If at our core we are images, then our lives are the actualization, the out-picturing over time of the entelechy's image, what Michelangelo called the imagine del cuor. This core image is the ultimate sponsor of each person's life. Thus all the things that happen to us in the course of personal unfolding are secondary to the essential givenness of the image in the heart. . . . You are not necessarily caused by your history, by what your parents and siblings did or did not do, by your schooling or the events of your early life. These serve to reflect and refract the primary image but did not create it. Before you were ever history, you were imagination. The image is the seed that contains both the psychic DNA and the motivating forces that shape the fully bloomed flower that you become.
— Jean Houston, A Mythic Life