What spiritual seekers require for today’s challenges is a deep dive into the “imaginal realm,” a liminal space which hovers between the visible and invisible, the spiritual and the material worlds. Noted spiritual author Cynthia Bourgeault says the “imaginal realm” finds its native home in the heart. It can be accessed through a pervasive perennial awareness that shimmers with the perceptive acuity of deep wisdom, if we might only pay attention.
“And when all the intellectual attractions have been stripped away, and it is allowed to speak in its own native tongue, what it speaks of, with surprising simplicity and directness, is beauty, hope and a mysteriously deeper order of coherence and aliveness flowing through this earthly terrain connecting it to the infinite wellsprings of cosmic creativity and abundance … It calls us to a renewed sense of dignity, accountability, belongingness, cosmic intimacy, and love … Our hearts get this language. It is called ‘imaginal’ because, while it is invisible to the physical eye, it is still clearly perceptible through the eye of the heart, which is in fact what the word imagination specifically implies in its original Islamic context: direct perception through the eye of the heart, not through mental reflection or fantasy. Of course, in the modern West we now view the interior landscape through the filter of Wordsworthian romanticism and hear the word imagination as suggesting something personal, subjective, illusory, or ‘made up’—which is of course exactly the opposite of what the term is actually intended to convey … The imaginal is a meeting ground, a kind of cosmic intertidal zone—and as in all intertidal zones, nourishment and metamorphosis furnish the principal order of business here. In this realm the fruits of our human striving—both conscious and unconscious—are offered up to the whole.”
—Cynthia Bourgeault, Eye of the Heart, A Spiritual Journey into the Imaginal Realm (Boulder, CO: Shambhala, 2020)
In a Newtonian, mechanistic universe, preference for observable, measurable, verifiable data was reified as “reality.” This effectively served to relegate our experiential knowledge of “unverifiable data,” e.g., inter-personal energy exchanges and shifts, communal consciousness, experiences of deja vu and synchronicity, dreamwork, nature therapy, the efficacy of presence and prayer, the experiences of the mystic, among many other ways of knowing, to the realm of the incredible. My, how things have changed! In the post-Einsteinian world, “it is no longer possible to think that way; the old metaphysical maps must be redrawn to a new baseline in which energy, not substance, is the coin of the realm” (Eye of the Heart). In a quantum universe, it is not only credible to acknowledge the imperceptible, subtle energy that flows in and through the universe, but it is necessary for “that quality of aliveness moving through this realm, interpenetrating, cohering, filling things with the fragrance of implicit meaning whose lines do not converge in this world alone but at a point beyond” (Eye of the Heart).
What is even more critical for spiritual seekers today is the efficacy of tapping into the imaginal realm for the good of the wider “We.” Humans—among all life forms in the web of creation—are least likely to go first to the wider “We” for challenges to our intellectual insuperability. We are only recently learning to tap into the wisdom of the elders and our fellow travelers in the journey of the universe, but we are learning. Bio-mimicry, embodied prayer, chakra meditation, story-telling and myth-making, dance, art, music, play, accompaniment of our beloved creature-kin, and listening, really tuning into nature’s rhythms and wildness all serve as good primers. We can no longer neglect the wisdom of the fish and the leaf, the eddying pools and the wild dynamism of the seasons. Wherever our deep dive into the imaginal realm may take us, we crave the depth and the flourishing of the wider “We.”
Our time is now. What might we perceive today with the eye of the heart?
—Laura Weber, Prairiewoods associate director and retreats coordinator