the imaginal

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.

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

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

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