ABSTRACT
The closer Berthe gets to the bull, the more her body becomes infused with its power. Like walking into a storm, the bull becomes a maelstrom of turbulence. The closer we get to an image-presence, the more it becomes an environment in which we ®nd ourselves. We are pulled into the presence and participate in its medium. This is the literal meaning of the word ekstasis, a movement outside of our selves, changing our state of being.4
Through this movement outside of our selves we are initiated into a world that is unfamiliar. Like the Sangoma, we become absorbed by the embodied presences. In embodied imagination there is an inversion of the notions of inside and outside. In western culture we assume that we have an inner life which is taking place inside of us, in the same way that synaptic processes happen inside the brain. This feels obvious. But as Berthe gets closer to the bull, she is pulled into his world. From our central paradigm in this book, dreaming perception, the bull is not inside Berthe, but she has been absorbed into his world. In relation to Berthe, the bull is not inside, in an interior space. As the bull takes possession, it changes the very nature of the space in which Berthe ®nds herself. What she experiences as her inner life is actually a participation in the presence of the bull. This confusing fact has best been expressed by Henry Corbin, in an article which is foundational to the study of embodied imagination.5 Corbin says: ``. . . the relationship of interiority expressed by the proposition `in', `inside of', is inverted. Spiritual bodies or entities are not in any world, nor in their world, in the same manner as a material body is in its place or may be contained in another body. On the contrary, their world is in them . . . each spiritual entity is `the entire sphere of its Heaven'.''
