God the Imagination

Paul Levy

There is an age-old imagination that there exists a miraculous substance that enlightens the
universe, which is exemplified in the alchemists' idea of the philosophers' stone. This
imagination does not come from the personal unconscious, but is transpersonal in origin, as
it arises out of the collective unconscious of humanity itself. This imagination has a
numinous, archetypal quality to it, which is to say it is an expression of something beyond
ourselves. This imagination of a substance which liberates the universe is a symbolic out-
picturing of a transformative potential that exists within all of us and which is the goal of the
alchemical opus. Our imagination, through symbols such as the philosophers' stone, is
revealing something to us of great significance.

Jung says, "The concept of imagination is perhaps the most important key to the
understanding of the opus." Accomplished alchemists realized that the God that they were
projecting onto the philosophers' stone was an imaginary God, a God of the Imagination.
This is not to devalue their God, or imagination, in any way, as if to say "their God
is only imagination." The alchemists knew that their God was a creation of the cosmic
imagination, and this is why they venerated, revered, and prayed to it. For the alchemists,
the imagination is the Divine Body in every person, a refined, rarefied and "subtle body" that
is not humanly constructed but divinely implanted in us from a source beyond ourselves.

To the alchemists, the figure of Christ, for example, as the incarnation of the Logos, became
pneuma-tically impregnated with the substantiality of, in Jung's words, "the world-creating
imagination of God," which is why artist and poet William Blake refers to Jesus as "Jesus the
Imagination." Christ, from the alchemical point of view, is the revelation of the divine
imagination itself, referred to as the "imagined God," which, alchemically speaking, is the
highest praise. Blake comments, "The Eternal body of Man is The Imagination, that is, God
himself."

When the alchemists had a living experience of God through their relationship with the
imaginatively created philosophers' stone, they realized that the whole experience was
nothing other than an experience of the divine imagination, which is to say that they were
realizing that they themselves were living inspirations of the divine, creative imagination
itself. Jung says, "I am indeed convinced that creative imagination is the only primordial
phenomenon accessible to us, the real Ground of the psyche, the only immediate reality."
Being the "only immediate reality," the divine, creative imagination is the primordial ground
of "reality" itself. Paradoxically, at the same time that the philosophers' stone revealed itself
as a product of the alchemists' imagination, the alchemists realized that they themselves --
and everyone for that matter -- were the imagination of the philosophers' stone!

To quote Jung, "The imaginatio, or the act of imagining, was thus a physical activity that
could be fitted into the cycle of material changes that brought these about and was brought
about by them in turn." The act of imagining influences the material world, while at the
same time, is reciprocally influenced by the material world in the process. We dream up the
world while concurrently, in a circular, nonlinear and acausal process that exists outside of
time, we are dreamed up by the world. This simultaneity of cause and effect, of "creating"
the seemingly outer world while at the same time being "created" by it, is an expression of
the fundamental correspondence and ultimate indivisibility of the inner and the outer.

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.

Subtle Body

According to the alchemists, the products of our imagination are not immaterial, vaporous
phantoms, but are something corporeal, having a "subtle body" all their own. The alchemists
were realizing that the philosophers' stone was a subtle energy body, a super-celestial body,
the "star" in humanity, which is the interface between mind and matter. The imaginal,
subtle body is a transcendental idea that is neither purely physical nor spiritual, but rather is
a hybrid in that it partakes in, encompasses, and is comprised of both the spiritual and
material. The subtle body is both the same as and different from each of the two sides that
define it, as it is more than the sum of its parts. To quote Jung, "Imagination is therefore a
concentrated extract of the life forces, both physical and psychic." A hyper-dimensional
portal and mercurial medium, the subtle body is a magical elixir, the product of the
imagination that influences, bridges, links, and connects the spiritual and the material
worlds. Jung comments, "Somewhere our unconscious becomes material, because the body
is the living unit, and our conscious and our unconscious are embedded in it; they contact
the body. Somewhere there is a place where the two ends meet and become interlocked.
And that is the place where one cannot say whether it is matter, or what one calls ‘psyche.'"

The materialistic prejudice of assuming matter objectively exists separate from the psyche
immediately banishes the intermediate realm of subtle bodies to seeming nonexistence. But,
nevertheless, the subtle body is a real presence. Its presence is present even in its seeming
absence. It has a genuine weight, which means the subtle body leaves an "impression."
Once both physics and psychology touch the untrodden, untreadable reaches of seemingly
impenetrable darkness where physis and psyche become indistinguishable, to quote Jung,
"then the intermediate realm of subtle bodies comes to life again, and the physical and the
psychic are once more blended in an indissoluble unity." In a genuine conspiracy, the
material and the spiritual worlds truly "conspire" with each other, as they "co-inspire" each
other, which is to say that they breathe together as one.

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). To quote Jung, "there
did exist an intermediate realm between mind and matter, i.e., a psychic realm of subtle
bodies whose characteristic it is to manifest themselves in a mental as well as a material
form." Jung's words themselves can be seen to be an atemporal and nonlocal form of his,
as well as our subtle body.

The subtle body is a hidden realm through which projections, themselves a form of the
subtle body, pass, are transmitted and have their impact. Though seemingly insubstantial,
projections carry a real weight and have a very real effect. We live in an information-imbued
universe where everything in-forms, acts on, interacts with, and is a projection of everything
else. Information itself is a subtle body; in-formation means a message that actually "forms"
and alters the recipient. When self-reflective, lucid awareness is added to the mix, the subtle
body becomes the medium through which the in-forming influences encoded within the
projections are alchemically transubstantiated into "lucidity stimulators." This is to say that
our projections, while being the very things that are separating us from real relationship,
can, if we recognize their mirror-like, reflective nature, potentially wake us up.

The space of the subtle body is a body that does not fill space in the same way as ordinary
matter, and yet it can extend itself all throughout space. The subtle body does not consist of
matter, and yet it exists in every atom of the universe. In addition to manifesting through
the inner plane of our imaginings, dreams, and visions, the subtle body "fleshes-out" its
immaterial, transcendental nature by also incarnating itself through the embodied forms of
our ordinary third-dimensional world. The subtle body materializes itself as the entire
universe, which is the place of its appearance, but its physical manifestation mysteriously
does not contain its substance. This is similar to how a mirror is merely the place of the
appearance of the image it reflects, but the substance, the thing-in-itself which the image
re-presents, doesn't reside in the mirror. The revelation of the subtle body through the
forms of the world are both itself and other than itself at the same time, in the same way
that the reflections in the mirror are inseparable from the mirror but are themselves not the
mirror.

The subtle body's essence is simultaneously indistinguishable from and transcendent to its
mere manifestations. The subtle body is a "no-substance," empty of independent, inherent
existence, inseparable from consciousness itself, yet it physically displays itself in, through
and as the seemingly substantial forms of the universe. Though able to affect our ordinary
lives, the subtle body is not located in the third dimension of space or time, as it literally
exists in another dimension which mysteriously interpenetrates into our dimension. Jung
elaborates, "the subtle body is a transcendental concept which cannot be expressed in terms
of our language or our philosophical views, because they are all inside the categories of time
and space."

The subtle body exists in a realm that has no inside or outside, in that it has no location in
the way we normally think of location in terms of space-time coordinates. The subtle body
is nonlocal, which is to say it is not bound or localized to one particular place or time, but on
the contrary, transcends the conventional rules of space and time, as it is expressing itself
throughout the entire field of consciousness at all times. Speaking about the part of the
psyche that is "extraspacial and extratemporal," Jung writes "'Subtle body' may be a fitting
expression for this [nonlocal] part of the psyche."

Nonlocal interaction is characterized by instant informational exchange, where one part of

the universe, in no-time whatsoever (i.e., outside of time), appears to interact, affect and
communicate with another part of the universe in an immediate and unmediated way.
Imagine, in baseball terminology, a throw from deep centerfield to home plate, only the
outfielder is halfway around the planet, and the throw takes zero seconds to arrive. The
interaction involved in a nonlocal universe is not any known form of interaction we are
familiar with, as it occurs infinitely faster than the speed of light can travel through the
medium of space, while at the same time doesn't involve any expenditure of energy.
Nonlocality's action-at-a-distance is an expression of an underlying and out-flowing
information-filled field which connects and inextricably links every part of the universe with
every other part in no time. In a nonlocal universe such as ours, no part of the universe is or
can be fundamentally separate from any other part, which is to say that nonlocality is an
expression of the indivisible wholeness of the universe. This linking, according to the
quantum theoretician Henry Stapp, could be the "most profound discovery in all of science."

The subtle body nonlocally configures events in the world so as to synchronistically give
shape and form to itself. Synchronicities, where the inner psyche and an outer event co-
relate and correspondingly reflect each other (please see my article "Catching the Bug of
Synchronicity"), are themselves a form of the subtle body expressing the underlying
singularity of all creation. Synchronicities are revelations of the absence of any division
between the physical world and inner, psychological reality. Synchronistic events are
"lucidity stimulators," neon-signs from the dreamlike nature of the universe to help us wake
up to its, and our, dreamlike nature. Just like a dream, mind and matter are not separate,
distinct realities, but rather, are seemingly different fundamental components of the same
deeper, underlying reality that has both an external-matter aspect and an internal-mind
aspect. Jung writes, "the body of the world and its psyche are a reflection of the God we
imagine...we have every reason to suppose that there is only one world, where matter and
psyche are the same thing." The subtle body is the revelation and living expression of the
creative imagination itself, as if it's introducing itself to us in a way we could only imagine.
Imaginatio

If we are to engage the subtle body, the imagination must be "employed," which will
nonlocally help the life-nourishing "economy" of the biosphere as a whole. The subtle body
can only be perceived by the eye of imagination itself, which is the supra-sensory organ of
its auto-revelation. Simultaneous to being the object of the alchemists' contemplation, the
imagination was itself the organ of perception through which they imaginatively gained
access to the other-worldly and world-creating qualities of the sacred imagination existing
within themselves. It is important to differentiate the alchemists' notion of imagination,
which is a creative activity originating out of and expressing the wholeness of the Self, from
mere fantasy, which is a repetitive and self-soothing activity of the ego whose fundamental
purpose is to avoid relationship with life. An alchemical text expresses this same idea by
saying, "In thine efforts be guided in all ways by the true and not the fantastic imagination."
It is the alchemists' version of true imagination that Einstein was referring to when he
famously said "Imagination is more important than knowledge."

When the alchemists talk about the "imaginative faculty of the soul," they are giving a clear
indication of the secret essence of the alchemical art. The imaginative faculty of the soul is
not merely a human attribute, but is a divine activity of the soul in which the human
imagination participates and bears witness. The human imagination is enveloped in and
suffused with the unconditioned, divine, creative imagination, the imagination that is
imagining-creating the whole universe in this very moment. The imagination that the
alchemists were interested in was the imagination of God, which is the imagination where
what is imagined effects what is happening in a way that can only be imagined and is
beyond imagination at the same time.

When we become conscious of an unconscious content, it is as if God's consciousness has

expanded through us. At that moment it is as if God has imagined that we have become
conscious. These divinely-sponsored, inspired moments of becoming conscious
instantaneously and nonlocally registers throughout the whole collective field of
consciousness. In a prescient articulation of the nonlocal nature of reality while speaking
about the "nature of the collective unconscious," Jung comments, "it seems to me like an
omnipresent continuum, an unextended Everywhere. That is to say, when something
happens here at point A which touches upon or affects the collective unconscious, it has
happened everywhere." Becoming conscious stimulates and empowers the creative
imagination, both within ourselves as well as throughout the surrounding field, to become
more and more of a primary means through which we engage with creation. The act of
becoming conscious depends ultimately upon our connection with the infinite, with
something divine within ourselves. Jung comments, "The decisive question for man is: Is he
related to something infinite or not? That is the telling question of his life."

Sacred, primordial, archetypal living images are thirsting to enlist our creative imagination as
an instrument to in-form and give shape to themselves in, as and through the third-
dimensional world. In a certain fundamental sense, we, as egoic agents existing in time,
don't create. We can, however, become instruments through which we allow something that
already exists in the mysterious, timeless, higher-dimension of our being to appear and
become progressively revealed in manifest form. Jung writes, "If a man puts his hand to the
opus, he repeats, as the alchemists say, God's work of creation." In becoming an
intermediary through which the divine, creative power is expressed and made real in time,
we are participating in and en-acting a "recreation" of the eternal act in the play of creation.
We may then say that we are creating in a similar sense as God creates, as it is God that is
creating through us.

Jung comments, "Because these higher things are imagined by God they at once become
substantial instead of lingering in a state of potential reality, like the contents of the
unconscious." As compared to contents of the unconscious which remain in a state of
unrealized potential, we can get out of our own way and offer ourselves as a conduit for the
contents of the divine, creative imagination within us to actualize themselves in, as and
through both ourselves and our world. This process directly co-responds to and is reflected
in the inner world by the act of consciously realizing contents of the unconscious, or to say it
simply -- becoming conscious. Any one of us becoming more conscious lights-up and
nonlocally registers throughout the whole universe. When we wake up, the whole universe
wakes up with us.

Like an iteration of an inter-nested fractal, the (macro)cosmic, collective process that is

happening on the world stage reflects and reveals itself on the inner, personal plane at the
same time, as well as vice versa. Different dimensional reflections of each other, the outer
collective process and the inner personal process are beyond interconnected, they are the
same process simply explicating itself in different dimensions of our being simultaneously.
The microcosm (our inner, personal process) and macrocosm (the world process) directly,
instantaneously and reciprocally affect each other, as the two are one and the same. This
means that the way to effect real change in the world is to transform ourselves by becoming
more conscious, as, holographically speaking, the world is enfolded within us while at the
same time "We are the World."

Symbols

Through accomplishing the process of "imaginatio" the soul, "just as God does," is
empowered, by becoming an instrument for the divine imagination, to bring about "many
things of the utmost profundity outside the body." To quote Jung, "it was a question of
representing and realizing those ‘greater' things which the soul, on God's behalf, imagines
creatively...The place or the medium of realization is neither mind nor matter, but that
intermediate realm of subtle reality which can be adequately only expressed by the symbol.
The symbol is neither abstract nor concrete, neither rational nor irrational, neither real nor
unreal. It is always both." Once again we have a situation that is not either/or (are symbols
real or unreal?), but both/and (symbols are both real and unreal). Symbols in a dream are
the form that the unconscious takes to communicate with and ultimately add consciousness
to itself so as to awaken the dreamer (which is us), thereby uniting the conscious and the
unconscious. A symbol is a bridge and synthesizer of opposites, containing and uniting both
of the opposites within itself.

The subtle body is a genuine symbolic entity, an ambassador for the open-ended, seamless
field that pervades everything and then some. The nonbinding and ungraspable nature of
the subtle body is a symbol reflecting back to us our own intrinsic freedom. Seen
symbolically, the subtle body introduces us to and is an expression of the greater
interactive, unified and unifying field, transcending the separate self and uniting the
opposites of self and other in one fell swoop. A symbol of itself, the subtle body is a spiritual
means of transport, in that it is both a manifestation of and doorway into spirit. Being a
living symbol, the subtle body is the vehicle that actualizes the very higher-dimensional
universe of which it is an emanation. Symbols offer us a precious opportunity, for as Jung
writes, a symbol "not only conveys a visualization of the process but - and this is perhaps
just as important - it also brings a re-experiencing of it, of that twilight which we can learn
to understand." The universe exists in the form of an ever-transforming living symbol of
itself, which is to say that it is a continually unfolding, primordial revelation. Just like a
dream, the universe is an instantaneous feedback loop, a living work of art, an inspired
oracle that is speaking symbolically.

The subtle body is relational in nature and function. The subtle body has to do with relations
per se, rather than the seemingly separate things that are doing the relating. The subtle
body of the alchemists is a field phenomenon, in that it has nothing to do with separate
selves and everything to do with the infinite inter-relationships pervading the underlying
field. The field's subtle body is not a thing but a dynamically evolving, living process in which
we are all participating, simultaneously creating and being created by, what physicist John
Wheeler calls a "self-reference cosmology." Co-joined and coupled in a deeper unity, the
seemingly objective and subjective worlds are reciprocally creating and being mutually
created by each other. The field of the subtle body does not exist as an isolated, objective
entity separate from our subjective awareness, which is to say that it is imaginal. The subtle
body is an (im)materialization of the interactive field between us. To quote Jung, "In the
deepest sense, we all dream not out of ourselves, but out of what lies between us and the
other." Jung is pointing at that "in-between" place in which we are all inseparably
interconnected and, in the deepest sense, don't exist as isolated entities. Rather, we exist as
relational beings who are interdependently dreaming together, contained in and expressions
of a deeper unified and unifying dreamfield.

Matter

The subtle body is a form of matter that is so exceedingly subtle that it cannot be perceived
through ordinary, consensus-reality means. We can only consciously perceive the underlying
subtle body of the field when we "abandon," in Jung's words, a "causal description of nature
in the ordinary space-time system, and in its place to set up invisible fields of probability in
multidimensional spaces." The field is a higher-dimensional, quantum phenomenon of open-
ended potentiality; its infinite wave function collapses into a particularized manifestation
depending upon how it is "dreamed up" and observed into form. The underlying field can
only be perceived when we step out of our habitual viewpoint of imagining that we exist as
a fixed reference point, a center of volitional action, a "time-bound ego," and connect with
our timeless selves, who ironically, can only be found in the present moment of time. The
subtle body of the field can only be perceived with a shift and expansion of our awareness,
while at the same time being an expression of this very shift of consciousness itself.

To quote Jung, "We don't know whether our psyche is material or immaterial, because we
don't know what matter is, so we cannot say that there is any difference between the
psyche and the body." When we get down to the matter, it is an inescapable fact that we
don't even know what the bound-energy wave-packets we call matter actually are. To quote
Jung, "What the alchemists called ‘matter' was in reality the [unconscious] self." Jung is
pointing at that what the alchemists call matter is inseparable from the projections of their
unconscious (please see my article "The Sacred Art of Alchemy"). One thing for sure,
which quantum physics has shown us again and again, is that we cannot factor out the
psyche from the material world. The alchemical philosophers' stone, mathematically
speaking, represents the "equation" that integrates mind and matter.

The subtle body is not experienced by getting out of the body, but rather, by incarnating
into it. Our physical body itself is a form of the subtle body, as our physical body is never
experienced separately from our consciousness. We only experience our body in and
through our psyche, as we never experience one without the other. Jung writes, "In reality,
there is nothing but a living body. That is the fact, and psyche is as much a living body as
body is living psyche; it is just the same."

The subtle body is ultimately a mental body, a body of light. The idea of the subtle body
plays a big role in the New Testament. For example, St. Paul's referring to Christ's
"incorruptible body" is an allusion to the glorified form of the subtle body. Speaking of the
resurrected body that "we put on with Christ," Jung comments, "Christ is in a way the soul
or the pneuma, the incorruptible body that is beyond space and time." All different wisdom
traditions symbolically re-present this same ineffable state that symbolizes our true nature in
various ways. For example, in Tibetan Buddhism, the adamantine, "diamond body"
represents the indestructible, invulnerable aspect of the enlightened state, while the
"rainbow body" symbolizes the aspect of our nature that, just like a rainbow, appears but is
empty of intrinsic, independent existence, thereby existing "beyond space and time."

Consciousness

This universe we live in, ourselves included, is never experienced without consciousness
being part of the equation. Consciousness is the most fundamental feature of reality despite
the currently predominating deterministic, scientific worldview in which consciousness is
marginalized and ignored. To recognize that the whole universe is not separate from our
psyche is to begin to realize the "dreamlike" nature of Reality. Recognizing the dreamlike
nature is itself a self-luminous and rarefied form of the subtle body in action. Becoming lucid
and recognizing the dreamlike nature of reality is the way this radiant, refined form of the
subtle body in-carnates and "in-corporates" itself in the world, while at the same time
incorporating the world into itself. The open heart of lucid awareness attracts and dreams
the world into itself. Lucid awareness is the polar opposite of, energetically speaking, what
a black hole symbolizes. Instead of "disappearing" and imprisoning energy like a black hole,
lucid awareness nonlocally "appears" energetically throughout the field. Lucid awareness is
like a white hole or rather, a white "whole," omni-directionally emanating radiant awareness.
Liberating experience to spontaneously unfold creatively, lucidity is a truly creative act in
that it is to be actively participating and engaging in the co-creation of the universe with
itself.

To recognize the dreamlike nature is to realize that, just like a dream, all the matter in this
universe, ourselves included, is in-formed by and composed of crystallized light, the light of
consciousness. All matter is thus recognized to be mind-stuff or crystallized and condensed
consciousness. This living light which takes on all the myriad forms of the multiverse is the
light of self-existing sentient awareness itself. This is the lumen naturae, the light of nature,
the light within the darkness itself, the light which has no opposite (please see my
article "The Light of Darkness"). This living light of non-dual awareness is the "light
body" of all spiritual wisdom traditions.

Stepping into our "body of light" is analogous to becoming lucid inside of a dream and
realizing that what we took to be objectively real, including who we thought we were, is
nothing other than a momentary materialization of our own thought-forms, our own
imagination, our own consciousness. In a fundamental way that is just like a dream, we
can't separate out our consciousness from the body of the world, as the two are so
interwoven as to be indistinguishably united. It's not simply that our consciousness is
dreaming up the world; as if completing a circle, the world is at the same time dreaming up
our consciousness. The world and consciousness are intermingled in such a way that they
mutually and reciprocally co-arise in a deeper unified sphere of being. It is impossible to say
which initially caused the other, as their relationship has no beginning in time. This
realization of the acausal and synchronic co-arising of the world and consciousness "orients"
us towards the universe, as well as ourselves, in a whole new way that opens up vast
realms and domains of possibilities that were simply not available to us while operating from
a more fixated, deterministic, linear and causal worldview.

Fire

The alchemists were having the experience that heating a substance so radically changed its
form that they thought they had created a new body, what they imagined was even a new
being, which they conceived of as a living spirit. To quote Jung, "So you can make a spirit
out of matter, can de-materialize - what they call ‘subtilize' matter to such an extent that it
becomes a spirit, not a disembodied spirit but a spirit that is a subtle body." Luminous like
light, fire is an ancient, primordial image of both God and the Holy Ghost. Jung continues,
"Now, since this subtle body was made by heat, they assumed that through the fire they
imparted fire-substance to the body so that it became partially like fire, and ‘fire' was
another symbol for the soul...And by giving fire to substances they assumed that they
became half spiritual, or subtle bodies."

Melting our psychic numbness, fire inflames our buried passions and sheds light on our
latent potentials as well as our shadow. Symbolically speaking, fire represents overwhelming
affect, deep feelings, and strong emotions, which are the connective elements which provide
the linkage between the inner and outer. Jung elaborates, "The fire means, of course,
intensity, so if you submit to intensity, say to an intense emotion, you would change into a
subtle body. Therefore, to subtilize or sublimate a man, you must expose him to the
fire...the fire can subtilize him, or it may destroy him. This idea is expressed also in the non-
canonical saying of Jesus: ‘He who is near to me is near to the fire; and he who is far from
me is far from the kingdom.'" The divine, refining fire burns away all the impurities and
superfluities which seemingly obscure the truth of our being, consuming and transforming
our lower nature in a way that progressively reveals our true selves. The ordeals, trials, and
tribulations that inevitably come our way as part of life and put us "through the fire" are
initiations, designed by a higher, divine intelligence, uniquely crafted for and by our soul to
burn away our false, egoic personality traits so as to liberate our latent, higher psycho-
spiritual potentials. Whether the fire purifies or destroys us depends upon if we have created
a strong enough, hermetically-sealed alchemical vessel within ourselves (to read more on
the importance of heating and the alchemical container, click here). These experiences of
being internally triggered and set aflame are ultimately a reflection of our own uniquely
personal process, while simultaneously being an expression of the
collective/nonpersonal/transpersonal field. The microcosm and the macrocosm are always
indivisible reflections of each other.

The Solution

The solution to our dilemma is encoded in the seeming problem. For example, when we are
unconscious, we are unconsciously identified with the linkage between mind and matter
such that it's invisible to us, i.e., we can't see the connection between the two. Seemingly
stuck in a perspective that sees events in the outer world as having no relation whatsoever
to our inner state, the dreamlike nature of our experience will simply reflect back the
seeming objective truth of our viewpoint, as we continually "prove" to ourselves the
rightness of our point of view in a self-fulfilling prophecy. En-trancing ourselves, our own
creative power is being turned against us by ourselves. And yet, this unconscious
identification, in Jung's words "between the behavior of matter and the events in his [our]
own psyche...not only serves as a bridge, it actually is the bridge that unites psychic and
material events in one, so that ‘what is within is also without.'" The subtle body of the
unconscious has no choice but to reflect back this unconscious identification with itself, as
the unconscious is a reflection of this very identification. Paradoxically, the manifestation of
the subtle body of the unconscious simultaneously reveals and veils itself in its open
revelation of itself. Our unconsciousness is the very thing which keeps us asleep while
simultaneously being the very thing which is waking us up. The seeming problem is itself the
doorway to its own solution. We simply have to stop concretizing our fixed ideas and
interpretations about what is happening and open up to recognizing what is actually being
revealed to us by our experience.

Just like a dream, how we observe, or "dream up" the world has an actualizing and
meaning-creating influence on how the world materializes and appears to us. This
realization unlocks the door to our ever present God-given creative potency, as we realize
that in a very particular way the world is as we dream it. We, not as discrete egos, but as
interconnected instruments that potentially serve a much vaster, intelligence-filled whole,
are creators. There is an alchemical saying, "The philosopher [the alchemist] is not the
master of the stone, but rather its minister." When we connect and get in-phase with each
other as fellow alchemists-in-training, we discover that we can collaboratively minister to
and help each other to activate our sacred power of creative imagination en masse, I
imagine, and literally incarnate our most grace-filled vision in, as and through the world. Our
only limitation is our imaginary lack of imagination.

Jung says, "the psyche, when directly experienced, confronts us in the ‘living' substance it
has animated and appears to be one with." The "living substance" that the psyche has
"animated" and "appears to be one with" is the subtle body of the philosophers' stone,
which is ultimately both ourselves and the world co-joined. The alchemists discovered that
their psyche was not located inside their heads, but rather, that being "in the world" was to
be "inside" the psyche. For alchemical adepts, the boundary between dreaming and waking
dissolved to reveal its inseparable unity. Becoming lucid in the dream of life, the boundary
between self in here and others out there becomes transparent and is seen through, as we
are all recognized to be interdependent and interconnected reflections of each other. As if
snapping out of a self-limiting spell, our self-image expands as we step into our nonlocal,
omni-directional extensions of ourselves, our new "members," so to speak, when we re-
member we are "coming from" and "emerging" from both inside and outside of our
imagined selves at the same time. The "Self" is found everywhere. Not "apart from" each
other, we are "a part of" each other, ultimately all on the same side. Dream characters in
each others' shared waking dream who are linkages to each other as well as to ourselves,
we are reflective aspects of the same being, Being itself. As the opposites unite, matter
becomes divinized, deified, and blessed, and spirit becomes humanized, materialized and
incarnated in form. Realized alchemists -- "is there such a thing, or am I just imagining?" --
realize the immanence of the divine creativity in everything, a genuinely transcendental
experience which can only be found right now, in this present moment.

Image by _Lev_, courtesy of Creative Commons license