No.0 - Introduction to the Land of the Imaginal

Photo by vahid asadi on Unsplash

An Invitation to the Imaginal Path

OK friends,

I’m about to begin a series of weekly articles that chart a kind of expedition - not into a physical landscape, but into an inner territory long overlooked in our modern world. This is a journey into what the French philosopher and mystic Henri Corbin called the Mundus Imaginalis: the Imaginal World. Not to be confused with the imaginary or the made-up fictional poetic world I am creating with the Exquisite Archives though it is based in something like the imaginal realm as I understand it. The imaginal is a real and subtle realm of perception - a world of symbolic depth, archetypal presence, and intuitive meaning.

In this series, we’ll explore what it means to walk the creative path as a kind of pilgrimage through the Imaginal. Along the way, we’ll contrast Corbin’s vision with a very different terrain: the Massurreality - a term I use to describe the algorithmic, media-saturated, image-simulated reality that now surrounds us. Where the imaginal invites reverence and depth, the massurreality trades in distraction and spectacle.

I’ll be using Chatwick & Co - my Editorial and Research Dept. (AI) to do a lot of the heavy lifting on this expedition into the highlands of Nowhere. This is a place where we will find signs, traces and markers but no actual trails.

These essays will offer reflections, provocations, and practical ways to think about your creative practice as a form of seeing and listening, a way of living that’s attuned to mystery and rooted in meaning. My hope is that this journey offers a fluid map - not to answers - but to a renewed trust in your own inner vision.

We’ll look at:

• What the imaginal actually is (and how it’s different from fantasy),

• How to recognize when your creativity is being hijacked by the massurreality,

• Ways to recover and protect your imaginal sight,

• And how artists, mystics, and meaning-makers can reclaim their role as stewards of the Real.

So pack lightly. Bring your sketchbooks, your instruments, your notebooks, your listening heart. We’re headed off the map.

More soon.