Meditation and Imagination

Rather than simply exploring what imagination is, or providing a taxonomy of imagination, meditation manuals and their philosophical accounts describe a different domain of imagination: identifying imagination as one of the mental faculties that needs to be cultivated and trained with an underlying premise that imaginal acculturation has an enormous role to play in the subject’s mental health and his interaction with the society. Unfortunately, extant philosophical investigations of imagination in light of yogic and tantric materials has been overshadowed by the text-historical and scientific approaches, with the first focusing on the emergence of practice and its sociocultural boundaries, and the latter focusing on meditation and its relation to health. Historically, issues such as imagination or emotion have been neglected topics even in Western intellectual discourse. Classical texts written in Sanskrit come in contrasting flavors, with both positive and negative depictions of imagination. While a romantic understanding of imagination is vivid in literature and aesthetics, philosophical texts attribute a dubious role to imagination, with kalpanā (imagination) consistently being depicted, whether in Hindu or Buddhist philosophical texts, as a hindrance for recognizing reality or for veridical perception (Timalsina, 2013). In this latter presentation, kalpanā is equated with the monstrous power of māyā or illusion that projects the world that is not even there, and traps beings in their delirious slumber. This trend is changing, though, with new studies bringing to discourse the constructive role of imagination, particularly in contemplative practices.Visualization, primarily by means of playing with images, appears to dominate substantial space in the literature of meditation, and it also appears that since classical times, imagination has been identified by philosophers as a faculty to explore the nature of consciousness. Rather than these practices seeking to draw a line between fantasy and reality, they appear to use fantasy in order to reconstitute commonsense reality. This paper explores the extent to which these practices envision those possibilities. At the same time, this paper also identifies a conceptual framework for pursuing such an investigation. I engage with contemporary theories of imagination in order to contextualize some of the archaic practices of imagination and the justifications behind such practices. Meditation practice, any form of contemplative exercise among different cultures oriented toward altered mental and/or psychosomatic states, involves a substantial amount of imagination in its course. The insights derived from such practices can help