This article describes one of many techniques developed by Adventures in Spiritual Living to encourage and support personal spiritual experience. It can be used by individuals or enjoyed as a group activity and sharing.
To many of us it is news that creative imagination can be beneficial in our spiritual lives. Creativity can be spontaneous and wholly haphazard, or it can be controlled, directed, constructive, and even spiritual.
Spiritual Receptivity
I am convinced from personal experience that creative imagination is a powerful tool to help us be receptive to spiritual experience.
I often use imagination in my prayer life. If, for example, I am trying to uplift my attitude to a more loving one through prayer, I might imagine how God would reach into my body and adjust my feelings. I can feel my tension melting away. When seeking courage and strength, I might imagine the warm, strong hands of God at my back, supporting and encouraging me, giving me the strength I need. The changes in attitude and feeling seem to flow easily as I use my imagination to foster God’s work with me, and these changes last beyond my episode of imagining.
Conversation With God
It makes a lot of sense to me that our capacity for creative imagination would facilitate our connection with the divine spirit of God within each of us. In fact, this very process is recommended in The Urantia Book.
“the more effective technique for [communicating with your inner spirit] will be to revert to the concept of a near-by alter ego, just as the primitive mind was wont to do, and then to recognize that the idea of this alter ego has evolved from a mere fiction to the truth of God’s indwelling mortal man in the factual presence of the [inner spirit] so that man can talk face to face, as it were, with a real and genuine and divine alter ego that indwells him and is the very presence and essence of the living God, the Universal Father.”
[The Urantia Book, Paper 91, Section 3, Paragraph 7]
What this describes is our use of our creative imagination to imagine a divine alter ego. But, this is not mere fantasy. We truly are talking to our inner spirit. In fact, we are promised that every attempt to communicate with our inner spirit will be successful–whether we are conscious of that success or not. [The Urantia Book Paper 133, Section 4, paragraph 10]
Controlled, Directed, and Constructive
Let’s go back to the earlier statement that I made: Creative imagination can be spontaneous and wholly haphazard, or it can be controlled, directed and constructive.
We can focus our imagination on attitudes and activities that serve true values. Our creative imagination, like all mental and spiritual gifts to us, is given to us to be used for good. Constructive creativity will not imagine or act destructively. It builds others up. It contributes to civilization’s advancement, not its degradation.
A lot of our life is already lived in imagining how we want things to be. We dream of adventure, mystery, love, wealth, etc. Imagination is already a big part of what we think and feel and how we rehearse our behavior. Consider applying creative imagination to resist the influence of fears, rehearse true values like goodness, appreciate and respect beauty, gentleness, tolerance, etc. and contribute to the maturing and growth of individuals and civilization. This is putting your imagination to work to achieve spiritual results.
Spiritual Transformations
We have looked at how our application of creative imagination can facilitate our communication to the inner spirit. Now let’s look at how our inner spirit enters into our imagination to communicate to us. Again, The Urantia Book confirms that this happens.
[Highly experienced inner spirits] are often able to contribute factors of spiritual import to the human mind when it flows freely in the liberated but controlled channels of creative imagination. At such times, and sometimes during sleep, the inner spirit is able to arrest the mental currents, to stay the flow, and then to divert the idea procession; and all this is done in order to effect deep spiritual transformations in the higher recesses of the superconsciousness. [The Urantia Book, Paper 109, Section 5, Paragraph 1]
During our liberated but controlled flights of creative imagination our inner spirit can tune our minds to respond to God’s leading and teaching. Engaging in imagining of spiritual actions of love and service to others and for the universe produces spiritual benefits.
I encourage you to imagine your ideals and to extend your own personal invitation to your inner spirit to “effect deep spiritual transformations in the higher recesses of your superconsciousness.”
