Jonathan, your Blake stanza quietly answers the question you are raising. The Word does not transmit from outside — it walks among the ancient trees. Participative, not broadcast. Which makes me wonder: if the imaginal reaches us and sends dispatches, have we already installed the separation the imaginal is supposed to heal? How can a wave ask whether the ocean is communicating with it, unless it has momentarily forgotten what it is?
I’m not sure what the contention is here. Are you denying that an ocean/body/system/cosmos can have internal communication between its variegated parts? I can see why “send a signal” might sound a little lacking in an understanding of autopoiesis but it doesn’t imply dualism, it’s just a form of description that honours what Barfield here recognises as distinguishing between things that can’t be divided.
You're right, Jonathan — I was conflating two things. Levin's bioelectric signalling is communication that respects the ontology: like-with-like, the medium and the message continuous with each other. That kind of internal communication doesn't install separation. My hesitation is specifically about symbolic communication, where the signal and its referent come apart — and where, historically, that coming-apart has had consequences well beyond semantics.
Which is why perichoresis keeps drawing me back. The mutual indwelling of the Trinity isn't a signal between three parties — it's constitutive. They don't communicate across a gap; they are what they are in the relation. Is the imaginal more like that — constitutive indwelling — or more like the level where symbols begin to mediate, which is what we humans usually mean by 'communication'?
Honestly I’m not sure how it works ontologically, but morphologically the answer is invariably that there is one thing that is also several different kinds of things that communicate with each other.
A Readwise highlight arrived this morning that adds something to where we left off, Jonathan.
Kripal, in The Flip: ‘There is no external communication, no information signal between this and that particle. There is only an instantaneous response from nature outside of space and outside of time. It is as if everything is already one thing and is simply responding to itself.’ Which suggests your morphological formulation sits at one level — differentiated parts, communication continuous with the system — while Kripal points beneath it, to where the one thing has not yet become several and there is only response. The ocean isn’t communicating with its waves. It is simply being oceanic.
That morphological description is actually where the real question lives for me — and I find myself grateful for the precision of it. One thing, several kinds of things, communicating. The question I keep returning to is not whether that communication occurs, but at which level it operates. Levin’s bioelectric signalling is one level — the medium continuous with the message, nothing coming apart. Symbolic communication is another — and it is specifically there that what I have been calling the consciousness trap becomes active. The morphology may be invariant; the level of communication appears not to be. Which suggests the imaginal question is not ‘does it communicate?’ but ‘at which level does it reach us, and what does that level do to what arrives?’
Yes — and none of those transformations require the ocean to send a message. The river doesn't receive communication from the ocean; it is the ocean having become something. The life form doesn't receive a dispatch; it is the ocean having generated something. Transformation and communication are different categories. The question is which one the imaginal actually is.
I am really excited to read your thoughts about the imaginal realm as I have just been participating in a really refreshing short online course with Aftab Omar at Meridian University about how to use all this what you are pointing to here as the fundamental framework in a coaching context. They call it “Imaginal Coaching”. Looking forward to read your other pieces on perspectiva.
Rowson is asking the right question but the framing contains a premise worth examining. Asking what imagination wants presupposes that imagination is the primary agent in the encounter he is describing. But what if imagination is not the wanting thing, it is the mechanism through which something else wants?
The experience he describes with Blake's stanza is precise: he began with arbitrary associations and arrived at something that felt like recognition rather than construction. That gap between what he started with and what he ended at is the structurally interesting part. Imagination did not produce that recognition. It was the instrument through which something already structured in the architecture of the universe made contact with a node capable of receiving it.
Which is to say: the question is not what imagination wants. The question is what it is in service of, and whether that distinction changes how we understand the imaginal realm at all.
Thanks Brittany, that’s an astute finesse. In the post after next in the series on Perspectiva that I link to, I will soon be comparing Arabi, Corbin, Hilman and Bourgeault, all of whom would answer your question a bit differently.
I loved reading this, Jonathan, and I'm headed to Perspectiva to explore more. Reading your piece, the word image that the interface between my imagination and memory sent forth was "the secret sharer," which was the title of of Joseph Conrad short story which I think is totally about this topic. There's in that phrase, the secret sharer, that I find indefatigably haunting, and a portal to the ante chamber where words find the imaginal.
Jonathan, I keep circling around your question because the form of it seems right: not “what is imagination?” but “what does imagination want?” That phrasing treats imagination less like a tool we possess and more like a relation we are inside.
The distinction you draw between imagination, the imaginary, and the imaginal helps me here. Imagination as capacity. The imaginary as constraint. The imaginal as cornucopia. But I wonder whether another way in is through pattern and relation.
I tend to see human beings as patterners. We perceive patterns, inherit patterns, suffer patterns, break patterns, and recombine them. Imagination is not only the making of images. It is the making of possible relations: this with that, self with world, memory with possibility, pleasure with form, private image with shared consequence.
So perhaps imagination wants relation. But not relation in one simple sense.
It is tempting to protect imagination from utility, and I understand that impulse. But I am not sure utility is the problem. Imagination is playful, spontaneous, strange, sacred, aesthetic, relational, and useful. Its usefulness is part of its life. The danger is not that imagination becomes useful; the danger is that usefulness becomes the only register in which we know how to receive it.
A pattern can be profound while held only within one person. It does not become more real merely because it is expressed. Some patterns need solitude. Some need protection. Some need time. Some need a witness. Some need friction. Some need an audience. Some need an institution. Some need to become part of a wider shared life.
That means imagination does not simply want expression. It wants the pattern to find its proper field.
This is where discernment becomes crucial. The imaginal may deserve reception before dismissal, but it should not become command before discernment. And a pattern may deserve attention before expression, but not every pattern is ready to be carried outward.
The thresholds seem different at each level.
There is the pattern for the self: the private image that deepens inwardly.
There is the pattern for another: the image that asks to be witnessed.
There is the pattern for interaction: the image that becomes truer through response.
And there is the pattern for the wider field: the image that begins to shape shared practice, culture, institution, or world.
Each carries a different weight, and each asks for a different kind of care.
So my answer, for now, would be something like this:
Imagination wants right relation.
It wants patterns to be held when they need depth, played with when they need freedom, shared when they need witness, tested when they need reality, and integrated when they can carry consequence.
But is it not rather that art rescues nature from the weary and sated regards of our senses, and the degrading injustice of our anxious everyday life, and, appealing to the imagination, which dwells apart, reveals Nature in some degree as she really is, and as she represents herself to the eye of the child, whose every-day life, fearless and unambitious, meets the true import of the wonder-teeming world around him, and rejoices therein without questioning? - George Macdonald, Phantastes
That mind has extension only in time, not in space, was Descartes' stance of course. So you're putting imagination in the same place he put mind, or are the extensions in time of the two nonetheless distinct, as if there were space between them if adjacent, or of some other distinction if both a-spatial? Or ... are imagination and mind finally one-in-the-same?
Jonathan, I'm curious about where you sourced the statistic " (c85%) of people around the world who have a broadly spiritual or religious outlook on life". I'm not challenging it, I'm just curious about your source? I've seen a recent report from the Pew Research Center that quotes 75% of the world's population as being associated with a religious tradition. Thanks
Jonathan, your Blake stanza quietly answers the question you are raising. The Word does not transmit from outside — it walks among the ancient trees. Participative, not broadcast. Which makes me wonder: if the imaginal reaches us and sends dispatches, have we already installed the separation the imaginal is supposed to heal? How can a wave ask whether the ocean is communicating with it, unless it has momentarily forgotten what it is?
I’m not sure what the contention is here. Are you denying that an ocean/body/system/cosmos can have internal communication between its variegated parts? I can see why “send a signal” might sound a little lacking in an understanding of autopoiesis but it doesn’t imply dualism, it’s just a form of description that honours what Barfield here recognises as distinguishing between things that can’t be divided.
You're right, Jonathan — I was conflating two things. Levin's bioelectric signalling is communication that respects the ontology: like-with-like, the medium and the message continuous with each other. That kind of internal communication doesn't install separation. My hesitation is specifically about symbolic communication, where the signal and its referent come apart — and where, historically, that coming-apart has had consequences well beyond semantics.
Which is why perichoresis keeps drawing me back. The mutual indwelling of the Trinity isn't a signal between three parties — it's constitutive. They don't communicate across a gap; they are what they are in the relation. Is the imaginal more like that — constitutive indwelling — or more like the level where symbols begin to mediate, which is what we humans usually mean by 'communication'?
Honestly I’m not sure how it works ontologically, but morphologically the answer is invariably that there is one thing that is also several different kinds of things that communicate with each other.
A Readwise highlight arrived this morning that adds something to where we left off, Jonathan.
Kripal, in The Flip: ‘There is no external communication, no information signal between this and that particle. There is only an instantaneous response from nature outside of space and outside of time. It is as if everything is already one thing and is simply responding to itself.’ Which suggests your morphological formulation sits at one level — differentiated parts, communication continuous with the system — while Kripal points beneath it, to where the one thing has not yet become several and there is only response. The ocean isn’t communicating with its waves. It is simply being oceanic.
That morphological description is actually where the real question lives for me — and I find myself grateful for the precision of it. One thing, several kinds of things, communicating. The question I keep returning to is not whether that communication occurs, but at which level it operates. Levin’s bioelectric signalling is one level — the medium continuous with the message, nothing coming apart. Symbolic communication is another — and it is specifically there that what I have been calling the consciousness trap becomes active. The morphology may be invariant; the level of communication appears not to be. Which suggests the imaginal question is not ‘does it communicate?’ but ‘at which level does it reach us, and what does that level do to what arrives?’
The ocean has waves, but also depth, and myriad life forms, and it becomes rivers…
Yes — and none of those transformations require the ocean to send a message. The river doesn't receive communication from the ocean; it is the ocean having become something. The life form doesn't receive a dispatch; it is the ocean having generated something. Transformation and communication are different categories. The question is which one the imaginal actually is.
I am really excited to read your thoughts about the imaginal realm as I have just been participating in a really refreshing short online course with Aftab Omar at Meridian University about how to use all this what you are pointing to here as the fundamental framework in a coaching context. They call it “Imaginal Coaching”. Looking forward to read your other pieces on perspectiva.
Rowson is asking the right question but the framing contains a premise worth examining. Asking what imagination wants presupposes that imagination is the primary agent in the encounter he is describing. But what if imagination is not the wanting thing, it is the mechanism through which something else wants?
The experience he describes with Blake's stanza is precise: he began with arbitrary associations and arrived at something that felt like recognition rather than construction. That gap between what he started with and what he ended at is the structurally interesting part. Imagination did not produce that recognition. It was the instrument through which something already structured in the architecture of the universe made contact with a node capable of receiving it.
Which is to say: the question is not what imagination wants. The question is what it is in service of, and whether that distinction changes how we understand the imaginal realm at all.
Thanks Brittany, that’s an astute finesse. In the post after next in the series on Perspectiva that I link to, I will soon be comparing Arabi, Corbin, Hilman and Bourgeault, all of whom would answer your question a bit differently.
Great to hear! Corbin especially. The mundus imaginalis carries exactly the structural question I was pointing at.
I loved reading this, Jonathan, and I'm headed to Perspectiva to explore more. Reading your piece, the word image that the interface between my imagination and memory sent forth was "the secret sharer," which was the title of of Joseph Conrad short story which I think is totally about this topic. There's in that phrase, the secret sharer, that I find indefatigably haunting, and a portal to the ante chamber where words find the imaginal.
Thanks Sandra. Yes, who or what is the secret sharer? That’s one good way to pose the question.
Jonathan, I keep circling around your question because the form of it seems right: not “what is imagination?” but “what does imagination want?” That phrasing treats imagination less like a tool we possess and more like a relation we are inside.
The distinction you draw between imagination, the imaginary, and the imaginal helps me here. Imagination as capacity. The imaginary as constraint. The imaginal as cornucopia. But I wonder whether another way in is through pattern and relation.
I tend to see human beings as patterners. We perceive patterns, inherit patterns, suffer patterns, break patterns, and recombine them. Imagination is not only the making of images. It is the making of possible relations: this with that, self with world, memory with possibility, pleasure with form, private image with shared consequence.
So perhaps imagination wants relation. But not relation in one simple sense.
It is tempting to protect imagination from utility, and I understand that impulse. But I am not sure utility is the problem. Imagination is playful, spontaneous, strange, sacred, aesthetic, relational, and useful. Its usefulness is part of its life. The danger is not that imagination becomes useful; the danger is that usefulness becomes the only register in which we know how to receive it.
A pattern can be profound while held only within one person. It does not become more real merely because it is expressed. Some patterns need solitude. Some need protection. Some need time. Some need a witness. Some need friction. Some need an audience. Some need an institution. Some need to become part of a wider shared life.
That means imagination does not simply want expression. It wants the pattern to find its proper field.
This is where discernment becomes crucial. The imaginal may deserve reception before dismissal, but it should not become command before discernment. And a pattern may deserve attention before expression, but not every pattern is ready to be carried outward.
The thresholds seem different at each level.
There is the pattern for the self: the private image that deepens inwardly.
There is the pattern for another: the image that asks to be witnessed.
There is the pattern for interaction: the image that becomes truer through response.
And there is the pattern for the wider field: the image that begins to shape shared practice, culture, institution, or world.
Each carries a different weight, and each asks for a different kind of care.
So my answer, for now, would be something like this:
Imagination wants right relation.
It wants patterns to be held when they need depth, played with when they need freedom, shared when they need witness, tested when they need reality, and integrated when they can carry consequence.
But is it not rather that art rescues nature from the weary and sated regards of our senses, and the degrading injustice of our anxious everyday life, and, appealing to the imagination, which dwells apart, reveals Nature in some degree as she really is, and as she represents herself to the eye of the child, whose every-day life, fearless and unambitious, meets the true import of the wonder-teeming world around him, and rejoices therein without questioning? - George Macdonald, Phantastes
I’m sure it’s something like that, yes. Or at least, let’s hope so. 🙃
That mind has extension only in time, not in space, was Descartes' stance of course. So you're putting imagination in the same place he put mind, or are the extensions in time of the two nonetheless distinct, as if there were space between them if adjacent, or of some other distinction if both a-spatial? Or ... are imagination and mind finally one-in-the-same?
Jonathan, I'm curious about where you sourced the statistic " (c85%) of people around the world who have a broadly spiritual or religious outlook on life". I'm not challenging it, I'm just curious about your source? I've seen a recent report from the Pew Research Center that quotes 75% of the world's population as being associated with a religious tradition. Thanks