Imaginative truth is the most immediate way of presenting ultimate reality to a human being... ultimate reality is what we call God.
Interpretation
The quote suggests that creativity and imagination are essential for understanding profound truths about existence and divinity.
R. S. Thomas posits that imaginative truth provides a direct connection to the ultimate reality, which he equates with God. This highlights the significance of creative thought in grasping complex spiritual concepts, indicating that our understanding of the divine is often shaped by imaginative processes rather than strictly rational or empirical ones.
In practice
In a discussion about the role of art in understanding spirituality.
The furies are at home in the mirror; it is their address. Even the clearest water, if deep enough can drown. Never think to surprise them. Your face approaching ever so friendly is the white flag they ignore. There is no truce with the furies. A mirror's temperature is always zero. It is ice in the veins. It's camera is an x-ray. It is a chalice held out to you in silent communion, where gaspingly you partake of a shifting identity never your own.
A recurring ideal, I find, is that of simplicity. At times there comes the desire to write with great precision and clarity, words so simple and moving that they bring tears to the eyes.
Man is a dream about a shadow. But when some splendour falls upon him from God, a glory comes to him and his life is sweet.
Poetry is that / which arrives at the intellect / by way of the heart.
My perception has changed from thinking if someone's in jail they're supposed to be, to there's a lot of factors that's not that simple.
We are our world knowing itself. We can relinquish our separateness. We can come home again - and participate in our world in a richer, more responsible and poignantly beautiful way than before, in our infancy.
What seems to us but dim funeral tapers may be heaven's distant lamps.
I realize now that people are not thinking about you and me or caring what is said about us. They are thinking about themselves-before breakfast, after breakfast, and right on until ten minutes past midnight. They would be a thousand times more concerned about a slight headache of their own than they would about the news of your death or mine.
Against eternal injustice, man must assert justice, and to protest against the universe of grief, he must create happiness.
I grew up with a lot of people whose whole prime mover was dad rage. I never really had it - it always seemed so empty. It always seemed to be masking something else, which was really their own lack of initiative.
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