A Tree Full of Angels

All summer long we have been working on imagination and the imaginal. In English the word imagination has multiple meanings, but the way we were using it in our summer's work was to focus primarily on our ability to "play with images." At the various wisdom schools and academies the question was on how we do this using the earliest and original images found in our sacred texts. Playing with images is a distinctly different activity than analyzing words or ideas rationally. One is a kardial function, and the other is a logical function. Using the heart we can begin to extract truth from images. We can move dimensionally "higher" than the rational mind not only to detect truth, but to ingest so that it becomes soul-food.

This morning I was "taken" by the word-pictures in Logion 20 of the Gospel of Thomas where the students ask Yeshua to describe the Realm (Kingdom) of the Heavens. He does so by using a series of images. He says that the Kingdom is like a tiny seed being placed into prepared soil which then grows up into a great tree able to shelter the birds of the sky. Its an innocent enough image until you see that "heavens" and "sky" (cognate words in Coptic) are talking about the same realm (transcendent to earth) and that the "birds" may in fact be the "birds of heaven" which, using the imagination, are more likely its winged messengers. So imagine that in us, the divine seed comes to rest and then as it grows out of the ground of being here, it moves vertically until it becomes a habitat for Angels.

Could our own soul-work contain such possibilities? Using our capacity to "play with these images" what would it mean to us?