Status Updates From Imaginal Love: The Meanings...

There’s more of gravy than of grave about you, whatever you are!’’ It’s the same thing when we take Prozac and deny the meaning of depression and the strange and terrible moods and disruptions it engenders. We want a physical cause for our problems—so we can take a pill or put an electrode in our brains—this is the underdone potato theory of psychopathology. The soul demands and deserves more.

“There is a loving in dreamwork … Let us call it imaginal love … This love does not reach only towards unifying as we have been so tediously taught. When we love, we want to explore, to discriminate more and more widely, to extend the intricacy that intensifies intimacy. “

“Ludwig Wittgenstein thought that “philosophy ought really to be written only as a poetic composition.”  — I couldn’t agree more!!

“…to reveal each disciple to himself … He leads each disciple to his own theophany…his own “inner heaven,”…to his eternal individuality … Khidr’s mission consists in enabling you to attain to the “Khidr of your being,” for it is in this inner depth, in this “prophet of your being,” that springs the Water of Life at the foot of the mystic Sinai, pole of the microcosm, center of the world.”

“Everywhere there is the ready suspicion and accusation that the poet has not really earned or deserved to have wonder manifest in the poem, as if wonder came from some power of the writer’s and was not a grace recognized by the writer in the reality of things. The world is then filled with “prosaic” things … that do not deserve our poetic attentions…”

“Literary writing is a way of attempting to capture the poetry of the world. Sun, moon, mountains and rivers are the writing of being, the literature of what-is. Long before our species was born, the books had been written. The library was here before we were. We live in it. We can add to it, or we can try …
  When you think intensely and beautifully, something happens. That something is called poetry.”

“The openings require a loosening of your attention and relaxing of your intentions—you have to stop grasping at the world. You have to come to feel that nothing is literal – nothing is only what it seems on the surface. Everything has depth, breadth, and extended reference.“

Wowee…

agh!! i love this so far. Been wanting to taste more of the magic of Henry Corbin and James Hillman and the imaginal dimension but I couldn’t find a good entryway. Great primer here, posits that imagination is at the center of reality and that literalism is the root of all madness. I think? that might be too ‘literal’ of a summary 😏 associative words - pluralistic thinking, non-dual, literal-metaphor, soul.

This is a most wonderful book. I have no doubt already that it will be a book that I reread and use as an ongoing inspiration. I have been meditating for over twenty years in various traditions. These two individuals, James Hillman and Corbin and Tom Cheetham present a way of perceiving the human psyche and spirit that is practical, wise and experience based as opposed to conceptually driven