Imaginal Journeys (Pathworking)

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S4E17 TRANSCRIPT:----more----

Yucca: Welcome back to the Wonder Science-based Paganism. I'm one of your host Yucca,

Mark: And I'm the other one, mark.

Yucca: and today we are going to be talking about the power of imagination and how we as Pagans can use that in a very conscious way.

Mark: Right. Yeah. Because our brains are so powerful and we are so built for the creation of narratives, of stories that we can harness. That propensity and that talent to be able to take ourselves places and have experiences?

Yucca: Right. We're the storytelling apes. That's who we are, right? Yeah. And that's what we do, right? Wh wherever you're from in the world, that's what humans do. That's something that all cultures have in common, is the storytelling that we do, and, and sometimes it's. Very subtle that we might not even notice it, you know, telling you about my morning.

And other stories might be these long epics to, you know, the Lord of the Rings and this and that, you know, but, but we do it all the time throughout the day,

Mark: Right, the, the connection of events into an arc that starts one place and ends in another place. Science is a storytelling process

Yucca: right.

Mark: in science. Just because it's a story doesn't mean it's not true. I. There are many stories that are factual stories. I mean, we, our hopes of history are that history will be as factual as possible.

Yucca: Mm-hmm.

Mark: Science is all about developing narratives that explain stuff first. This happens, and then that process happens, and as a result you end up with this.

Yucca: A and with science there's just very specific narrative rules you have to follow. Right. And in other types of stories, there's different kinds of rules that are being followed in, in the creation and the telling of those stories. And we do it, it, it's just the way that we're even understanding the world.

And so, Sometimes our, our imagination can not be in line with someone else's understanding of events or of a more objective perspective on what happened. And that can, either way, whether it's reflects other people's understanding or you're not, we still have an emotional response. To the stories that we're telling.

And that's where I think a lot of the power is in, is what is the response that we have to that story. Because stories they, they invoke a response.

Mark: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. And a part of what's very interesting and powerful about our brains is that the same systems that are used to assess real world events and then draw, connect the dots between them to create a narrative, are also used in the imagination. And our brain is actually not very good at differentiating between what is imagined and what is actually experienced.

It's the, those kinds of narratives, they just run right parallel in our minds. And as a result, you can have a memory of how an event went that conflicts sharply with someone else's memory of how that exact same event went. And neither of you are necessarily right or wrong. Because we edit our memories.

We remember different things from different points of view, and our memories are constantly evolving. So if there's a car accident, for example, the two drivers might have very differing stories about who was responsible for what and so forth, and they believed them. Absolutely. And this is why eyewitness testimony is taken with a grain of salt in a court of law because just because you believe something absolutely doesn't make it true.

Yucca: Right. We were saying, Lord, the Rings earlier, it's, it's Gollum with, it was his birthday present. Right. He firmly, he told himself that enough times that he's rewritten his memory to believe that. But yeah, we do that with, you know, Whether you actually had your turn signal on or not. And what was it that, the, what, what was your tone?

What was your intention with that argument that you had with your spouse last night? And sometimes we're rewriting things in a way that is beneficial to us. Right. And sometimes it's not a con, it's not a conscious thing where it's like, oh, yes, I'm gonna talk myself into this. It's just. It just kind of happens, right?

You're just a little bit unclear in the details and your mind just fills in details for you

Mark: right. Fills in the gaps

Yucca: right now. This is,

Mark: what we don't like is a story that has holes in it.

Yucca: yeah.

Mark: Because it makes us uncomfortable. A narration that smoothly explains everything is more comfortable to sit with than one that's got these holes in it where it's like, okay, this happens. And then a while later this is happening and we don't know why, which is kind of what science is all about.

Yucca: Yeah. Well, and a physical, a perception example of this is actually our vision. We have blind spots and you can actually detect it by, if you take your thumb and you take it all the way out to your side to your peripheral vision, and then you slowly move your thumb to the front of your face, you're gonna find that there's a, a blind spot that you have, but we don't notice it because our brain fills it in for us.

Right. Our imagination fills that in, but it's, it's there.

Mark: What I've read is that what we experience is a, is a, an edit of about 15 seconds of sensorium. So the reason that your brain can fill in the stuff that's in the blind spot is because it caught it earlier when your eyes were looking in a different. Place and it just cuts and pastes over the proper location, which is miraculous when you think about it.

It's just, it's extraordinary that this thing is able to happen. Not to mention the fact that we should be seeing upside down, but we're not, cuz our brain turns it over. Our brains are very, very powerful in terms of editing this stuff to make sense to us so that we can create a coherent story about the events of the world.

Yucca: Mm-hmm.

Mark: All of that is to say that we can create stories that we experience with as much vividness as if we were actually going through them.

Yucca: Right.

Mark: And we do that with books. We do it with movies, and we do it with radio dramas, and we do it with theater. We do it with all kinds of immersive sorts of experiences.

And in the context of Paganism, we can do it in our minds by doing what's called Pathwork or journeying.

Yucca: That's right. Well, and even on a much broader level, that's what a lot of our ritual work is. So we're gonna talk specifically about Pathwork or journeying, but those are, that's. It is more of a subset of ritual and working with the mind and working with imagination. So when we imagine that we are casting this circle, that's us working with our imagination.

Do we know? Do we actually know that? No. That we're not, there's not really this magical force that we're putting out. Yes, but the, there's still so much power in the imagination that it still helps us to feel things.

Mark: It reassures us, for example, that within that circle there is safety. And feeling safe is a prerequisite to being able to be vulnerable. And if you're vulnerable, you can access your emotions better, and then you can more easily kind of manipulate the sort of experience that you want to have coming, you know, out of this, this ritual.

So, you know, when we talk about creating the sacred container, for example, a lot of that, I mean, it's imaginary, right? I mean, hopefully you're not. Doing your ritual in a place where people are gonna come barging through. But but there's no physical impediment to them doing that. If there are, and I have had people come barging through into a circle that I've drawn and it's uncomfortable.

It, it really kind of throws you off. So, when we do this, when we do rituals, usually a ritual has a story. Right. A ritual has a story. Okay. The story is we are now in sacred space. We invoke powers to come to help us, whether that's elements …