Imagine That!

One way you know you're experiencing higher imagination is that the content has a different quality than imaginings we make up for ourselves. An image or vision may be infused with a brighter quality of color and light. An insight may come with the force of authority. The poem or the story unfolds as if it were being dictated. Sometimes, when we have a vision in meditation, we wonder, "Was that real, or did I make it up?" When it comes from the prathibha level of imagination, there's a sense that the vision or insight arises from a realm that you don't ordinarily access.

Re-Imagining the Self

Visionary imagination comes to us on its own. But yogis court it through visualizations—kalpana practice, and especially through the process called bhavana, or creative contemplation. Bhavana is the most powerful tool we have for internal self-creation. It lets us re-imagine the self.

The word bhavana comes from bhava, a Sanskrit word meaning "feeling," or "emotional flavor." Bhavana works with the power of your emotions to radically re-order your internal experience of yourself. In the world of tantra, where the power of mind is recognized as identical with the universal creative power, bhavana is used to create a sense of identity with the divine itself. A true bhavana combines idea, vision and feeling. It's the emotional quality that gives a bhavana its power. One of the most famous tantric bhavanas asks you to imagine being in the presence of someone you love, then focusing on the feeling the image brings up in you. You take that further by imagining the feeling of love filling your body, dwelling strongly in the felt sense of love in your body. Then, you might anchor yourself in the feeling, and act from it. The power of that imaginative combination of visualization and emotion will shift your inner experience—at least while you are practicing it. This is why an imaginative practice like remembering a happy moment, or cultivating a felt sense of gratitude, has such power to create well-being.

But the yogic sages take the idea of bhavana much deeper. My teacher used to say that when you hold the bhavana that you are a limited person with limited options, you will continue to experience yourself as limited by your body and personal history. When you replace your ordinary self-imagining with the highest and most sublime one you can find, you'll begin to experience yourself as filled with divine qualities. This is why, in the tantric traditions, you always start your practice with a radical re-imagining of the self. You would imagine your body as made of light, or infused with mantra, or filled with infinite compassion. From there, you begin your practice.

The ultimate tantric bhavana is to imagine yourself as the incarnation of grandeur, the very form of God. The affirmations "I am the Absolute," "I am That," "I am divine love itself" are imaginative constructions, but they work because they encourage you to identify yourself with a higher truth, and then to feel how that impacts your inner experience, your body, and your sense of self.

A truly profound imaginative bhavana lets you rehearse what it would be like to actually live and act as the self you know in your heart you really are—a divine self, a self whose power comes naturally from within, and who acts for the sake of the good. If you're spending time during your day imagining yourself as filled with compassion, it doesn't take long to notice that you speak to people differently, and even treat yourself with much more subtlety and kindness.

Imagination at its heart lets us find our way into our highest possibilities. Training the imagination, harnessing its power, we can use it for creating beauty and truth in the world. Then our acts of transformative imagination become genuine acts of power. They can change our inner state, for sure. But they can also change the world.