Imagination is Reality

First imagination, then spirit. There is no spiritualization without imagination because in the end it is the imagination that 'images' the spirit even when the latter pretends to be independent from the imagination; for spiritual independence or detachment, like everything else humanly created, is a product and fantasy of the soul. Moreover, we shall have to maintain as firmly as possible that our fantasies and imaginings are by no means less ontological than the source from which they arise. The soul does not exist in separation from what she does, including her spiritual and material configurations. Neither is she a conglomeration of spirit and matter. The soul is precisely, absolutely, unreservedly in the middle. That is the mysterium tremendum et fascinans: the soul, that strictly is not, endows all else with being and meaning.

The adjective "imaginal" comes from the French Islamic scholar Henry Corbin who proposed the term (or alternately mundus imaginalis) as pointing to an order of reality that is ontologically no less real than physical reality on the one hand, and spiritual or intellectual reality on the other. The characteristic faculty of perception within the mundus imaginalis is imaginative power which noetically or cognitively is on a par with the power of the senses or the intellect.


Roberts Avens
Imagination is Reality, Spring, 1980 [8]