Unlocking Imaginal Religion — Part 6: Eternal Transformation
Arise, Ye Metamodern Gods
Can you believe it, friends? ANOTHER instalment of Unlocking Imaginal Religion. A whole year since the last one? Yes, that’s exactly what this is!
I’ve got unfinished business with the unconscious, apparently. The Gods have been knocking at my door. Stirred from my slumber, I have resumed this inquiry into the imaginal nature of all things — including the Gods themselves. They want their story in writing, apparently. So, here in the sun-kissed mountains of Southern Mexico, I resume my research.
As a reader, you can go ahead and read this as a standalone piece, see how you get along, and if you want deeper background, make your way back to the first instalment here on Medium.
I have seen my Lord with the eye of my heart, and I said: “Who are You?”
He said:”You.”
– Mansur al-Hallaj
“The world of god is a world of endless expansion”
– Shams of Tabriz
“Truth didn’t come into the world naked, but in types and images.
Truth is revealed only that way. There is rebirth and it’s image.
What is the resurrection?
Image must be born again through image.
The bridegroom and image enter through image into truth, which is restoration.”
— The Gospel of Philip, Nag Hammadi Library
In this series we have been exploring the fact that our lives revolve around our God-images. When we relate to them unwittingly, these images cast enormous shadows of unconscious behaviour in our personal psyche.
These images are revealed by the immaterial organ of perception that is the active imagination. Also known as the soul. The appearance and illumination of these images in the light of awareness is the revelation of the divine wholeness to itself, through the unique lens of our personal consciousness.
As we encounter our God-images, these living symbols for wholeness, in and through our conscious perception, the Self (which contains the infinite totality conscious and unconscious psychic contents) realises its own wholeness (again through the lens of the personal self) and becomes informed — and indeed transformed — by a perspective beyond, or outside, consciousness itself. This phenomenon speaks to the fact that God-images point to something which transcends and includes consciousness and therefore cannot be revealed or realised within consciousness — but that can, apparently be reflected or “pointed to” by images and archetypal symbols.
In other words: God-images reveal an infinite beyond, in and through a finite — and therefore perceptible — image or symbol. These symbols are heart-portals to the Unknowable, Unspeakable, Indescribable and Inconceivable, which many cultures refer to as God. This fact is evidenced by the similarities in religious, prophetic and mythological images, statements and symbols from across world history and geography.
In this piece we are going to explore the post-Jungian “Great Opening Up” of the God-images: the development from monotheistic traditions, with their fixed and unflexible God-images, to an infinite imaginal creative landscape of ideation and imagination in which every living being is an active and essential participant…
This is the story of the explosive and ego-shattering collision of “Psyche” with “God” that occurred in the creative imagination of Carl Jung; a collision which has thrust the entire history of religion into a wild and expansive new era…
Buckle up, Dorothy. We’re not in Kansas anymore!
And so we cast out once more in search of our God-images: out into the wilderness within, into the depths of the psyche and the ancient myths that pulse and breathe in our blood and bones… ever-guided by the “angel out ahead”, the invisible one who awaits us in the caves, on the beaches, on the hills in the pouring rain, in the labyrinths of our dreams…
As our human lives progress and we encounter deeper layers of ourselves and the cosmos, our God-image evolves — just as we do.
Fascinatingly, Jung delineated six stages of transformation of the God-image which evolve over the course of one’s personal lifetime development, but also map onto our historical and cultural conception of God. Take note that the evolution of the God-image corresponds to the evolution of the collective transpersonal psyche, or collective unconscious (by another name, the Self).
Jung’s six stages of evolution of the God-image are:
1) Animism
2) Matriarchy
3) Hierarchical polytheism
4) Tribal monotheism
5) Universal monotheism
6) Individuation or the discovery of the psyche.
From the approach of spiritual anarchism, there is no hierarchy to the above list: imaginal religion frees us to go back and forth, embracing and enjoying the fruits — and responding to the demands and invitations — of all of these types of God-images. However, this freedom of movement only becomes possible once we have advanced through all six stages to the final discovery of the psyche. That is, once we have arrived at a revelation of the psyche itself (or Herself) as a God-image: psyche as a living symbol for divine wholeness, emptiness and boundlessness; an image which transcends and includes all of the previous God-image stages.
This discovery of psyche as a possible God-image was arguably Jung’s most profound innovation.
It can equivalently be viewed as a moment in which the collective unconscious (or transpersonal psyche) of humanity recognised and realised itself as a God-image.
Carl Jung made this possible by offering his personal consciousness as a space in which the collective psyche could see, realise and evolve its own imaginal nature; to recognise in the image of the psyche its own divine wholeness and equivalence (or identity) with “God”.
Within this stage of psyche-seeing-psyche, or God-imagining-God, all Gods of all religions are now revealed — or can potentially know themselves — as having a psychic — or psychological — nature: they have arisen in and out of the psyche — just as everything does.
Psyche is therefore the God-image of divine wholeness out of which all God(-image)s are born. Not only an image of images, but a God-image of God-images. (I imagine that you will thank me for restraining myself from introducing the term “meta-God-image”.)
By relating to psyche as a God-image, the self-revealing and self-sufficient nature of God-images becomes clear: all beings, all images, all experiences, all Gods, are embedded in — and emergent from — the infinite potentiality of psyche.
Psyche is the “essential medium of all religious experience” and so “any conceptual distinction between God and the psyche’s expression of the divine is purely theoretical and of little practical significance”.
I thank the Jungian analyst Lionel Corbett for this insight.
It informs us that when the psyche knows itself as an expression of the divine (or even as the whole boundless expression of the divine miracle, simply through its own appearance), then psyche knows itself as God, and any distinction or boundary.
“God” is revealed to be a mere image within psyche’s boundless totality (of all possible perceptions and images), and “psyche” is revealed to be an image of God, the boundless totality!
The practical equivalence of psyche and God drops right out onto our lap.
This is psyche — as the infinite divine creative imagination — relating to herself as God-image. This is in contrast to psyche relating to herself as literally real, or as an image (but not a God-image revealing divine wholeness and unfathomability).
This archetypal self-realisation happens in and through every human being who experiences their own unique / personal individuation and self-realisation.
After all, the personal unconscious is a microcosm of the collective unconscious; the personal embodied God is a microcosm of the transpersonal transcendent God.
“My father is the transcendent godhead, my mother is the embodied godhead, and I am their divine child, dancing for them both on their burning dance floor”
– Kabir
My own realisation of myself (or my psyche) as a God-image is inseparable from psyche’s self-realisation of God-image. Again, in different words: God’s self-realisation as psyche is God’s self-realisation as ME. The same is true for you or any other being who comes to know themselves as psyche. The realisation of our unity with the entire Self (the combination of the infinite conscious and infinite unconscious) is the realisation of our unity with God. As image.
So our (God-)images don’t arise from anywhere “outside” the psyche, as they are suggested to in the Abrahamic religions.
Psyche reveals itself to itself. This is the same as saying God reveals Itself to Itself (or Herself to Herself, or Himself to Himself). And it is the same as saying that I reveal myself to myself. It is very simple, really. God, Self, Psyche, the Divine Creative Imagination… these are images of the infinite set of all possible images (and experiences, and perceptions).
I’m going into this so deeply in order to bring God down from the pedestal as being a real and literal entity external form ourselves, and to restore God as an essentially psychic or psychological phenomenon. In other words, an image! This does not devalue or negate God but rather, if accompanied by a raising of our self-conception from a literal, realist one to an imaginal one, thrusts us into a newfound identity with the divine creative totality of the psyche. This is our self-realisation and individuation as an embodied and personal incarnation of the primordial transcendent deity (the collective unconscious or transpersonal psyche). It forces us to confront our own equivalence with the divine: the congruency of the Self-image and the God-image.
God-images are the symbolic and ecstatic expressions of this self-revelation of wholeness and indescribable boundlessness, and each one is unique to the perceiving/beholding/participating soul. The personal psyche is a unique window – or perspective – onto the transpersonal psyche, while the transpersonal psyche sees and knows itself through all such infinite variety of perspectives (incarnated and individuating souls).
What we perhaps never expected to learn is that we, as conscious and self-aware beings, are essential for this self-revelation of God.
Another way to language this is that we personal selves can relate to the universal Self — the infinite totality of conscious and unconscious contents — as a God-image.
The self-revelation of personality and perception that every living being is privy to is the self-revelation of God.
Indeed, God seems to long for this self-recognition, as is captured by the Islamic hadith: “I was a treasure and I longed to be known”. This desire is precisely the same desire that drives us to create and discover our own selves: it is God acting, discovering and creating through us and as us.
“God comes to us disguised as our life”, said Paula D’Arcy.
It is as if psyche / God / the collective unconscious actually needs mortal personalities like us to in order to become more fully aware of the infinite mystery of Its own being. And this self-discovery of God occurs in and through our discovery, encounter and co-creative relationship with our God-images. Indeed, the two are utterly inseparable.
(The infinite evidently needs finite forms and beings through which to know and behold itself, because infinite beings and forms are inherently unknowable. Sometimes willing, sometimes reluctant, we have been created for this purpose of divine self-realisation, in and through the beauties of material reality. We — as God, as psyche — evidently created ourselves (or entered into incarnation) for this purpose of knowing, weaving and evolving endless beauty.)
This is delicate territory. We are in grave danger of ego-inflation via identification with God. Jordan Bates has unpacked this more clearly than anyone I know so I will simply point you straight to his excellent work on the topic in order to avoid this pitfall/fallacy (article entitled “You Are Not God”).
The most reliable way I currently know to get around this is that yes, I am God, but so is everyone else.
I depend on a countless number of other souls, alive and dead, human and non-human. Without them, I cannot live, cannot take a body, cannot appear at all. I depend on all beings so thoroughly and inseparably that we are not really distinct or separate beings at all. Not ultimately. And yet we are not ultimately one, either, that’s just another view (or God-image)!
The practical point is that my imaginal co-dependence with innumerable beings will move me to unspeakable gratitude, reverence and commitment to those beings.
If I really see and sense this then I will stay humble, less an “individual being” than an empty space through which psyche / God recognises Herself through not only my body but through all bodies equivalently, without discrimination or preference. As one of an infinite number of God’s incarnations, I am essentially nothing. Consider that the number one, despite being a finite number, is still infinitely smaller than infinity. This is an awesome and incredible gift, a magic trick of utter divine genius: that I can be simultaneously one, and nothing and an infinite many.
And in my fundamental divine limitless, I am also none of the above, not ultimately. These are all different images, different perspectives on the boundless inconceivable whole. Me seeing me, me seeing God, God seeing God, me seeing you, God seeing you… these are all possible views. None of them real or true. All of them are imaginal: infinitely deep and rich sources of experience, encounter, intimacy, discovery and revelation. All infinitely fecund sources of novelty and opportunities for soulmaking, beautymaking, lovemaking.
“The human psyche is the organ through which we imagine God, while God simultaneously imagines Itself into incarnation through our image-ination”
— Paul Levy
Quite unlike the ‘Creator-and-His-Creation’ myths of old, in this radical new view we co-arise and co-evolve with — and as — the Gods. We are faces and facets of the Divine, just as the Gods are faces and facets of the Human. Neither is more real, true or fundamental. This empowers every single human being as a fundamental co-creators of the divine miracle, and it re-empowers the Gods as imaginal supra-beings of infinite power, creativity and imagination (who may or may not take incarnation in human bodies).
We created humans are the children of such forces, even though the source of our life-energy is utterly identical with the primordial divine love-light that birthed the whole show in the first place.
The Gods have yearned and dreamed of material incarnation in human form for countless aeons, and now it is coming to fruition. To spell it out clearly: God — or the Gods — cannot enter knowing consciousness (or materiality) in order to “reveal themselves and be known” without the interface of a conscious — and mortal — ego, or personality. A lover, a devotee, a beholder, a servant. And in turn, the personal consciousness of that ego cannot even appear without the universal transpersonal psyche (in other words: the collective unconscious, or the God) on which it depends and is utterly inseparable from.
Realising this, we can then imaginally reconnect, if we so wish — or are compelled to — with any and all God-images of the past. Reconnecting with these images and symbols means reconnecting with the autonomous Gods and spirits they represent and reveal — because we’re no longer relating to these Gods as abstract metaphysical entities but living, transcendent, transpersonal agents, whose essence and intentions we intuit — and imagine — through the images, symbols and myths of our own personal perceptual experience. This gives fresh meaning to the word religion — which as we have seen means to re-connect.
We reconnect with the origins of our soul in the ancient and timeless God(s) — or archetypal forces of Love — who created this cosmos. Awareness of these Gods is invisible to our modern consciousness, neglected and repressed out of awareness by our rampant rationality, literalism and materialism. Not to mention our disengagement with the creative imagination, our refusal to communicate with the imaginal realm. Yet these Gods are the primordial cosmic artists and lineage holders of our souls, as are countless prophets, poets, visionaries, mystics and religious devotees who act as their worldly messengers and conduits. By reconnecting to our God-images, we can continue to receive their love, inspiration, guidance and wisdom. In turn, they receive all of the beauty and poignancy and learning that is taking place in our soul through our imaginal incarnation in embodied human form.
We reconnect to the expansive and infinite dimensions of ourselves. We know ourselves as Gods among Gods. Only, we are the Gods with anuses. With feet. With hands. With saxophones. With families, and houses, and gardens, and crops. We are the Gods who came to earth, who is herself a Goddess of unimaginable intelligence and creativity. Bathed in her love, we are healing, we are learning: learning how to create in and through this materiality, the vibrating energy of which is ALL the energy of divine creative love.
God Needs You
Once we sense our self as image (as imaginal, symbolic and mythic), no longer independently existing but arising co-dependently with all and every aspect of psyche, including the Gods… at this point we lose the ego-centric worldview that “I am imagining and therefore creating God”, as well as the human-negating God-centric view that “God created everything, including me, and so I am nothing more than a helpless creature in His Plans”.
We enter a state of balance, with neither the personal or collective psyche being primary or more important. It is also a cyclical state of constant and eternal flux, or transformation, where neither the uncreated and formless God is more primordial than the created, formed, incarnated God. This breaks with another core tenet of the Abrahamic religions, which is the “something from nothing” linear creation narrative. Rather, the uncreated God imagines the created God (us, incarnated humans!). And the created Gods imagine the uncreated God: it is a fundamentally mutual (co-)dependence, mutual creation, mutual imaginality and a mutual emptiness.
It is a non-literal non-realism: a state of utter boundless freedom; the infinite potency and potentiality of the divine creative imagination.
We can now understand that all experience arises out of an infinite web of co-dependent imaginal relationships between an infinite number of divine imaginal beings, including the Gods (who are God-images) and the being/God who is all of the above combined (the universal monotheism God-image).
Without me and you, there is no God.
Without God, there is no me or you.
Without conscious beings to behold the eternally transforming God-image, living symbol of the infinite collective unconscious, the divine mystery could not reveal itself to itself!
The God-image is itself an empty (formless) archetype which is fulfilled (given form) by our conscious creative participation in its embodied imaginal incarnation (via active Imagination).
Without the eternal transformation of the God-image, or psyche, conscious beings could not and would not emerge to behold themselves (as God), and would not be able to evolve, create and re-incarnate eternally. “The world of God is a world of endless expansion”.
We have seen that the Abrahamic God-image of “universal monotheism” can be included within the all-embracing God-image of the psyche. Consequently, the God-image that we begin to co-arise and co-evolve with may very well include a God-of-All, a One-God who unites and live in and through all beings and all existence. It will take our personal image-ination of – and communication with – such a God for such a God to reveal themselves – just as it requires God’s imagination of us for us to become conscious, embodied, incarnated beings!
We are learning that it is possible to experience ourself as an imaginal self relating to imaginal Gods.
What we once called “reality” is deified and divinised as an infinite theatre of embodied imaginal souls relating to their transcendent imaginal Gods.
I must now ask: is it even possible to experience oneself at all without this fundamental imaginal co-dependence (between self and God)?
Perhaps this is what so many indigenous peoples intuitively knew: that we must sustain and feed the Gods that feed us, otherwise the cosmos that we live in – and as – will not be able to sustain itself, and will disappear completely. That it is urgently and continously necessary that we finite beings relate consciously to the infinite (through our God-images), such that we can continue to draw on the abundant love and potentiality of the infinite as the source of novelty which is absolutely needed for the ongoing evolution – and thus survival – of our embodied self, species and cosmos. This evolution, this eternal experimental project in creating beauty and unique self-experience (or soul) is what God, the transpersonal psyche, evidently desires with an unfathomable passion and adoration for all things embodied and material.
The living need the dead, and vice versa.
Matter needs spirit, and spirit needs matter. Two inseparable faces of the same inconceivable whole. Psyche, God, Self – whatever you want to to call Her!
Old Gods, New Tricks
The psychic and imaginal co-dependence of humans and Gods sheds quite a different light on prophetic figures like Jesus and Mohammed. By this view they didn’t uncover an objective Truth but rather, by interfacing and communicating intensely with their God-image, the transpersonal divine creative imagination/psyche was able, through their openness, attention, and devotion, to evolve that God-image into something entirely unforeseen on the world-stage: a unitive God of Love who inhabits all existence and holds all beings in conscious awareness and undying compassion.
Crucially, this God required the human heart and knowing-consciousness of these prophets in order to take new life in this world.
The ancient God(-image)s are transformed by encounters with our conscious creative imagination(s). And in turn, we are transformed by their demands, their guidance, their invitations. This reconnection fulfils the original meaning of “religio” as to re-ligament.
Very unlike traditional monotheist religions (which present One Image (One Form) of the One God), to an imaginal being of religious or theophanic inclination there is an infinity of possible God-images (i.e. living autonomous Gods) awaiting discovery, conversation and communion.
In this realm there is no need to cling to any one God-image or self-image… because God is limitless, the self is limitless, reality is limitless…
God may be One (Allah), Two (Zoroastrian Good/Evil Dualism), Three (Christian Trinity), Four (Jung and the Alchemist’s Quaternio), all the way up to Infinity (the Hindu Pantheon; Animism; Imaginal Polytheism; Mahayana Buddhism’s God-image of “all beings”, woven together in an infinite plurality of endless difference and diversity).
The Old Gods are welcome at the table, sure, but they will have to make themselves comfortable amongst an infinitely vast rabble of equally free and boundless imaginal souls.
Let the games begin!
Ultimately, God is neither many, nor one, nor both. These are all different God-images, different possibilities for God / psyche to know and behold herself.
And so we enter the infinite abundance and community of the infinite divine creative imagination. A psychic field of infinite openness, dynamism, fertility, and possibility.
Therein we may find our Gods — and therein, our Gods may find us.
Therein, we may find ourselves, blinking and shimmering in the halls of divine light…
Enter, ye of passionate desire: the unbounded imaginal way…
Arise, ye metamodern Gods…
Metamodern Gods
Consider that the number and range of possible God-images is limitless; that the life of the world — and the evolution of the human — is precisely the creative imaginal transformation of these images.
Each God-image, a unique expression the collective psyche in her wholeness, divinity and infinitude, is revealed to (is both created and discovered) as a unique imaginal revelation to an individual soul (or person).
All interpretations of this dynamic are happening simultaneously and equivalently: the finite beholding the infinite, the infinite beholding itself through the finite, and the finite beholding the finite (the soul beholding itself as an incarnated divine being).
Now we have the language of the God-image, we can understand the stages of religion that have been unfolding on the world stage in a new way: in terms of the God-image that each development revolves around, whether consciously or not.
The stages progress from Modernist Religion, through Postmodernist (anti-)Religion, to Metamodern / Imaginal / Integral / Jungian Religion.
Firstly, Modernism operates on the thesis that “God is dead, but Reality lives!”. So the God-image of the modernist worldview is Matter, or Physical Reality, a.k.a the Universe. This God-image generates a Self-image in its likeness: physical, material, and atomised. We start treating ourselves — and others — as isolated machines whose primary task is survival and reproduction. This is a painful and delusional state defined by identification with the body — a state of finitude and therefore bondage.
Secondly, Postmodernism taught us that the phrase “God is dead” should be swiftly followed by the addendum “and so is Reality”. In this worldview even Reality itself is laid down to die, having been revealed as a construct borne of social, cultural, and perceptual fabrications. The only thing we can cling to now is the self. But as we know, the self is going to die. So for the postmodernist operating solely within the worldview of the finite personal self, death spells the end of all meaning or worth to life. Because this shadow of death envelops all existence, the God of Postmodernism is Nothingness. “God is dead, Reality is dead — there is only Nothingness!” In other words: “God is Empty, Reality is Empty, Self is Empty, Nothingness is (by definition) Empty”. Postmodernism leaves us here: in a death, a nothingness, a void.
What postmodernism did not realise is that this death is the doorway to an Infinite Rebirth. God, Reality, Self, Psyche… just because they aren’t real, just because they don’t exist, doesn’t mean that we can’t still relate to them, entertain them, play with them, love them…
Postmodernism did not recognise that the non-reality of all things (and beings, and Gods) is the gateway to the imaginality (the boundlessnesss, the divinity, the unfathomability) of all things (and beings, and Gods).
Going through this gateway is precisely the point of departure for the next stage of the adventure: the Metamodern or Jungian Aeon.
When we gain the ability to see everything as image, or as imaginal, we realise that God, Reality, Self… were never really born, never really existed at all! They were imaginal, fantastical, and mythical all along. And far from negating them as purely void, and therefore worthless and meaningless, their very appearance, which is inseparable from and dependent on their voidness, is now seen and appreciated as being utterly divine, magical, and wondrous.
Life on Earth is no longer a random and dead physical process but a mythical quest to realise the spirit in matter, the divinity and the love in everything… a quest in which we are not alone but are guided, are led, are invited by forces and figures (from Gods and angels to demons and daimons).
We too are imaginal, fantastical, and mythical!
We too are psyche in drag!
We too are imaginal Gods!
With God and Reality dead, the Self is also dead, and this is where Postmodernism leaves us. But when we admit this dead-end on a deep existential level, by surrendering the ego and the intellect (through absorption into selfless love, which reveals the non-real imaginal nature of all things and all beings), we undergo a spiritual death which makes possible our return to the imaginal realm. This is the Metamodern rebirth, reconstruction and resurrection. This is our realisation that the world we thought was so real and ordinary is actually completely and thoroughly magical and divine; is completely and thoroughly imaginal: undying, unborn, beyond belief or idea or conception — but not beyond the heart, soul, or psyche).
The mind cannot travel here, cannot see things in this way (but it can, by connection to concepts such as infinity, inconceivability and emptiness, enter into consciousness of its finite capacity to know the unknowable).
To re-cognise the imaginality of all things — including ourselves and our God — we must submit and surrender to direct experience, to the callings of the soul and the sensing of the heart (beyond the rational, finite and limiting conceptual mind), and allow ourselves to be guided through the forest of images and symbols towards a realisation of our perfect, unshakeable freedom. This winding path ultimately leads leads us to the God of Metamodernism (or of the “Jungian Aeon”, as some call it).
This God is the God-Image itself: the image of images, the symbol of the Self as the psychic wholeness that contains everything conceivable and inconceivable within it, the entirety of the infinite contents of the conscious and unconscious worlds.
Another way to put this is that the God(-image) of the Jungian Aeon is the Self, or “Psyche” itself (or Herself), who contains within her fold all possible / conceivable / perceivable images (and God-images) and all possible ways of seeing, being and sensing. All infinite possible experiences and perceptions in all infinite possible dimensions and conceptions of reality, self, other, world, God… on and on and on. Endless expansion! This God-image, a living symbol of the infinite psyche, reflects and illuminates everything without exception. Within this all-embracing light (or love), this God-image enables everything we can possibly conceive to be sensed imaginally — i.e. as image. Without it, we recourse to realism or nihilism, unable to see the imaginal (divine, empty, magical) nature of what we are perceiving — and of who and what we are.
God-images make the difference between living in a cold, dead, lifeless Universe that will ultimately dissolve back into meaningless nothingness, and living as an essential participant inside the mind of an infinite and immortal divine creative intelligence.
Our primary metaphysical premise may now become: “God is Image, Reality is Image, Self is Image, Nothingness is Image… Everything is Image”. This leaves us free to revere, play with, worship — and even identify with — all of these (God, Reality, Self, Nothingness, Everything…), as we desire!
All and any images can be re-conceived (i.e. re-born) and re-imagined, over and over again, without limit — or rather, limited only by the scope of our divine creative imagination (which, we soon remember, is indeed infinite and limitless). This revelation incurs the possibility of infinite rebirth: the invitation to experiment with countless numbers of embodied incarnations through countless different universes / dimensions. This experiment proceeds not via an ongoing replication of the same person, ego or body, but via our infinite freedom to imaginally identify and disidentify with any conceivable form-body. We are delivered us from the grip of death by entirely re-conceiving what death is. It is simply the transformation of an image, a process which can occur again and again, endlessly and without limit. The boundless freedom of the soul!
Lastly, the materially embodied self is revealed as an aspect of the imaginal self, or soul. Material reality (or “The World”), is similarly sensed as infinite, unbounded, unlimited — an aspect or face of the imaginal world-soul. Our entire Living Cosmos is itself no other than Psyche in drag!
“Creation is Theophany and Theophanic Imagination”, as Henry Corbin put it.
Thats enough for today, I think. And would you believe it, Part 7 awaits! Oh yes, it’s not over yet… there’s still a few stones left unturned in this weird soul canyon of mysteries. We’re working towards an ecstatic crescendo here. Stay tuned, dear pilgrims.
If you have any feedback — anything that was particularly clear or unclear, or did or did not resonate — I would love to hear it.
