John O'Donohue: Imagination is the great friend of possibility
The Irish poet and philosopher on living a soulful life with imagination, friendship and integrity
There’s a psychologist that I really liked, a Scottish psychologist called RD Lang. He wrote amazing books, but in one of his books called The Politics of Experience, he said, we never see another person’s experience. All we see is their behavior. But you never see another person's experience. So in a certain sense, if you don’t look out for your inner life, nobody else can.
And one of the great tragedies I always think of life is that people live in this private inner world, but they usually take all their furniture for it from outside, from other people. And everything you do is guided by thought. It's a very interesting question to ask yourself, and the question is this, “What are the seven thoughts that govern, shape and determine my life?”
It takes a long time to find them out. What are the seven thoughts that you keep secretly coming back to? Because every day you’re using thought all the time, whether you realize it or not. And the world that you inhabit and see is shaped by the way you see it, and the way you see is shaped by the way you think.
So if you really want to change your life, the best way to change it is to change the way you think. I know people who’ve wanted to change their lives by changing their work, their partner, their friends, the places that they live, what they did, all the rest of it. And usually what you find is they only end up becoming more the same as they were before.
Whereas in actual fact, if you change some of the furniture in your inner world, in your mind, then you really change your life. So it’s an interesting thing. Take out an empty white page — it’s the best mirror ever — and ask yourself, what are the seven thoughts that shaped my life? When you get them on the page, then you get a secret look or a look into the secret way that you understand things.
And when you’ve got the seven thoughts written down, leave them alone for a week or two. And then take another page some other day and say to yourself, “Because I was so faithfully married to these seven thoughts, what were the seven other ones that I didn’t even flirt with or have an affair with?” And then you begin to get a look at what you have excluded and avoided, and places that you’ve never even thought of going in your heart or mind, or spirit.
And like an exercise that somebody told me about one time that I thought was a wonderful exercise in terms of just waking yourself up a bit, was to try to imagine the view from your deathbed and see what you’d like to see. Think of what you’d like to see that’s not yet there, and think of what you wouldn’t like to see that’s there now and maybe needs to be transformed. Because the thing about it is, the whole journey is so short. A friend of mine said to me about six months ago, “What is it that haunts you?” And I said, I can tell you exactly what haunts me now. It’s the sense of my days running through my fingers, like the finest sand and I can’t stop it.
Very often, we all almost have to be on the edge of losing a thing before we begin to either see it or value it or celebrate. I’ve often seen that with people who were working so hard and so meshed into their lives they didn’t know they were on earth, which is just bed, work, back again, and then suddenly an illness hit and all the webbing got caught.
And suddenly they were on their own and they got a new look at their lives and they woke up because they began to think, one should try to live so that one can die very honorably. And at one’s deathbed, you should be able to look back and say to yourself, well, what I dreamt of doing I actually tried to do. Whether it worked out right or whether I did it the right way, that’s another question. But I didn’t stand on the fence or sit on the fence and become a kind of exile in my own life. I actually entered it and got right into it.
Van Morrison, the Belfast mystic, says in one of his songs, “If you live the life you love, you will get the blessings from above.” And I really believe that, I think that life is the great sacrament, and if we get into it, it looks after us completely.
One of the greatest sins was the unlived life and that nobody can convert you into your own life but yourself. And somebody whose heart is contented, and who’s at peace in their own lives, they’re not causing destruction, right, left and front and center. It’s always the inner disturbance that causes outer disturbance.
And the fellow I was talking about this weekend, Meister Eckhart in Oxford, I mean, he believed that totally. He believed if you didn’t get it right in here, that the rest of the stuff never worked outside. And I think in our times that there is a huge invitation to awaken your heart and your mind. Like people draw all kinds of distinctions between people — people who have money, people who don’t, people who are gifted, people who are not, people who are beautiful looking, people who are not. For me, the crucial difference between people is whether a person is awakened or not. Because an awful lot of people, if you give them a comfortable pillow and look after this middle section with food doses, they’ll sleep their way through most of it.
Honest to God, I remember doing a thing with the psychiatrists in Scotland a few years ago, and there was an old psychiatrist there, and I said to him, what would you say about the human person after all your years in psychiatry? And he said to me, “People only change,” he said, “when the prospect of not changing is more painful than to change.”
I always think that when all the talking is talked and the doing is done, that everything depends on the integrity of individual presence, the integrity of your own presence. It’s lovely to sit in front of a person of integrity who is themselves. That’s the ontological duty, to be who you are. And an awful lot of people expend huge energy in trying to become someone else or to pretend that they’re someone else. And like the energy that goes into trying to be putting on a face on things is just unbelievable. So the relief of being able to just slip into who you actually are and to live the life that your heart wants.
One of the lonelinesses in the world is that so many people are in positions of work that they would, they’re just dreaming their whole life is an imprisonment and they dream of getting out of it. Or people are stuck in relationships that are so dysfunctional and they’re still stick in there. Why do we hold on with such commitment sometimes to that which robs us of spirit and makes us utterly miserable? We deserve happiness and above all, we deserve creativity.
And the challenge of becoming all that we could become, the possibilities for change within us, are absolutely endless. I think that one of the things that has been neglected in the Western tradition is the imagination of God. We’ve heard about the will of God like and people have crucified themselves and hammered their beautiful awkwardnesses into submission trying to do what someone else thought was the will of God for them.
And I, to be honest, I don’t think the will of God is that interesting, whereas I think the imagination of God is absolutely fascinating. And a lot of people say, like they'd say, “It’s all right for the likes of you, your interest in imagination writing and all the rest of it, I have no imagination at all,” or, “I’m not artistic” as they say.
I don’t believe that at all. I think everyone has an imagination and there's two arguments I’d use in support of it. First argument is that we are all, no matter how respectable and serious humans look, everyone is an ex-baby, right? You wouldn't think of looking at some people that they started off like that, but actually we all did. So when you were a child, you lived in an imaginary world. Each of us lived in that imaginative world.
And the second reason that we are all imaginative is that each night, while you sleep, you dream. A dream is a sophisticated, imaginative text that you send to yourself each night. The Talmud says that a dream that is not interpreted is like a letter that has not been opened. So your dreams are very wise about who you are because they come from your subconscious, not from your controlled surface mind. So if you can dream, if you’re a former baby, then you can imagine.
In our contemporary world, it’s very hard to find places where you can show your heart. And I think that a diary, a creative diary, is a place where you can actually talk to yourself because there’s an awful difference between thinking a thing and writing it down, because in the act of writing it down, something totally changes and the thing becomes part of yourself, and it builds up its own density and resonance.
One of the things in our culture that’s very difficult is to find someone you can talk to. One of the reasons that therapy has taken off all over the place, like — and I have no problem with therapy — like, if you are in trouble and you’re entangled and you find a good therapist, you are blessed.
Because a person like that will educate your fingers and show you how to disentangle yourself, but it’s all, a lot of it is an expression of a great loneliness that is at the heart of postmodern society. People want a best friend or someone they could talk to and then to bring creativity and imagination into this.
What I want to ask is a question that I find interesting: When was the last time that you had a great conversation with someone, a conversation that sang in your mind for days and weeks afterwards? It’s an interesting question because an awful lot of what passes for conversation in our culture is merely intersecting monologues and there’s no real conversation. Cos in real conversation, you can be taken to places you never expected. You can overhear things from yourself that you never knew you had in you, and you can absolutely change in a great conversation. It’s like pure nourishment for yourself, and like this is one of the beautiful gifts of friendship.
And if you have a friend that you can have a great conversation with, then you should do that often. And regardless of where they are, you should go to see them so that you can talk to them and be with them. Because I think in that you find new dimensions of yourself that in your normal day-to-day life, nobody even suspects.
It’s amazing how familiar we become to each other, and I always think that one of the real difficulties in a relationship is to kind of keep the crust of familiarity from forming over it completely. Gabriel Garcia Marquez, the great South American writer, in a book of conversations with Plinio Mendoza, called Fragrance of Guava, was asked about his relationship with his wife, Mercedes. They’ve been together all their lives and he said, “I know her so well now,” he said, “that I haven’t the slightest clue who she really is.” I think that’s a great statement, and I think that in friendship and in really good conversation that you get a chance to make a clearance. In order to allow the other person to emerge as who they are in their otherness, in a safe space where they won’t be assaulted with either expectation or judgment.
And that’s one of the things that friendship should be, friendship and love should be safe spaces of clearance and healing and possibility. Because one of the lovely things about the imagination is that it’s the great friend of possibility. The imagination is always interested in that, which is not attended to, but which is always present.
One of the lines that I’ve always loved in the New Testament is in John’s letter where he says, “One day you will know as you are now known,” and that that knowing is always accompanying you. Every time you are creative, you are on holy ground cos you’re actually deepening, extending and realizing creation.
And that’s where I think the beauty comes in. I think that there is a wonderful danger that we have totally forgotten. The respectability of theology makes God nice and palatable. The colors are inevitably pastels. Nothing in the universe resembles God so much as silence and through quieting your mind and your heart, you can slip right down into it. But one of the things like in Ireland, when you’d ask somebody a question, you’d rarely get a straight answer. Do you know that kind of way? Be going around a bit? Around, around, around. Like you’d be saying, you know, “How are you doing?” “I’m not too bad. How are you?” “Ah, I’ve been worse.” Then it kind of goes, no information has been communicated.
But like when I went to America first giving talks, I got an awful shock cos I suddenly discovered if you put too much sincerity into the question, “How are you?” You could unleash a biography in seconds. And what often happens, you see, is that people reduce identity to biography. And if they have a story or they think of telling the story, then that’s who I actually am. But in actual fact, your identity is infinitely more complex, nuanced, sophisticated, and mysterious than your biography or than anything that could ever unfold in your biography.
And part of what I’m saying this afternoon is that one of your duties, which only you can do, is to imagine yourself. Because the “who” question is the really magic question about who you are. And the point I’m making is no one else can tell you that but yourself. And if you don’t have a sense of that, then you’re on sand and not on ground. Like when I was a child at home, people would say, you know, “Stand up for yourself.” The way it was put was they’d say, “Stand your ground.” Stand your ground.
So part of integrity is to imagine yourself honorably. And integrity is also related to integrated, that the different complex dimensions within yourself have the invitation and the possibility of coming together and meeting each other. Your concept of God should be feisty and imaginative and rich enough to incorporate all the hungers of your heart.
An awful lot of people are going around, you know, with the concept of God that they learned at 10 or 11. Everything else in their life has grown and their little concept of God is like something out of a Lucky Bag. And it’s so awful. Like especially fundamentalist stuff, like it’s just unbelievable when people get, when people get tarmacadam put inside to lay down the Autobahn for the fundamentalist thing, and it’s an answer to nothing. It’s based on the invention of a past that never existed, the creation of a false nostalgia for that past. Yes, God is only our name for it. And the closer we come to it, the more it ceases to be God.
And when the time comes for us to lie down to die, we will be able to look back on a life that took honorable risks, that pushed its own frontiers. That tried to look after its own healing and exercise, a psychological hygiene that didn’t let stuff spill out over other people that had nothing to do with them. That was compassionate and didn't judge, and that tried to look after the poor and the neglected and the unspoken for.
The duty of privilege is absolute integrity.
The duty of privilege is integrity towards ourselves, towards our possibilities, and to live to the full the life that we’d love. And to animate and realize everything because the time is so short and it’ll be soon gone. And I’ll finish with this short poem called Fluent.
I would love to live
like a river flows
carried by the surprise
of its own unfolding.
Thank you very much.
Transcribed from youtu.be/grumSvuUzxw