Is our understanding of reality too limited? Can we tap the power of imagination to access different dimensions of the real? The modern mystic Cynthia Bourgeault would say yes, enthusiastically yes. She points to the work of philosopher and Islamic scholar Henry Corbin, who made an important distinction between the imagined and the imaginal. The imaginal world or Mundus Imaginalis was for him much more than arbitrary fantasy. He understood the imaginal as a transformative power, a unique human faculty, through which we can gain access to deeper and more subtle forms of reality. Following Corbin’s lead, Cynthia Bourgeault has researched deeply into the form of perception of the imaginal. For her, it is essential that we find access to these deeper, more subtle forms of knowing to deal with the crisis we are in as humanity.

About this imaginal perception she says in an interview with evolve: “We will not find the meaning that will allow us to pull us out of the crisis thrust upon us without beginning to widen the context of what human life really means. The spiritual traditions point to that bigger context, particularly when they access their own subtle teaching, which is the imaginal. In the broadest sense, the imaginal is the body of teaching and objective knowledge about human identity and direction that exists beyond sense perception and rationality. In other words, it is the body of objective knowledge, which draws on subtle, embodied capacities of understanding. That's what we need to turn to. The culture has lost it. We have disowned the traditions that acknowledge collective human meaning.”

In this evolve LIVE! dialogue webinar we will explore together with Cynthia Bourgeault and the participants the nature of this subtle imaginal perception and why it is so meaningful in our time. The dialogue will open the space to try to move into the imaginal depth and co-creativity in our conversation itself.