Currently I’m reading a mildly interesting book which bounces in some strange space between alternative psychotherapies (including but not limited to Jungian) and a Western alchemical tradition. It’s not exactly my cup of tea, but you know, I sometimes read stuff from the periphery of my interest since there is some overlap sometimes.

Anyway, there is this one idea there that was really interesting that I thought I would attempt to pass along. It’s a somewhat new idea for me, but I also see how I’ve been using this process all along, so it’s also not that new. I just never really thought of it as “imaginal metabolism.” So that’s the name of the idea. So what is it then?

The idea is that imagination can be compared to a digestive and metabolic process. This is of special relevance to those who want to use mind powers to heal some conditions, or to overcome PTSD and similar. Whenever something painful or terrible happens, there can be at least two ways to respond: one possible way is to isolate what happened in an impermeable mental bubble of sorts, and then never think about it again. The author postulates this as an unhealthy response. But to leave the experience AS IS is also bad. The memory of it is too heavy, and of course if the experience is still ongoing it might be unbearable. So one option here would be to digest the bad memory or experience in the stomach and juices of imagination.

This is done by mixing the memories or experiences with the so-called “imaginary” ones that make it better. When this is done over and over, it’s like digesting something by breaking it down and integrating that something into your body.

In this case the body is not understood in a conventional way either. The body is the most visceral level of imagination. It’s not a thing or an object per se. So the most visceral level of imagination is our waking experience or something akin to it.

Then integration means safely combining two types of experiences which we normally would think are incompatible. So for example, health and pain seem to be incompatible. However, with the process of imaginal digestion one could make pain compatible and in effect not painful. So one could transform the pain, and then even transform the memory of pain, which can be painful in its own right, to be something that can no longer induce oppressive apprehension and fright. It’s basically a way to brighten up and lighten up memories in addition to having the potential of transforming ongoing experiencings. When it comes to memory, you can leave the basic facts the same, if you like, but you can drain all the heaviness out of any memories that seem too heavy. Or I imagine you can even achieve a more radical transformation.

So the idea is simple: we can mix what is visceral with what is less visceral and we can play with it creatively and imaginatively. So if let’s say you felt pain in your arm, you could visualize colorful symbols streaming into the area of pain and swirling around and inside it and dissolving it away. You can then also imagine pain itself streaming outward and combining with other phenomena in strange ways. You can take a perspective on your painful arm from a helicopter far above, and imagine looking at your own arm through the binoculars. Or you can add a funny music track, mentally, to just about any experience, and suddenly the whole experience feels different. So the point is, we can use the more malleable and the less viscerally felt level of experience to complement and offset the more visceral level in ways that will transform our appreciation and maybe attitude of the whole experience.

Playing with experiences and memories allows us to take them less seriously, which in effect will reduce the level of oppression these experience and memories can sometimes have. And using imagination to do so can be compared to a process of digestion.

Just like digestion, which is an ongoing process and not a one-off thing, this kind of imaginative and playful mentality would need to be an ongoing process too. Digestion conventionally is thought to be a process which integrates self and other. Self here is what the readers might imagine their human bodies are. And other is food in this case, or other consumed resources, like air. And digestion is a process that makes things normally hostile or opposed to self beneficial to self.

So if you implant a pear directly into your thigh, you’ll probably injure your body severely. However, if you put the pear in the stomach and let it digest, the pear can become safely integrated with your body. Since we’re on a subjective idealism sub here, I’m using these as metaphors. I hope no one takes the body and pear stuff literally. Nor is the body literally the self. That’s just a metaphor sourced from convention. Imaginal digestion can integrate bits of imagination that in other circumstances might be at odds with one another. That’s the idea I think.

So the idea is to do something opposite of surrounding the unwanted experiences or memories in impermeable mental bubbles. For the worst ones this requires a significant ability to face up to one’s fears, since as one can imagine, one powerful reason it’s sometimes tempting to section off a bad experience or memory is precisely how fearsome it might be.

So what do you think? Is it worth thinking in this way? Is digestion a useful metaphor? Or is this not worth the bother? Have you ever compared imagination to digestion before?