Excerpt:

CERTAIN WORDS in the course of long use gather so many strange connotations that they almost cease to mean anything at all. Such a word is imagination. This word is made to serve all manner of ideas, some of them directly opposed to one another. Fancy, thought, hallucination, suspicion: indeed, so wide is its use and so varied its meanings, the word imagination has no status nor fixed significance.

For example, we ask a man to “use his imagination”, meaning that his present outlook is too restricted and therefore not equal to the task. In the next breath, we tell him that his ideas are “pure imagination”, thereby implying that his ideas are unsound. We speak of a jealous or suspicious person as a “victim of his own imagination”, meaning that his thoughts are untrue. A minute later we pay a man the highest tribute by describing him as a “man of imagination”.

Thus the word imagination has no definite meaning. Even the dictionary gives us no help. It defines imagination as (1) the picturing power or act of the mind, the constructive or creative principle; (2) a phantasm; (3) an irrational notion or belief; (4) planning, plotting or scheming as involving mental construction.

I identify the central figure of the Gospels with human imagination, the power which makes the forgiveness of sins, the achievement of our goals, inevitable.

All things were made by Him; and without Him was not anything made that was made. John 1:3

There is only one thing in the world, Imagination, and all our deformations of it.

He is despised and rejected of men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief. Isaiah 53:3

Imagination is the very gateway of reality.

“Man”, said Blake, “is either the ark of God or a phantom of the earth and of the water”. “Naturally he is only a natural organ subject to Sense”. “The Eternal Body of Man is The Imagination: that is God himself, The Divine Body. [yod, shin, ayin; from right to the left]: Jesus: we are His Members”.

I know of no greater and truer definition of the Imagination than that of Blake. By imagination we have the power to be anything we desire to be.

Through imagination, we disarm and transform the violence of the world. Our most intimate as well as our most casual relationships become imaginative, as we awaken to “the mystery hid from the ages” [Colossians 1:26], that Christ in us is our imagination.

We then realize that only as we live by imagination can we truly be said to live at all.

I want this book to be the simplest, clearest, frankest work I have the power to make it, that I may encourage you to function imaginatively, that you may open your “Immortal Eyes inwards into the Worlds of Thought” [William Blake], where you behold every desire of your heart as ripe grain “white already to harvest” [John 4:35].

I am come that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly. John 10:10

The abundant life that Christ promised us is ours to experience now, but not until we have the sense of Christ as our imagination can we experience it.

The mystery hid from the ages… Christ in you, the hope of glory, Colossians 1:26,27, is your imagination.

This is the mystery which I am ever striving to realize more keenly myself and to urge upon others.

Imagination is our redeemer, “the Lord from Heaven” born of man but not begotten of man [The Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed or the Symbol of Faith, 325/381 A.D.].

Every man is Mary and birth to Christ must give.

If the story of the immaculate conception1 and birth of Christ appears irrational to man, it is only because it is misread as biography, history, and cosmology, and the modern explorers of the imagination do not help by calling It the unconscious or subconscious mind.

Imagination’s birth and growth is the gradual transition from a God of tradition to a God of experience. If the birth of Christ in man seems slow, it is only because man is unwilling to let go the comfortable but false anchorage of tradition.

When imagination is discovered as the first principle of religion, the stone of literal understanding will have felt the rod of Moses and, like the rock of Zion [Isaiah 28:16; Romans 9:33], issue forth the water of psychological meaning to quench the thirst of humanity; and all who take the proffered cup and live a life according to this truth will transform the water of psychological meaning into the wine of forgiveness. Then, like the good Samaritan [Luke 10:33-35], they will pour it on the wounds of all.

The Son of God is not to be found in history, nor in any external form. He can only be found as the imagination of him in whom His presence becomes manifest.