the imaginal

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... 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... 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.

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... See more

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.