ever-flowing novelty and majesty of our own creative imagination, we forget our fluid nature, becoming stunned into immobilization, alienated from and a trauma to ourselves. The play of and our play with the creative imagination, however, is the very act that cultivates, empowers and transfigures the subtle body into healing nectar which dissolves and dis-spells our seeming trauma.

The subtle body transcends and dissolves the categorical divide between the opposites. The realm of subtle bodies exists in a state “between” matter and spirit, like some sort of intermediate realm or Tibetan “bardo” (a gap, or in-between state).