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Mindfulness of Breathing (26) Imagining, Visualizing, and Freedom

So this has been a week of emphasizing the role of imagination in Buddhist practice. It's not something that I'm making up on my own; the Buddha himself, in a variety of ways, used imagination and evoked the imaginary powers of people when they engaged in this practice. As the practice deepens, there is born a particular capacity for imagination, which in English we could call "vision." To have a vision of a possibility, a vision that can seem very clear, tangible, and immediate—and maybe it even is, in a certain kind of way. It's not something that is physically tangible or physically seen, but seen with the mind's eye.

In Buddhism, awakening is opening the eye of the Dharma, the eye that can see and have a vision of the potential for freedom. It can see the peace and freedom of the mind that's there to some degree, and then it has a vision for it becoming complete, a vision of it expanding, a vision of it touching the places where we're not yet free. This idea of becoming a visionary, using the imagination to know a possibility, is not a fantasy; it's based on something real, but it's imagining the fulfillment of that.

For example, if I hold my hand in a tight fist, I could release one finger and hold the other fingers tight. But then I think, "Oh, it's possible now." I have a vision, I see the potential of opening the whole hand up and relaxing it. So it's a kind of imagination, a vision of a potential. It's sometimes said in Buddhism that awakening is an act of vision, a seeing. Or it awakens vision, it awakens the imagination of something that's possible that then becomes the direction we go, or what we wholeheartedly put our life energy into. Like, "This is important, this is valuable to live this way."

It doesn't mean we have to leave our regular world behind. Rather, when we have a clear enough vision of the potential, or of what awakening is as freedom from clinging, we realize that it can be the foundation for how we live our life, or the all-encompassing container or approach for everything we do. It isn't so much that we have to leave our life, but rather to envision that it's possible to live our life freely and to wholeheartedly enter our life with that as a guiding principle. This is a radical thing.

So it's not compromising our life necessarily, but bringing what's best in life—freedom, peace, and compassion—as the container, as the context, as a foundation. It's a vision of what's possible, and then a decision, even a commitment, a vow: "This is how I want to live my life."

All these things I've been talking about this week have to do with imagination. Imagination can be harmful and debilitating, or it can be forward-leading and opening; it can help us grow and develop. To be able to tell those two apart is very important.

Let me say a few things about the words that the Buddha used, words he used that I'm translating as imagination.

One of them is maññati^[1]. That is usually used for acts of imagination which are not helpful. In fact, Bhikkhu Bodhi^[2], the great translator, sometimes translates this word as "misconceived." There's no negative prefix in the word, but it's used in such a negative way in the suttas^[3] that it can often mean to mis-imagine, or poor imagination. The Buddha used the word for a jackal that imagines itself to be a lion. It misconceives itself as a lion.

One of the very interesting places where this word, which has negative connotations, is used has to do with identification. There are plenty of places in the suttas where the Buddha emphatically talks about the problems people have when they imagine. They imagine an identity for themselves, that they are something in relationship to other things. Imagining that they are the same as the universe, or the same as the world. Imagining that they are in the world, or imagining the world is in them. Imagining that they are distinct from the world. He uses this word maññati, imagine.

It's often translated as "conceive," which has some of the idea but doesn't quite capture the idea of imagination. Rather than talking about the self and identity—"who I am, I'm this, I'm that"—as a belief, which gets into philosophy, the Buddha is using the word "imagine." It's not a philosophical issue; it's an issue of what we're doing with our imagination. What are we constructing? What are we fantasizing about?

Many of the problems around self are not about what we truly are as a self, whatever that is, but rather how we imagine ourselves to be. Then we have a whole different understanding of this kind of not-self teaching. For example, there's a very common phrase, "me, myself, and mine," that's used in the suttas. That's a little bit of a mistranslation of the order of it, but it's basically the same. Imagining that something is mine, imagining that I have an identity, imagining there is an essential self—the Buddha uses the word "imagine." He doesn't say one believes in me, myself, and mine, but that it is something that we're construing, we're constructing, we're imagining is happening.

Part of meditation practice, then, is to quiet and calm this excessive over-imagination, false imagination, and misconstruing we do. It's not questioning or challenging any kind of philosophical view of self—me, myself, and mine—in these particular teachings. We don't have to get involved philosophically about whether there is or is not a self. Where we get involved in meditation practice is to clarify, let go of, and quiet the imaginings that are occurring.

So that's maññati, an imagining that is usually negative. The word that's more positive for imagination has the word anupassati^[4] in it. That's one of the central words for mindfulness practice; it means to observe or to see. But it has the prefix sam in front of it, so it's samanupassati^[5]. The context in which it's used by the Buddha can be understood to be imagination, maybe in the form of visualization.

In the similes of being free of the hindrances that I talked about a few days ago, the Buddha says, "Visualizing oneself as no longer sick. Visualizing oneself as no longer in debt. Visualizing oneself as no longer enslaved." That visualizing sometimes has a richer feeling than imagination; it touches into something deeper. It touches into something more emotional, more embodied, and more tangible, maybe, in the mind's eye. It kind of helps us to fill out something.

I think there are two functions of this imagination or visualization that the Buddha uses in practice. One is to give us a visceral, kind of embodied feeling or sense of what he's talking about. It's not just explanations; it's more like poetry, or something that's evocative and opens up, touching into more dimensions of our life than just words. It touches into our emotional being, our kinesthetic being. Some of the imagery is in action and movement: flowing water, the person working the lathe, or kneading water into powder.

Also, it touches into memory and associations we have with these things, as well as our capacity for imagination, thought, and thinking. So we have here, supported by imagination, this movement of becoming unified. This means gathering together all our different functions as human beings so that we're focused and present here for the practice of meditation. We're not fragmented, we're not divided, and we're not leaving any part of ourselves out. Rather, we are gathering together all of ourselves to center and be here.

We'll continue with the steps of ānāpānasati^[6] on Monday, going on with steps seven and eight. This continues the process of gathering together, settling, and unifying. We're also supporting the process of helping the imagination settle once it has functioned in a useful way. The goal is not to hold on to it, but to go to deeper states of unification and calm, where at some point, imagination is no longer supportive. We'll start going more deeply into the mind next week and go on from there.

Thank you very, very much. Someone asked yesterday in the chat at the end that they wanted to see the written form of the similes for the jhānas^[7]. I said I would do it, and I still will do it at some point. I can also maybe post my translation of the sixteen steps that we're going through. Once I've posted it, I'll let you know where it is, and hopefully, I'll have time to do it over the weekend.

Thank you all very much, and I look forward to our next time together.