Already Gone: Imagery and Spiritual Experience

According to the transpersonal psychiatrist Stanislav Grof, the classic psychological work on spiritual development is Roberto Assagioli’s 1933 essay, “Self-Realization and Psychological Disturbances.” A posthumous collection of Assagioli’s (2008) essays, Transpersonal Development, elaborates on his study of the modern person’s process of parapsychological and spiritual development. In all of his work, Assagioli focused on the potentials of the person beyond the socially conditioned personality. Along with fellow psychiatrist Carl Jung, he pioneered in Europe what later became transpersonal psychology in the United States. Assagioli’s main theme was that higher states of consciousness objectively exist in dormancy in each person, and that the activation of these states brings wisdom into the mind, peace into the body, and joy into the emotions. With such positive benefits, Assagioli considered it obvious that higher consciousness should be studied and activated. Imagery was his primary method to accomplish this.

An important distinction: Imagery refers to entering the imagination with a minimal amount of direction. “Guided” imagery tends to be much more controlling, suggesting the actual images and experiences the person is supposed to have.

Assagioli’s main theme was that higher states of consciousness objectively exist in dormancy in each person, and that the activation of these states brings wisdom into the mind, peace into the body, and joy into the emotions.

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Assagioli identified the cross-cultural images that are known to activate spiritual energies and emotions. These include images of ascent, descent, expansion, awakening, light, enlightenment, fire, empowerment, love, wisdom, path, pilgrimage, transmutation, new birth, regeneration, liberation, resurrection (Assagioli, 1965). Rather than wait for these images to possibly appear in the dream life of his clients, Assagioli advocated the suggestion of these images to activate higher consciousness and spiritual development.

In the case study that follows, we can see how a spiritual imagery experience reduced suffering and increased peace. In Charles’ case, imagery activated his spiritual level of consciousness as he went through the dying process.

In the era before effective treatments were found, Charles was terminally ill from HIV-AIDS. The virus had by now led to brain damage. Charles was unsteady on his feet, and his speech was beginning to slur. His memory was slipping away from him.

This case study describes an imagery session with Charles. The session took place in his apartment as he was lying in bed in severe discomfort from skin rashes and from the side effects of the then-ineffective AIDS medications.
Under these circumstances, it would be hard to imagine how imagery could
help. In fact, this single session provided Charles with a higher vision that helped him throughout the dying process.

Charles had a home healthcare nurse who visited him in his apartment. She saw that Charles was desperate for any kind of relief from his anguish. Trained in psychosynthesis, she decided to use a method – Inner Wisdom – that she had personally benefitted from.

The imagery session began with an induction technique of 1) asking Charles to close his eyes and follow her voice, 2) asking him, despite his severe itching from the medications, to bring his attention to his nostrils, and 3) to follow his breathing without trying to alter it in any way. She then asked him to imagine that each breath had the potential to take him deeper and deeper into peace.
The nurse noticed that Charles’ chest was in a slower breathing pattern. This suggested that Charles was responding to her directions and was experiencing a more relaxed, more inwardly absorbed state. The nurse next suggested that he continue to follow his breathing as he listened to her talking about the fact that in all times and cultures people have prepared themselves for inner work in exactly the same way Charles was now doing. She spoke further about imagery as an ageless practice for realizing inner wisdom. She then wondered if Charles could begin to imagine meeting someone in another time and culture who was following his breath just as Charles was doing. She said nothing more.
She saw Charles’ chest movements slow down even more. Her own personal
experience in imagery told her that at that moment Charles had deeply let go. She silently meditated by his bedside, keeping her eyes open to observe any changes in him.

Twenty minutes passed. In most imagery sessions, this is an incredibly long time of inward absorption. The nurse felt a palpable peace in the room. Now moving ever so slightly in his bed, Charles opened his eyes and began to tell the nurse what he had experienced.

“I felt my body sink deep in the bed. I felt a great heaviness and peace.
The itching was gone, and it’s still gone. I saw an image of a young man. I then saw him become ill, and saw his flesh begin to fall off him, until he became a skeleton. Then his flesh reappeared, and his life force returned. He was again the same healthy young man I first saw.

Soon, the flesh began to come off him again, his life force left him, and he became a skeleton again. At that point, I saw an old man behind him, and I realized that as the old man moved his hand to the left, the flesh came off the young man, and as the old man moved his hand to the right, life came back to the young man.

I watched this with great feelings of peace. I felt something very important was being taught to me. I can’t even say the peace was in me, because by the time I was watching this I had absolutely no sense of my body at all. My body was gone. My body had dropped away. I was free, I was floating free. I had no fear at all. I was free.”

I watched this with great feelings of peace... I can’t even say the peace was in me, because by the time I was watching this I had absolutely no sense of my body at all. My body was gone.

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Charles closed his eyes and sank back into peace. The nurse sat quietly, not wanting to say anything. Thinking that Charles may have fallen asleep, she left the apartment. When she visited Charles a week later, he had invited three friends to be there for the nurse’s visit. He wanted them to experience the imagery so that they could learn it and practice it with him whenever they were with him. Charles had found a way to help himself.

In a month, he could no longer manage at home. He was hospitalized, and after a few days he stopped communicating. Visitors would talk to him, not get a reply, and then leave. The nurse visited him, and the same process happened.
Everyone began to accept this as either a neurological and/or emotional consequence of his dying process. The nurse found out from his friends that Charles had made them promise to guide him to his inner wisdom if he was near death. The friends had agreed to the promise, but they all felt embarrassed about the thought of guiding Charles in this strange process with other patients and visitors around in the hospital room.

One evening, his friend, Paul, was visiting him at the hospital. As Paul was about to leave, the floor nurse told Paul that this was probably Charles’ last night. Charles’ vital signs and her long clinical experience told her so. Paul became upset and started to go toward the elevator to leave the hospital. He suddenly remembered the promise to guide Charles to his inner wisdom in the event he was about to die.

Paul went back to the hospital room. There was Charles, not moving and uncommunicative. His silence had continued throughout his hospitalization. Feeling very self-conscious, Paul leaned close to Charles’ ear and began to guide him into the imagery method he had learned from the psychosynthesis-trained nurse.

Charles continued to lie there, unresponsive. Nevertheless, Paul continued to guide Charles to follow his breathing and to begin to imagine a wisdom figure from another time and place and to imagine both Charles and the wisdom figure both breathing and meditating together. Paul finished the guiding. To Paul’s great surprise, Charles spoke. He said, “Don’t worry, Charles is already gone.”

Paul began to both cry and feel happy. He did not know what was happening to him. Charles died 30 minutes later.

Having studied, practiced and taught meditation, imagery, and psychosynthesis for 45 years, we have felt quietly empowered to bring this work to anyone in any situation. The results of course are not always as dramatic as the Charles’ example, but they are many great teaching moments and discoveries.

A quick anecdote about one such moment: At a public talk, we guided the audience through an Inner Wisdom method meditation. When we finished guiding, a woman was very eagerly waving her hand for our attention. She was invited to tell her experience, and of course we had no idea what to expect. She said that she asked the inner wisdom figure if she should buy a Rolls Royce car. “And you know what he said back to me? ‘Will it help you to love’?” There were some giggles in the audience, and then the beauty of the wisdom landed in the woman’s awareness, and she laughed out loud.

Imagery may be just the name of a method, but what it is being tapped into—the vast intelligence of the mysterious imagination—is an entirely different matter.