the imaginal

Reality is something much bigger than our ordinary senses are capable of perceiving, and learning to be in relationship with it requires us to enter the imaginal realm. Mysticism, magic, and animist frameworks are ways of doing that, so I write a lot about those topics.

Experientially, received within one’s own quiet subjectivity, it appears as an allusive aliveness, a meaning presenting itself in “glimpses and visions,” a foretaste or reminder of a higher order of being to which the human heart actually belongs and to and from which it responds, with infinite tug. The imaginal nudges us, beacons us, corrects us a... See more

The imaginal is that quality of aliveness moving through this realm, interpenetrating, cohering, filling things with the fragrance of implicit meaning whose lines do not converge in this world alone, but at a point beyond.

I say “boundary,” but the imaginal world is actually more of a confluence , for the word “boundary” suggests a separation while what is really at stake in this realm is an active flowing together. “Where the two seas meet” is a beautiful Sufi metaphor to convey the essence of what actually happens here. The imaginal realm is a meeting ground, a pla... See more

It is traditionally understood to be a boundary realm between two worlds, each structured according to its own governing conventions and unfolding according to its own causality. In traditional metaphysical language, it is the realm separating the denser corporeality of our earth plane from the progressively finer causalities which lie “above” us i... See more

So, the imaginal world is a kind of interface between unseeable spiritual reality and the dense, immutable corporeal world. Reality is multi-layered, and the Imaginal Realm is one of the important, generative layers. The West had such a place for imagination through the medieval period, but in the development of empiricism we lost it completely. No... See more

Once we lose sight of the imaginal nature of certain realities, the true import of a great body of mythic and religious teachings slips from our grasp. The Imaginal World is the realm where invisible realities become visible and where corporeal things are spiritualized. It is more “subtle” and less dense than the physical world. It is more dense th... See more

When I sink and dance in the realm of the soul – turning towards the dark, tortured depths of its anguish and pathologies – I come to fall in love with the potent images and the Imaginal figures that arise from my mysteries of my psyche. I come to find the gifts in the wounds – the seed of divine longing [how am I called to serve?] in the heated cl... See more