(c) The I maginal Realm and Boundaries of the Soul
The Rebbe explained that what secularists call fantasy ... is very real and
more than just imagination, and that when he tells stories, he ... actually goes back
to the energy of that time. Most of the respondents described the same
phenomenon and in the case of the readers and writers, a phenomenon that
manifests in what I term ‘the spaces between the words’; an ontological dimension
behind the narrative that the shaman, the reader and the writer occupy, a potent
and uniform contiguity: an elsewhere-place. All respondents appeared to
experience place itself, of necessity, as generating an imperative narrative that
compliments or allows the ego-gatekeeper to stand between two realms: that of
actuality and that of the I maginal that emerges out of the interstice between the
words; or from a Kabbalistic perspective, even from between the letters of the
words.
Thomas Keneally’s belief that there exists a unified consciousness from
where the Arts emanate, is really one that identifies Corbin’s I maginal Realm, de
Chardin’s noosphere, the Celtic Web of Wyrd and Jung’s Collective Unconscious.
I ndeed, Keneally said that when we write, and here he was speaking of published
writers, we call into play a state of consciousness that predated specialisation, one
that contained the entire mythic and imaginative history of humankind. Albeit,
Keneally asserts that in departing from the way of life of animist hunter-gatherers,
we have lost the ability to view our lives, place and the world in this holistic way.
The readers stated that although they enjoyed reading for its sheer
pleasure, it also had a soothing or healing function particularly in times of extreme
distress or melancholy in that it provided a salve, a reverie that obliterated egoic
concerns. I n this sense, such an altered state of consciousness seemed comparable
to SC in that it was described by them as a heightened, more animistic and altruistic
form of perception. The readers also seemed to make unconscious distinctions
between reading ordinary literature and mythopoeic literature; saying of the former,
... I read such and such a book or story, whereas for mythopoeic literature they
used more emotional terms such as, ... the story entranced me, and in doing so
confirmed the deeper psychological dimension or inner space of the soul to which
mythopoeic narratives related. General comments related to the existentialist
nature of mythopoeic texts were that they enlarged the self through a vicarious
process of otherwise unattainable experiences and locales. Two respondents