Imaginal Love

different from, even alien to, all previous thought, and … there is nothing normative, or even normal, about it, or us.”

In order to make in progress in any situation of conflict you have to be able to imagine, feel, intuit, and think your way into the position of the other person.

We don’t feel them in Jung’s sense of the word ‒ we identify with them.

opposite. It is abstraction which is literal; the concrete is always imaginal.

We have to give up our attachment to psychology itself, to the literalism of psychotherapeutics.

He said to me once that as he sat lost in contemplation over those ancient texts, sometimes he was afraid that he wouldn’t be able to get back.

Hence, the opposite of idolatry would not consist in breaking idols, in practicing a fierce iconoclasm aimed against every inner or external Image; it would rather consist in rendering the idol transparent to the light invested in it.

the creative and active Imagination. It is the exercise of this faculty, conceived not as a merely human attribute but as continuous with the creative power of the world, that provides the means by which the intensive self can escape from its prison and enter that wider, more-than-human world.

we don’t always need to dig deep, to furrow our brows and plunge into the depths to find the poetic shimmer in the world.