SEEING INTO THE LIFE OF THINGS: IMAGINATION AND THE SACRED ENCOUNTER - NOVEMBER 2025 EVENTS
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EXCERPT FROM SEEING INTO THE LIFE OF THINGS: IMAGINATION AND THE SACRED ENCOUNTER
An Overview
The Venerable Thubten Chodron, a Buddhist teacher, once teased me at a time when I did not know what to do with myself.
“What are you going to do when you grow up?”
I told her, “I don’t know—because I am still growing.”
I am still growing.
I have an intuition—and it was affirmed in a dream so it must be true—that everything I have ever written is somehow connected, even if at any moment I am not sure how. I have a broader intuition that everything in life is connected as one, though only rarely do I experience this directly. We are all together in one life, that’s for sure, and so I write for others even as I write for myself.
I write for others in case it’s helpful. I write for myself—to find out what I’m thinking and feeling. The process of writing, the joy and pain, lies in surfacing hidden thoughts and feelings as they arise spontaneously as words and images. To free the words from abstraction and make them felt as images is what writing should be about.
When I’m in the zone I hear words and see images as one. That’s why it’s a pity to speed read. Because images take time to unfold, like dayflowers in early morning sun.
Abstract language gives little joy: a legal document is flavor-free. Orwell taught long ago how tyrants use abstractions to cover bloody crimes. Daily we gulp down clichés, cant, jargon and other gray stews of writing in a sad language Czech novelist Ivan Klima called “jerkish.”
So, it’s refreshing to taste images. From teaching a natural dreamwork for the past twenty years, along with their flavor, I’ve come to know their medicine.
Images heal. Contemplating them intently, we restore the innate imagination that makes us creative beings. And in certain sublime moments “we can see into the life of things.”
But for all this to work I must not only let images heal me, I must heal my relationship to images. That is my project here.
I feel images in memory and in dream. I also perceive the world around me in images though often I brush past the most gorgeous moments, captive to an internal narrative. There’s a way to shift back, to slow down and feel. Then we do the most beautiful thing, we “give birth to our images.” For images need our pregnancy, and per Aristotle thought cannot be born without images.
They come to life as I bring life to them. Imagination nurtures them, analysis kills them. We hurry past the feelings in our images. Or non-stop distraction snatches them away. Images purveyed by commerce seldom elevate the soul.
Children are born sensualists, but then we process them in school, teaching them to stand in lines. In second grade I was punished by being forced to sit on my hands. The naturally fidgeting curious body is bound to a chair, released only for a brief recess. Mind detaches from body and dwells in abstraction.
As adults we live in an interpreted world and explain away our dreams. Like paintings, films, drama—our dreams are spiritually necessary. Their first great gift is to bring us back to feeling.
This book responds to a question from the Dalai Lama: how do you deal with rage, resentment, anxiety, guilt, and shame—the afflictive emotions?
The short answer is pay more attention to the images in our dreams, memories, and perceptions. Then we know how images heal.