Cosmic Consciousness and Creative Imagination

The Tibetan Buddhist adept Lama Anagarika Govinda in his book Creative Meditation and Multi-Dimensional Consciousness writes about the imaginative aspects of meditation. He clearly states that if you change your awareness you will live in a different world and experience a different reality. In his book he explains how to use your creative imagination in meditation.

This power of creative imagination is not merely content with seeing the world as it is, accepting a given reality, but is capable of creating a new reality by transforming the inner as well as the outer world.

He goes on to claim that if we don’t embrace the imaginative power of meditation we deprive our practice of its most effective and vital means of transforming human nature as it is to what it could be. Human nature becomes what it could be as dominant potentials that lie within us are fully awakened, but to awaken these latent potentials they must first be vividly represented and pictured in the human mind. Without these representations there is no incentive to transform them into actualities.

In my own teaching work I speak about this aspect of practice as creative illumination. It is the creative act of illuminating new possibilities in our minds so that they can be brought into manifestation in the world. I call a person who engages in this work as an artist of possibility. I want to share one more lengthy quote from Lama Govinda’s book that beautifully describes the work of an artist of possibility.

Creative imagination builds with the “bricks of reality,” as does the artist with the materials of the physical world and the potentialities of his psyche. This is done in an inwardly directed and meaningful way which crystallizes in a new and unique expression of reality – either in a work of art or in that of a transformed consciousness – a transformed individual who has awakened to a new aspect of reality.

According to Lama Govinda, practitioners of Hīnayāna (mindfulness) schools of Buddhism strive to see the world as it is, and Zen practitioners work to solve the paradoxes of mind. Practitioners of the tantric Buddhist schools of Tibet are engaged with practices of creative imagination that replace merely abstract and mental conceptions of reality that operate two-dimensionally with creative multi-dimensional symbols of living experience.

The cosmic sense of self that we will build through the practices introduced in next year’s intensive practice program can best be understood as symbolic representations of a living experience. It is important to note that our current familiar identity is no different. It is a symbolic representation of the experience of being me. My concept of being Jeff represents a particular experience of being human and as long as I am identified with the concept of being Jeff that is the experience I will have. When we create a new cosmic self concept we encode it with the living experience of being a person with cosmic consciousness and when we identify with that self we experience cosmic consciousness.