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True Imagination in Alchemy

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True Imagination in Alchemy True Imagination in Alchemy Dennis Hauck, FRC, PhD Dennis William Hauck, FRC, PhD, can be prepared, and without it, no is the curator of the new Alchemy Museum at noble metal can ever be created. Rosicrucian Park and was the curator of the The riddle tells us that this secret Rosicrucian Alchemy Exhibit, now on display in power is commonly used and is in plain the Rosicrucian Egyptian Museum. Frater Hauck sight. But it is most obvious where we live is a recognized leader in the emerging field of (in our own minds?). Children play with it, consciousness studies and humble poor and has contributed to a number of related people use it more fields, including the than snobbish history of science, rich people. The mathematical logic, uneducated lower psychology, and the class prizes it, scientific study of but the educated mystical experiences. higher class He is a popular author believes it is an and lecturer working idle waste of time. to facilitate personal, Yet this hidden cultural, and global ability – that so transformations many condemn through the ancient and take for principles of alchemy. Frater Hauck has written granted – is the only path to real wisdom several books and many papers and articles, and the only way to perfect anything. including several that have been published in recent issues of the Rosicrucian Digest and the One of the authors in the twelfth- Rose+Croix Journal (www.rosecroixjournal.org). century Turba Philosophorum (An Assembly of Philosophers) describes it as “a thing which is There is a riddle from the Middle Ages found everywhere, which is a stone and no that describes the true nature of the First stone, contemptible yet precious, hidden, Matter – a mysterious, etheric substance concealed, and yet known to everyone. It that is the source of all transformation: is a thing stronger and more sublime than The key to life and death is all other things.” everywhere to be found, but if you do not find it in your own house, you “It is familiar to all men, young and will find it nowhere. Yet, it is before old,” explains the author of Gloria Mundi everyone’s eyes; no one lives without (Glory of All Worlds - 1620). “It is found in it; everyone has used it. The poor the country, in the village, in the town, in usually possess more of it than the all things created by God; yet it is despised rich; children play with it in the streets. by everyone. No one prizes it, though, next The meek and uneducated esteem it to the human soul, it is the most beautiful highly, but the privileged and learned and the most precious thing upon earth often throw it away. It is the only thing and has the power to pull down kings and from which the Philosopher’s Stone princes.” Page 11 How you answer the riddle has a lot The meditative methods used by to do with your concept of reality. Where alchemists consisted of prolonged and do you draw the line at what is real? Your silent invocation of divine powers. fantasies? Your dreams? Your thoughts? Sometimes a person’s “inner angel” Your soul? Matter – is that real? According or “higher self ” was invoked. In their to Hermetic philosophy, everything is real. meditations, they were looking for the Everything we perceive is part of the “angelic ray” that unites the world of same One Thing, and the spectrum of our forms with the divine ideals that are the awareness is determined by the light of the source of everything. One Mind. That primal light is reflected The author of the Rosarium (1550) in each person’s consciousness in the light describes this special kind of alchemical of imagination, which is the answer to our meditation: “Take care that your door is riddle. well and firmly closed, so that he who is My ten-year-old nephew once within cannot escape, and, God willing, described imagination as “walking around you will reach the goal. Nature carries inside your mind.” For alchemists, it was out her operations gradually; and indeed, a private world of infinite possibilities I would have you do the same: let your where much of the Great Work took imagination be guided wholly by nature, place. To differentiate it from idle fantasy through whom the bodies regenerate and day-dreaming, they called it the True themselves in the bowels of the earth. Imagination. It is a special kind of mental And imagine this with true and not with imagery or visualization that is directly fantastic imagination.” connected to the ground of reality. In our The True Imagination envisions the culture, we are taught to reject the True subtle processes of nature and connects Imagination and sever our ties to the them with their divine archetypes. It hidden reality while we are still children. attempts to capture the “Seed of the Families, schools, churches – authorities World” as the divine mind dreams it. of all types – deny our inborn connection Therefore, when Hermetic writers speak to the divine mind and replace it with their of “seeing with the eyes of spirit,” they own dogma. are describing a process that penetrates “There is a secret stone,” explains one the deeper genesis of things beyond their fourteenth-century alchemist, “hidden in a outward appearances. deep well, worthless and rejected.” “Our Alchemists believed imagination is most precious stone,” laments another, a piece of heaven concealed within us, “cast forth upon the dunghill, being most a divine connection to the cosmic One dear, is made the vilest of the vile.” Mind. If you look up the definition According to Paracelsus, “the True of “imagination” in Martin Rulandus’s Imagination leads life back to its spiritual Lexicon of Alchemy (1612), you will find it reality, and it then takes on the name of defined as “the Star in Man, a celestial or meditation.” What he meant was that the supercelestial body.” True Imagination envisions the divine “The alchemists’ concept of Imaginatio,” Rosicrucian source of anything, which can then explains Carl Jung (1875-1961), “is the most Digest No. 1 be explored and understood through important key to understanding the Opus. 2018 meditation. We have to conceive of these imaginal Page 12 processes not as the immaterial phantoms psyche corresponding to external events that we readily take fantasy pictures to and objects. Surprisingly, this concept be, but as something corporeal, a subtle is a basic principle in the philosophy of body. The act of science. Galileo, imagining was like Francis Bacon, a physical activity that could be fitted Giordano Bruno, into the cycle of Johannes Kepler, material changes Isaac Newton, that brought these and Gottlieb about and was Leibniz all spoke brought about by of primordial them in turn. The images that are alchemist related pre-existent in the himself not only to the unconscious human soul and but directly to the can be perceived very substance through the that he hoped to “innate instinct” transform through of imagination. the power of imagination. The act of imagining is therefore a concentrated extract Quantum physicist Wolfgang Pauli of life forces, a hybrid of the physical and (1900-1958) explained how these images psychic.” are the source of scientific insight: “When From his lifelong study of alchemy, one analyzes the pre-conscious steps to Jung developed the new discipline of true concepts, one always finds ideas transpersonal psychology and a therapeutic which consist of symbolic images. These method he called “active imagination” inner pictures are produced by an ‘instinct that uses the imagination as “an organ to imagining’ and are shared by different of understanding.” The technique allows individuals independently. Out of these unconscious issues and deeper feelings to archaic images grow rational concepts.” act themselves out in visualizations that often involve conversations with imaginal Albert Einstein (1879-1955) used the figures, such as one of Jung’s “guides” True Imagination to see himself riding on Philemon (shown above). a light beam through the cosmos, and he Active imagination can also be returned from his journey with the theory practiced by automatic writing or artistic of relativity. Like the alchemists, he paid endeavors like painting, sculpting, music, homage to the power of this divine gift: and dance. The method opens a channel “Imagination is more important than of communication between conscious and unconscious parts of a person’s psyche knowledge. For knowledge is limited to and also between the personal level and all we now know and understand, while the collective unconscious. imagination embraces the entire universe, Active imagination demonstrates the and all there ever will be to know and reality of pre-existing images in the human understand.” Page 13.
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