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Masefield, John - Shakespeare and spiritual life
Identifier
003504
Type of Spiritual Experience
Background
A description of the experience
Shakespeare and spiritual life – John Masefield
In the beginning let me say this: that by Spiritual life I mean all imagined or apprehended Life which, without known, sensible, physical character, affects, or is imagined to affect the lives of men and women in this world. I do not mean any way or rule of sanctity or austerity practised by devout persons of the great religions.
Man consists of body, mind, and imagination. His body is faulty, his mind untrustworthy, but his imagination has made him remarkable. In some centuries, his imagination has made life on this planet an intense practice of all the lovelier energies.
Imagination is controlling and using the energy of which we are made. Those who succeed in this have access, through their partial energies, to all energy.
The thoughts of these men have the divinity of all energy: they do not die. Thought and image in these states of energy are one; together they make poetry; that mixture of idea with language which lives.
Anything thought of with this energy becomes alive. When many think for centuries with this energy, about man's utmost ideals, living thoughts of beauty and power take shape, are seen, and influence conduct. The imagined heaven is, here and now, a beauty and power.