Holy Spirit & Imagination

Our connection to God must become too deep for words

We use language to think thoughts, and we need stories to put thoughts together. Somehow this is all connected to the idea of being “made in the image of God.” Maybe that’s why we worship God by listening to the story of the Gospel, and repeat that same story to counter the false narratives of the world. But what’s the Holy Spirit doing in this paradigm?

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For those interested, lately I’ve been writing about:

• Panscription: The Struggle For Reality (about how civilization and cultures are dominated by big stories)

• Panscription (Part 2) (about how personal lives are dominated by stories, too)

• Panscription (Conclusion) (about how being made in the image of God has something to do with being storytellers)

• People don’t get it (about taking our beliefs seriously enough to transform)

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Possibility generator

Beliefs must find their way into the deeper levels of the mind to become part of our selves. First, there is conscious acceptance (intellect), then an attitude shift, and then a rework of our analytical bond-building system. The deeper you go, the more dangerous it is to make a change. Deeper than all of them, at what may be our deepest level, is the realm of imagination.

By imagination, I don’t mean trying to picture something not real, which would be more accurately called “visualizing”. I mean that vast and irrational space that we can’t really think about, even if we wanted to, which works overtime when we’re not thinking about anything. The imagination generates possibilities for our mind to consider, almost as if to fill the quiet space with noise.

Imagination is a place in our mind we can’t consciously explore or alter. To return to our previous computer analogy, the imagination would part of the source code of the Operating System. At best, whenever we try to explore our own imagination, what we end up doing is requesting examples from down there. And this is no big deal, because that’s what it does. It fabricates examples constantly in the background. It usually does so silently and seamlessly, stitching together an approximation of the world beyond what we can currently see and hear. Every time you walk up a flight of stairs you are imagining the second floor of the building before you get there. If you’ve been to that location before, your imagination will work with the memories you have of it, but if you haven’t it will still generate possibilities of what feels likely. These become hypothetical “what if” scenarios. The more experience you have, the more accurate your imagination is supposed to become, so that you become less surprised and make better predictions.

Imagination mixes and remixes our memories and beliefs, producing new combinations of ideas and outcomes. The experiences we’ve had, the stories we’ve been told, and the beliefs we hold all play their part in feeding the imagination new material, to make new combinations. This is one way to try internalizing Christian beliefs: expose yourself to more and more Scripture (which is intellectual), singing (which is irrational), praying (which can be emotional), and sympathetically listening to stories of others (love). Hate is a wall that keeps out ideas, and love is an invitation to touch our hearts, even if we don’t agree with what that person says. If you feed your imagination enough Christian sentiment, your subconscious will absorb it and begin making connections to the rest of your worldview.

Running the process

Remember when I said that the “system” level of our mind explores the implications of things we believe? The imagination feeds directly into the system from below, causing it to dwell on the implications of new possibilities. From what I can tell, this is done using spare mental energy, so that people who are stressed, busy, and under pressure rarely run the “analyze imaginary hypothetical” process in their minds; because they’re using up their resources just dealing with the facts of the matter around them. (This is one reason, I suppose, why I’ve always avoided stress; trying to make sure I had enough personal space and spare mental energy to keep my system fed with new possibilities to consider.)

In healthy, comfortable minds, the relationship between the imagination and the system is a positive back and forth, like a seesaw, with the imagination grabbing elements of reality and offering them up to the system as a hypothetical proposal, which the system then treats as a real option. Whatever the outcome of this experiment may be, it doesn’t need to surface up to the conscious intellect. Dreams, inklings, intuition, and the subconscious world are ways that we access this archive of hypotheticals. If you’ve experienced a lot of fear, anxiety, pain, and distrust, your imagination is going to feed on those experiences and produce worse hypotheticals, which becomes part of your worldview. This is a good thing, because it would be foolish not to learn from and incorporate bad experiences. Of course, you may become more delusional if you dwell on lies and tell yourself fake stories.

But here we have the question: which elements of Reality does your imagination really use when it fabricates options? If your “belief” is not accepted on a subconscious, emotional, experiential level, it won’t be factored into future equations. That’s the danger of being intellectual about religion: it remains impotent, cordoned off, and inert. And in some ways this also reveals the meaning of spirituality. We all understand that “spirit” is something deep and unseen, unintelligible but powerful. I’m not saying the imagination is spirit itself, but it could be a next door neighbor.

Here’s another way of thinking of these levels of understanding:

1. Mind / Intellect / Conscious thought

2. Heart / Attitude / Subconscious thought

3. Gut / Intuition / Unconscious thought

4. Spirit / Imagination / Generative thought

[If you find this model intriguing, we can talk about it more in another post.]

Paths and destinations

The Holy Spirit soaks into to our unconscious imagination, where it feeds new emotions, ideas, and rules into the source code of how we operate. These impulses can be subtle or dramatic, depending on the situation.¹ It seems to me that the Spirit bypasses intellect, attitude, and systems, working on the deepest level to rewire the imagination.

But because the message of the Spirit is often contrary to the other stories we believe (for example, that we deserve pity, entitlement, and happiness in this life) we can end up fighting against it. This is also why it’s so important to study Scripture and try to bridge the entire span of your mind with the same outlook, from the intellectual conscious thoughts to the deepest areas of the imagination: you want your beliefs to line up from top to bottom.

If humans process Reality by telling stories, and if stories naturally find conclusions, then our lifestyles, beliefs, and the stories we tell ourselves are all part of the same effort: namely, to integrate Reality into ourselves and live accordingly.

This is one way of understanding the famous saying of Jesus about the broad and narrow paths, which lead to destruction and life respectively:

“Enter through the narrow gate, because the gate is wide and the way is spacious that leads to destruction, and there are many who enter through it. But the gate is narrow and the way is difficult that leads to life, and there are few who find it.”

—Matthew 7:13-14

If you do not internalize your Christian beliefs to the point where your lifestyle is changed, you don’t really believe them; they are quarantined in the safe part of your mind, disconnected from your true worldview. And even if you act out the lifestyle, so that nobody can accuse you of being immoral, you need a depth of belief beyond the intellectual if you want to withstand the “storm” that Jesus predicts will challenge us in every generation. The Holy Spirit is the only thing that can transform our deepest level of behavior, to the point where we (or He) can fight against the narrative of the world on a profound, instinctual level, in the grand narrative battle I call “panscription”. The narrative of the world leads to destruction, but the narrative of the Word leads to life. This is “spiritual” indeed, but we should not just think magically about what it means.