We are not yet ready to admit that the destruction of nature is the consequence not of policy errors that can be remedied by smarter management, better technology, and stricter regulation but rather of a catastrophic moral failure that demands a radical shift in consciousness.
Hitherto, the natural landscape and the human world took a backseat to the essentially spiritual and religious subjects of paintings. Prior to perspective, the mundane world was merely a reflection of the spiritual realms, a hieroglyphic backdrop to celestial events and figures. But with perspective, this changed. The represented world now became what was perceived from the point of view of a single human consciousness. The world was now what we saw.
To be an elder, benefactor, conservator, and mentor calls for a learning about shadows, an instruction from the “dead” (that is, from what has gone before, become invisible, yet continues to vivify our lives with its influences). The “dead” come back as ancestors, especially in times of crisis, when we are at a loss.
“Imaginal” is the world that lies between the purely intelligible—that is, conceptual—world of Plato’s Forms (the Intellect in Plotinus’s philosophy) and the purely material world of the senses. It is, as Corbin writes, “ontologically as real as the world of the senses and that of the intellect.” It partakes of and informs both in the sense that in it, the pure abstract Ideas are clothed in symbols, and the brute objects of the physical world can become imbued with symbolic significance. We enter it every night when we dream, and some intrepid explorers have entered it while fully conscious. To jump ahead somewhat: C. G. Jung’s “descent into the unconscious,” Swedenborg’s journeys to heaven and hell, Rudolf Steiner’s “readings” of the “Akashic record,” to name perhaps the most well-known modern journeys into the interior, all took place within the Mundus Imaginalis.
The suspension of disbelief becomes a humble acceptance of whatever is going on as part of the zigzag workings of the Creative. These two attitudes combine in an unshakable modesty which exemplifies The Receptive. While they appear to be passive attitudes, they are not. The secret is that they perfectly arouse the powers of the Creative to work out all things correctly.
“For there was no doubt in Bundy’s mind about his ability to handle... the world. The job was not just a happenstance thing; he had, literally and figuratively, been bred for it, or failing this, Secretary of State. He was the brightest light in that glittering constellation around the President [Kennedy], for if those years had any central theme, if there was anything that bound the men, their followers and their subordinates together, it was the belief that sheer intelligence and rationality could answer and solve anything.”
