Into the Age of Imagination

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What is imagination? Today, we usually understand it as a private capacity for creative thinking. But for mystics through the ages, imaginal practice has meant something far larger: the capacity to access an expanded field of reality. This expanded dimension—the imaginal realm—is the source and ground for events in the material world.

Over thousands of years of invasion and culture loss, increasing antagonism with land, economic strictures, and, for the last 500 years, ascendant rationalism, modern culture has forgotten the existence of that realm. The result is our current reality of overlapping crises, with a crisis of cosmology at the heart of them all. The leading scientific scholarship tells us that we live in a fundamentally disjointed, irreconcilable universe, tattered by impenetrable dark matter. Little wonder that the future looks so dark.

What’s missing in our current cosmology is the healing, whole-making field that is the imaginal realm. It is the recognition that the full truth of our universe cannot be known by the intellect alone. Remembering how to access the imaginal means remembering and revaluing lost ways of knowing. It means redressing the centuries-old imbalance between rationalism and embodied, resonant, sensory, and heart-driven knowledge. And it means restoring cosmology as a felt sense, rather than a cognitive construct.

This evening will feature a 45-minute talk on these themes and a one-pot vegan dinner, then we'll open up for a conversation about imagination, cosmology, ways of knowing, and anything else that feels alive. This is an invitation to build local community around more-than-rational ways of knowing. Nerdy weirdos unite. I want to meet you!

For more about me: eleanorrobins.substack.com