I heard a wonderful parable the other day, told by a member of the spiritual center that I have been attending regularly, and I’d like to share it with you:
A man gives one red balloon each to five children. The children stand together holding their identical red balloons, but their experience is not the same.
The first child, as he holds his red balloon thinks to himself, “I don’t really deserve this balloon.”
The second child holds his balloon protectively, looking over his shoulder with a scowl worried that someone will come and take his red balloon.
The third child feels sad and worried for he’s sure the balloon is going to escape his grasp and float away, leaving him behind.
The fourth child thinks of how special and important she is, how much better she is than all the other children without a red balloon.
And the fifth child is just holding a red balloon. He watches it move in the wind, notices the stark contrast of the red against the blue of the sky, and runs his finger along the delicate string tied around his wrist.
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This is a simple story, but one that clearly illustrates we all have our own perception of reality, influenced by our life experiences, memories, cultural upbringing and unique constitution. In the field of psychology there are many names for this concept: one’s story, schema, script, or belief. In Imaginal Psychology, the psychological orientation of the graduate program I attended, theorist Aftab Omer refers to this as one’s imaginal structure. I like this term because it draws attention to the idea that we are living inside of an image, and that our imagination, our organ of perception, is structured by that image.
For the most part, our imaginal structures are unconscious to us, though they mediate and limit our experience and relationship to all of life. Another way to think of imaginal structures is as a prism, or a pair of tinted glasses. We each look through one angle of a prism when multiple angles and perspectives are always available, like wearing a pair of tinted glasses. It only takes a slight turn of the prism to completely shift our experience. For instance shifting just a little from the imaginal structure of “life isn’t safe,” to “sometimes life isn’t safe” are two dramatically different ways to hold the balloon.
For example, we could look at our imaginal structures as they relate to money. Here are a few: Money doesn’t grow on trees, You have to work hard for your money, Time is money, money is time, Nothing is free, Money comes with strings attached, What’s mine is yours
All of these structures limit and direct my experience of money, work, abundance, and generosity and prevent a true understanding of what money really is – I have no immediate relationship to the energy of money, its open circulating, unlimited capacity to provide for me. Now, I realize, a little late, that money is not the easiest example to start with, as our collective relationship to money is deeply embedded in fear and the fallacy of limitation and we are far removed from the origins of money, both mythical and historic. Our imaginal structures as they relate to money are pretty fixed and hard to expand.
So once we identify our imaginal structure its time to do some digging. Where did this structure come from? We all would like to believe our own structures are objective, firm reality, but really they come from our experiences, our memories, and our ancestral and evolutionary legacy.
According to Imaginal psychology there are three layers to one’s imaginal structure: 1) Personal biography, 2) Cultural influence, 3) The universal/archetypal experience.
So let’s pick one of the money structures above and deconstruct it a little. I’ll pick “you have to work hard for your money” because that is a structure I live from often! When I think of having to, or wanting to, make more money, I immediately imagine more hard work. The image of an ox’s yoke comes to mind. So where does this lens come from?
1) Personal experience: When my parents got divorced finances became challenging, my mom had to clean houses to pay our bills, I was scared and marked by the intensity of that time. To keep up with costs in college I had to work hard at small jobs and to make more money I had to work harder.
2) Cultural influences: My mother’s family were hard working farmers in Wisconsin, putting food on the table meant grueling, back-breaking work on the land. My father’s father was an immigrant from Lebanon; he had to work hard to make his way in America.
3) There is an archetype of survival here that feels old and animal. The physical endurance it takes to stay alive runs deeply in all of us.
Knowing the origins of this belief helps me understand that my nervous system was created out of these past, ancestral and evolutionary experiences. But while our imaginal structures come from real life experiences that deserve acknowledgment and understanding that doesn’t mean they ARE reality. Our imaginal structures are also not false; they are just a thin, limited slice of the fullness of reality.
Here’s another parable, that comes from India, to illustrate further (Wikipedia)
Six blind men are asked by their king to determine what an elephant looks like by feeling different parts of the elephant’s body. The blind man who feels a leg says the elephant is like a pillar; the one who feels the tail says the elephant is like a rope; the one who feels the trunk says the elephant is like a tree branch; the one who feels the ear says the elephant is like a hand fan; the one who feels the belly says the elephant is like a wall; and the one who feels the tusk says the elephant is like a solid pipe. A king explains to them:
“All of you are right. The reason every one of you is telling it differently is because each one of you touched the different part of the elephant. So, actually the elephant has all the features you mentioned.”
Each of us is touching one part of the elephant. There is so much more to reality than what our life experience, if not elevated to awareness, allows us to know. Ask yourself, in what area of my life do I feel stuck? Or what core belief is running my life right now? “Love hurts” or “I’m alone” or “giving is everything.” Examine this lens, dig deep and look for the roots of your perception. Then place the palm of your hand on the elephant of your reality and feel it from another angle.
Image 1: Flickr My So Called Life by Anne Acaso, photograph 2009
Image 2: “Blind monks examining an elephant”, an ukiyo-e print by Hanabusa Itch?.