Varela on Imagination, Embodiment, and Transformation

[Balder]

Here's an interesting essay featuring a neurophenomenological analysis of the practice of Tonglen.  I'll copy the introduction here and include the full essay as an attachment to this post.

 

Imagining: Embodiment, Phenomenology, and Transformation

by Francisco J. Varela and Natalie Depraz

 

Imagination is one of the quintessential qualities of life and our being. Its central attribute is the manifestation of vivid, lived mental content that does not refer directly to a perceived world but to an absence that it evokes. It is fair to say that imagination is emblematic, in fact, of a cluster of human abilities: imagining proper, or mental imagery, remembrance, fantasy, and dreaming. Imagination is an inexhaustible source in all these dimensions, explored and praised by human cultures throughout the world, a witness to its centrality.

Our purpose in this essay is to let imagination be a guiding thread in a journey of exploration of its inextricably nondual quality,making it possible to travel from its material-brain basis to its experiential quality without discontinuity.  That is, we are not going to propose a “bridge” between a scientific view of imagination and its place in the Buddhist discipline of human transformation. Our purpose is to embrace the entire phenomenon in all its complexity and weave it as a unity with its many dimensions, which need and constrain each other without residue—in the body and brain, in its direct phenomenological examination, and in its pragmatic mobilization for
human change. Only such weaving can be called a meeting of Buddhism and neuroscience on a new phenomenological ground.

 

[The full essay is in the attachment below]