Gateways to the Imaginal: An Interview With Harold Bloom (from Wise Attention)

In the mid-1990s, Vishvapani (blogger of Wise Attention) interviewed the eminent literary critic and religions scholar, Harold Bloom - focusing on Bloom's then-recent book, Omens of the Millennium: The Gnosis of Angels, Dreams, and Resurrection. This very thought-provoking conversation originally appeared in Dharma Life 5, Summer 1997.

Gateways to the Imaginal: an Interview With Harold Bloom

Posted by Vishvapani on Oct 26, 2012

Harold Bloom’s writing on literature and religion is a remarkable mix of almost supernatural erudition with a deep concern with spiritual life. He’s controversial and unfashionable, but I constantly read and reread his works. I think Bloom’s approach has much in common with Buddhism and offers a way to discern what is most valuable in western traditions, in the arts, and perhaps even in Buddhism itself. Some years ago I visited Bloom in at his home in New Haven, near Yale University and discussed his book, Omens of Millennium, which explores the preoccupations of contemporary spirituality in the light of the western mystical traditions of Gnosticism, Sufism, and Kabala.


Vishvapani: In Omens of Millennium you speak of your rejection of the major western religious traditions, including their view of God, and you explore alternative ways of thinking about spiritual life. What did you reject?


Harold Bloom: I was raised in the Judaic tradition, but I am totally alienated from it. I have increasingly seen it as a terrible parody of what I regard as the authentic Jewish religion. What we call ‘normative Judaism’ is based on a very strong misreading of the Hebrew Bible, propagated in the 2nd century CE in Palestine by rabbis who were trying to meet the needs of the Jewish people under Roman occupation. To think that 1,800 years later it answers the realities of Jewish (or anyone’s) existence is preposterous. It accounts for so much of what is wrong with Israel and what is wrong with Jewish life in the us.

But I think that nothing can be done about this. A historical imposture that has lasted for 1,800 years will not be undone, just as the imposture of what absurdly calls itself Christianity, and has lasted 1,900 years, is not going to be undone. It seems that Buddhism is not so contaminated among most of its adherents by a false reading of its original texts as every variety of Christianity that I know.

V: In looking for viable spiritual alternatives you draw on the esoteric traditions of western religion – Gnosticism and kabbala. Why are you so drawn to these seemingly arcane traditions?


HB: I cannot hope to understand the religious history of the East. Hinduism is impenetrable to me. A number of my friends have become Buddhists – I estimate there must now be several million Buddhists in America. But for me Buddhism is barely available – I have tried, but I don’t think I understand it. So I am confined to the western tradition. That means I look at Judaic tradition, and what came after it in Christianity and Islam. And I find that all I can identify with are the heterodox elements – the traditions of ‘gnosis’ or ‘knowing’ in its various manifestations. 
If I look at Classical thought, I can only identify with a particular strain in Platonism, which in turn engenders the vast neo-Platonic tradition, and then rejoins the Gnostic tradition, in Hermetism. The early Hermetic circles were confined to a very few people who were evidently secular, philosophical and scholarly, but they have had a vast influence on western literature. Again and again when you have poetry that is aware of itself as poetry, Hermetic elements reappear. This happens with William Blake, with the French Symbolists, with the High Romantics, with Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson in the us. That seems to be most available to me.

What fascinates me about Sufi texts as expounded by Henri Corbin – the indispensable guide to Sufi tradition and a grand writer – is that they turn invariably on the notion of the imaginal, which they speak of as ‘the angelic world’. It is a notion implicit in Hermetism, which I first came to know through my study of Kabbala. The imaginal is that realm which is available to us in many guises, aesthetic and not at all aesthetic, which is neither the super-sensible nor the empirical. It is what Corbin calls ‘the middle territory’.

V: ‘The imaginal’ suggests the realm of the imagination. But when you speak of the angelic realm, I am reminded of Wallace Stevens’s phrase ‘the necessary angel’, which suggests there are some truths and experiences that can only be expressed through images or symbols. Why are angels ‘necessary’? Why do we need images to apprehend the spiritual?


HB: The traditions of western heterodox spirituality that fascinate me have always been concerned with image-thinking. Poets do not conceive without imaging. Plato himself is the most powerful of image-thinkers. The Yahwist [the original biblical writer], who is the gateway to a more archaic Jewish religion, is a great image-thinker. Jacob’s encounter with the angel cannot be regarded as literal, and therefore must be seen as an enormous image. The Yahwistic account of the creation is an ironically humorous image. God makes a mud-pie, and breathes into it! I don’t know if any spiritual traditions are possible without images. In every Buddhist text I know there is extraordinarily beautiful image-thinking.

V:  The implication seems to be that if we ponder such images deeply enough we can have access to the realms of experience from which they arise. Could you say something about your own explorations of the imaginal in your engagement with western literature?


HB:  I have used the concept very much in my work, though I have found alternative ways of talking about it. I am now writing – you see the evidence piled up around me – a vast book on Shakespeare and Imagination, which I have been trying to write for the past 11 or 12 years. I don’t think I will actually use the term ‘imaginal’ in the book, but I will use the concept, drawing my terms from Shakespeare himself. 
Shakespeare is the greatest inventor of character, and I believe he is the inventor of the human as we know it in the West. I think Shakespeare’s also the greatest master of the imaginal. For instance, the world of the Romances, where we think of things as supernatural or preternatural, is simply the exercise of the imaginal. This is perhaps more suggestive than anything in Dante because it is so ambiguous. There is a kind of glancing upward from the human condition to something beyond the human condition.

V:  This implies that in investigating poetry you are also investigating how the human mind makes sense of reality in ways that go beyond ideas and concepts. Could you talk about how this process works?


HB:  In his death poem, Of Mere Being, Wallace Stevens uses the image of ‘the palm at the end of the mind’. I don’t know if he was aware that it was a Sufi image. The Sufi Ibn Arabi says, when God formed Adam from the moistened red clay into which he breathed, there was a certain lump left over that he couldn’t put into the Adam figure and from which he made the palm tree. Stevens says:

The palm at the end of the mind
Beyond the last thought, rises
In the bronze distance … on the edge of space

Here we are surely in the realm of the imaginal. It is a reaching towards what would have to be called the super-sensible, yet Stevens is a wholly secular and naturalistic poet. Simply because he executes the full range of the poetic imagination, he finds himself again and again in the imaginal realm. He defines the imaginal in the America of his day. Just before he left for the hospital to die of cancer, Stevens wrote the last lines of the poem:

The bird sings, its feathers shine.
The palm stands on the edge of space.
The wind moves slowly in its branches.
The bird’s fire-fangled feathers dangle down.

The last words of a master. ‘Fire-fangled’ means fashioned out of fire, so the bird is a kind of phoenix. He did not overtly think the poem was about resurrection, but I interpret it implicitly in that highly Gnostic sense of resurrection. As the Gnostic Valentinian gospel says: ‘Christ was resurrected, he rose, and then he died’. The resurrection takes place in this life. That view is purely American. The American relation to Jesus is one of knowing yourself resurrected in this life. By being ‘born again’ American Christians mean something much more graphic than European Christians ever meant.

V:  When we move from the sphere of literature to the sphere of religion, one of the differences is that religion in the West has traditionally involved belief. Your emphasis on the imaginal seems to be an alternative approach, and yet from a Buddhist point of view it is striking that you use certain terms (such as God and the self) drawn from the theistic traditions, which Buddhism would reject. Why bring God into it?


HB:  The deepest influence on me since my own ‘middle of the journey’ crisis around 1965 has been Emerson. I am always battling with friends like Richard Poirier who, like myself, argue for Emerson’s centrality in American literature, thought and existence, but who want to despiritualise him. It is Emerson who insists on bringing God into it, because he says, ‘it is God in you who speaks to another or hears his own words on the lips of another’. 
But also it is an experiential matter for me, as it was for Emerson. I do believe – in fact I know – there is a best and oldest part of oneself, and that best and oldest part seems to me definitive of God. That hardly means I am sitting here as a representative of God. I am certainly no such thing. Finding that best and oldest part of one, that spark or pneuma as the Gnostics call it, is not easy. I can’t get at it. There is so much rubble in the self. You have to burrow down and try to get at the original spark and usually the effort does not work. Occasionally it does manifest itself, but most of the time I am not in communion with the best and oldest part of myself – alas. I am far too imperfect an old wreck for that.

 V:  You say that to understand literature or religion ‘the only method is the method of the self’ – experience is the only touchstone. Can you say more?


HB:  I think everything else is a delusion, or an imposition, or yielding to someone else’s self. Anything else is inauthentic.

V:  Your critics say that by insisting on this you deny social and political realities, and even risk falling into solipsism or relativism. When one moves from questions of literary response to questions of religious truth, many people would find the method of the self inadequate if it denies the possibility of ‘objective’ truth.


HB:  We cannot get at anything ultimately authentic outside of ourselves – outside our experience – so we have to look into what we understand by the self. Here my understanding of the self comes out of the complexities in Gnosticism. There are two selves. One is a self-aggrandising, or outward self, which is what Meister Eckhart meant when he said so fiercely that ‘only the self burns in hell’. But the other self is what Whitman calls ‘the real Me, or Me myself’, what Emerson calls ‘part or particle of God’. Emerson does not mean the outwardly aggressive, accumulative self. He means something else, and I do also. 
When I use the term I mean what Gnosticism calls the individual spark or breath, which is what remains of the authentic God in one. But my academic critics, who are preoccupied with what they assert are communal (i.e. political) concerns, are not going to understand this. That is why you get the developments in modern academic life, which I call ‘the school of resentment’. In a Buddhist context, where I would agree with the rejection of the limited self, I do not think I would face so many misunderstandings.

V:  There seems a strong tendency to literalise images, which is perhaps the origin of conventional religion. Instead you try to see the imaginal in its own terms. Most writers on religion or literature, however, tend to ‘interpret down’ something that is expressed in images and symbols into a system of rational thought.


HB:  Far from understanding poetry to be ‘spilled religion’, as Matthew Arnold considered it, I’ve always thought religion is spilled poetry. I try to interpret religious or poetic symbols upwards – to apprehend at a distance those elements in the imaginal which really do intimate something that goes beyond the realm of the aesthetic and seems to knock at the gates of the super-sensible. 
In my writing and thinking I try to establish a ‘modern Gnostic’ version of the imaginal. I draw on Romantic and post-Romantic literature for my vocabulary because of its intense implicit Gnosticism – its insistence on the direct experience of knowing, which creates its own images. I utilise that as a vocabulary for the imaginal. But I cannot say that I have as yet made such a project cohere, though I am trying, with help from Shakespeare.

V:  Your recent work in religious criticism has grown out of your career as a literary critic. How did that change take place? Was it because you came to see poetry in more or less religious terms?


HB:  I would emphasise that my work is religious criticism, not religious writing. I have not learned to cross the divide – I am far too limited in the religious sphere. I want to make the right distinctions and help others to do so. But I cannot become a religious teacher because I have no light of my own to dispense.

I am not so sure there has been any fundamental change in my approach to poetry, but my work has moved into new areas and I think Shakespeare has made the difference. The distinction between secular and sacred vanishes when you invoke Shakespeare. He is not a Christian dramatist, and yet he is not an anti-Christian dramatist. GK Chesterton brilliantly said that although he wanted to make Shakespeare into a Catholic writer, he couldn’t because what Shakespeare essentially shows is ‘great spirits in chains’. And that isn’t the Christian vision. I agree.

V:  In The Western Canon you are highly critical of recent developments in academic approaches to literature, such as ‘cultural materialism’, which are mainly concerned with political agendas. Does literary study still offer this training in the imagination?


HB:  There is always the hope that we might revive the study of literature as one which takes the images of literature seriously again. But I think that is a dream. The study of literature in the West has been effectively destroyed. It will certainly not revive in the academies. It is by no means dead among common or general readers, as my correspondence shows. Every time a new translation of The Western Canon appears I am deluged with letters from readers who dislike what the academic study of literature has become, because it belies their experience.

Traditional literary study teaches you not to reduce the image. It takes images very seriously indeed as ways of structuring reality. The leading literary critics of the 20th century – Wilson Knight, Northrop Frye, even a secular figure like Kenneth Burke – taught that everything depends upon the sanctity of the image. It must not be reduced or discarded, and one must not try to find a cognitive substitute for it.

V:  Can the tradition of western literature provide an alternative canon to that of theistic traditions, a source of spiritual nourishment from within western culture?


HB:  That is a fascinating suggestion and it runs counter to current fashion in the us and Britain, particularly in the universities. It is what I suppose I stand for, or battle for. But it is an extremely optimistic notion. People who are supposed to be students of literature and scholars of the literary canon have turned against it with a horrible odium.

None the less, what is still most available to us, as a gateway to the imaginal, is indeed the literary tradition – if only we knew how to get at it. When you read texts from kabbala, Sufism or Gnosticism, they retain an arcane aspect. Something that does not lose the aura of the esoteric is, in a sense, never fully ‘available’. But the literary tradition is not arcane, even if its spiritual aspects are becoming arcane, because it has been so hideously politicised and it is so badly taught – where it is taught at all. 
Shakespeare is available. So is Dante, though to fewer people as he is more abstruse. Blake is available, though not perhaps when he is most fully himself in the Prophetic Books; Whitman is available, though he has been so badly expounded and it has become difficult to see that he is indeed a religious writer. The idea of aesthetic experience still has a universal aspect.

So, for me at least, the aesthetic can provide a gateway to the imaginal. I find myself happiest and most at home when I teach Shakespeare. In trying accurately to expound Hamlet, Macbeth, King Lear or the high comedies, it seems as if I am closest to my own spiritual experience. I cannot regard Blake as other than a spiritual preceptor on the one hand, and on the other hand a very great aesthetic phenomenon. What moves me in the Hermetic writings, or Sufi texts, is the image-making power that is involved. To me the aesthetic is the imaginal. The heterodox tradition in the West is the imaginal, and the two fuse.

Read the whole interview.

Nice discussion on the neuroscience of dreaming. Your host, Dr. David Van Nuys, speaks with Robert Hoss, M.S., author of the book, Dream Language: Self-understanding Through Imagery and Color.

Shrink Rap Radio #300 On The Neuroscience of Dreaming with Robert Hoss

Robert Hoss, M.S., is author of the book Dream Language. He is also a Director and Past President of the International Association for the Study of Dreams, faculty at Haden Institute for Dream Leadership Training, and former adjunct faculty for dream studies at such institutions as Sonoma State University, Richland College and Scottsdale College.

A former corporate executive, scientist and researcher, with training in Gestalt and Humanistic psychology, he now devotes his skills to dream studies, for which he has been a frequent guest on radio and TV, and an internationally acclaimed lecturer and instructor for over 30 years. His unique, simple but powerful dreamwork approach is based on his training in Gestalt therapy and background in Jungian studies, the neurobiology of dreaming, plus his pioneering research on the significance of color in dreams.

He is also conference manager for the upcoming 29th annual conference of the International Association for The Study of Dreams “Sailing on the Sea of Dreams” at the Berkeley Marina Doubletree, June 22 – 26, 2012, and you are invited to attend!

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Posted on April 12, 2012

Bonnie Bright - The Shamanic Perspective: Where Jungian Thought and Archetypal Shamanism Converge

I stumbled upon this article from Bonnie Bright recently and was quite intrigued by it. There have been several articles and books over the years linking shamanism and Jungian psychology. Sandra Ingerman is one of the best known therapists to use this model of "soul retrieval" in her work.

Ingerman is quoted in the article as saying that shamans know where the split off parts of self/soul go when they are lost, but that modern psychotherapy has no such map. But I disagree - in the various parts models of trauma and mental illness, we know that the parts are found in memories, drams, or even in somatic sensations.

The whole article is quite interesting, but I am only sharing a bit on the topic of soul loss and soul retrieval. Follow the title link to read the whole PDF of the article.

The Shamanic Perspective: Where Jungian Thought and Archetypal Shamanism Converge

By Bonnie Bright

Soul Loss
Studies in anthropology led Jung to adopt into psychology a concept prevalent in shamanic societies: that of soul loss. Typically recognized as a state of general malaise, soul loss provides another common thread between both Jungian psychology and shamanism. Soul loss is a fragmentary sequence in which parts of the whole wander away, flee, or get split off, lost, or disoriented resulting in a loss of vitality or life force (Ingerman, 1991). In a shamanic worldview, the dislocated parts are carried away to the underworld; in psychology, they are said to recede into the unconscious. With the critical absence of vital parts of our soul, we are left feeling weak, empty, depressed, deflated, or anxious, and commonly trend toward mental or physical illness. Jung cited the loss of connection between our ego and the Self as the fundamental cause of soul loss:

There are two reasons why man loses contact with the regulating center of his soul. One of them is that some single instinctive drive or emotional image can carry him into a one-sidedness that makes him lose his balance…his one-sidedness and consequent loss of balance are much dreaded by primitives, who call it “loss of soul.” (1964, pp. 228-9)

Hillman (1975) outlines five functions of soul: (1) it makes all meaning possible, (2) it turns events into experiences, (3) it involves a deepening of experience, (4) is communicated in love, and (5) has a special relation with death (p. xvi). For Hillman, as a result of these five characteristics, the soul represents the imaginative possibility of our nature, a possibility that is realized in reflective speculation, dream, image, and fantasy. If any one of these aspects of soul alone is lost, the repercussions are immense. As meaning dissolves and love and death become increasingly distant aspects of our experiential understanding, our lives are prone to becoming simply a series of events, which happen to us, one after another, and from which we are progressively more disconnected and detached.

Both shamanism and psychology seek to treat soul loss by retrieving and reintegrating vital essence that is missing. According to Eliade (1974), soul loss occurs for many reasons: one, as a protective measure, transpiring when we simply cannot sustain the distress caused by accidents, abuse, attack, or other sudden, devastating events. In this case, the soul flees in order to escape feeling fear, pain, or shock. On other occasions, pieces of our soul remain with other people after relationships end or they depart with souls who have died. Additionally, invasive energies can attach themselves to, or are directed at, a person. This is commonly perceived as witchcraft or sorcery from a shamanic view and as a complex, or constellated, spontaneously activated, unruly energy triggered by past conditioning from a Jungian standpoint (Storr, 1983).

Last, soul loss can occur from habitually refusing to listen to the guidance of the gods or spirits (Ryan, 2002). Indigenous cultures often relate illness, both of body and mind, to soul loss, believing the resulting illness, disease, depression, or malaise stemming from the loss of an essential part of the self can only be restored through shamanic intervention (Sarangerel, 2001).

In psychological terms, soul loss is dismemberment or dissociation: the loss of contact or connection with deeper, vital parts of ourselves associated with the Self. French psychologist Pierre Janet coined the term splitting to describe the defensive mechanism through which the human mind is able to distance itself from the effects of trauma by severing the connection to thoughts, feelings, and memories that are in excess of what it can process at that time (Smith, 2007). Kalsched (1996) states that dissociating is a normal psychological defense that allows us to bear pain that may otherwise be unbearable. Disengaging and dropping the part of ourselves that was most traumatized is the only way we can cope and move on. In each of these instances, we dissociate or dismiss the parts of ourselves that are vulnerable to the brunt of the trauma and banish them for either punishment or safekeeping. Ultimately, it is a default mode of sequestering and coping with unknown entities that threaten us.

Glendinning (2007) maintains that the ability to remove our consciousness around an area or topic that is too painful to bear serves an important function. According to her, dissociation is a brilliant method of self-preservation, a way to stave off or avoid threats, challenges, and difficulties we are unable to integrate. Dissociation is a kind of fencing off of our psyche, a splitting, just as when we first fenced off plots of earth in order to manage them more effectively and accommodate our ongoing survival (as cited in Glendinning, 2007, p.113). These fenced off areas, once established, seem to freeze in place, holding the contents in the original untouched form, as if freeze-drying them to preserve the host from contamination. In psychology, these are what Jung referred to as the complexes, which are often spontaneously broken open when certain triggering situations arise (Jung, 1964).

Indeed, it is this loss of connection to which June Singer (1994), Jungian analyst and author, also attributes the core of our soul loss. Singer says when soul loss occurs, the soul has “ceased to be the connecting ribbon of a road between the conscious individual and the vast unknown and unknowable” (p. 39). She, like Jung, believes it is a necessity for the soul to provide ongoing intercourse between the ego and the unconscious.
 
Soul Recovery
It is the task of the shaman to walk between worlds as an interpreter or mediator of the spirit realm—including the province Jung referred to as the collective unconscious. According to Mircea Eliade (1974), one of the most vital functions a shaman performs is that of soul retrieval wherein the shaman’s spirit leaves the body to seek out souls who have lost their way, journeying into other realms to locate and retrieve the lost soul and re-integrate it into the person’s physical body. Similarly, psychotherapists also seek to re-integrate disconnected pieces of the soul, or psyche, but, in this case, the major difference from a shamanic worldview is that patients are encouraged to go in search of their own split-off parts. The therapist will then help the patient interpret the significance of her interaction with the imaginal and to frame her experience in order to reintegrate the parts (Haule, 2009). From both perspectives, healing can be achieved through visions, dreams, and symbols, regardless of whether they are accessed first by the shaman or the patient (Roberts, 1999).

Ingerman (1991) points out that a significant difference between shamanism and psychotherapy is that in shamanism it is categorically apparent where the fragmented pieces of soul go when they leave. In traditional psychology, we understand there has been a splitting off resulting from trauma, but we don’t think to ask where those lost parts reside. Smith (2007) rightly suggests that a shaman might consider most of the disorders defined in the DSM, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders published by the American Psychiatric Association, as symptoms with an underlying cause of soul loss, otherwise defined as loss of vitality or power. Regardless, healing, whether in shamanism or in Jungian psychology, results from gathering those parts and reintegrating them with the whole—just like bringing the lost bees home to the hive.


Collective Soul Loss
Modern times seem to find the increasingly global culture suffering from a spiritual crisis, a collective soul loss and a dismemberment of body, mind, and spirit (Allen and Sabini, 1997). Rampant dissociation characterized by inertia, loss of vitality, depression and disease pervades our everyday life. Daily we are exposed to new and ever more disturbing accounts and media stories of addiction, violence, rage, and intolerance. In order to prevent the discomfort and pain these events arouse, we must numb ourselves on an ongoing basis. Dissociation, a form of disregard, disrupts our connection to a universal, cosmic web in which we participate as equals with the greater whole of elements and life forms around us. It deepens the separation we have established between ourselves and what we see, and it intensifies our view that the outside world and everything in it is dead, justifying ever greater abuse and manipulation of the natural world, the earth, and each other (Bernstein, 2005).

Our collective culture mirrors an individual who is suffering deeply from soul loss, manifesting in symptoms such as falling into conflict with the self, fragmenting into splinters in the pursuit of goals, interests, and occupations; and losing touch with his “origins and traditions…even losing all memory of his former self” (Sabini, 2005, p.182). Disregard, numbing, or not wishing to see or feel the distress and negative effects that soul loss brings also moves us ever further away from deep connection with soul and into a society where meaning is hard to find, compelling us try anything to fill up the gaping sense of emptiness that results. Jung correctly diagnosed our compulsive, cultural tendency toward hyperactivity, saying, “we rush impetuously into novelty, driven by a mounting sense of insufficiency, dissatisfaction, and restlessness” (as cited in Sabini, 2005, p. 141). Rather than turning inward to find a sense of meaning, rather than encountering and engaging with soul to integrate the disparate pieces, we grasp at straws outside ourselves and further fragmentation ensues.

Jung also recognized that entire nations suffer from dissociation and soul loss, reminding us, "Modern man does not understand how much his 'rationalism' has put him at the mercy of the psychic 'underworld'…. His moral and spiritual tradition has disintegrated, and he is now paying for this break-up in world-wide disorientation and dissociation” (as cited in Allen & Sabini, 1997, p. 216). In fact, we are witnessing an ever-greater loss of soul at the planetary level as well. The anima mundi, the world soul, so rich and varied with her diverse multitude of cultures, languages, species, and habitats, is losing soul with increasing speed as each becomes endangered and then extinct. With every loss of heritage, home, or heart, pieces of soul drop away, leaving the world soul weak, listless, and disoriented, lacking needed vitality and energy to exist.