We are cognitively smaller than we could be, more easily disoriented, and more vulnerable to manipulation than we realize.
Why?
Because we never ask: what is this faculty actually doing?
And when it goes wrong, we lack the framework to understand why.
The result is a strange impoverishment:
We inhabit an Imaginal life, but we have no vocabulary for it, no way to work with it.
Realizing the Imaginal addresses exactly this…and it can be grounded scientifically:
Through the lens of cognitive science, your brain is not understood as a passive receiver of data. It is a generator of models, constantly anticipating and shaping the world it encounters.
So you live through imaginal constraints...mental framings that are simulations of the world.
These constraints are how we navigate complexity, set goals, and resolve problems.
When you plan your day (imagine a difficult conversation) or envision a future self, you are inhabiting the Imaginal.
It allows you to shift perspectives, simulate futures, adopt identities.
And this activity is not beyond the reach of rational evaluation.
You can ask:
Is this story I'm telling myself adaptive or deceptive?
Does it help me flourish?
Does it generalize across different aspects of life, or is it narrow and compulsive?
Imagine a person who has long lived in fear, but begins to imagine themselves as courageous (not merely pretending, but actively living into that image) then they are binding themselves to a vision that reorganizes their perception, their priorities, their behavior.
And if that Imaginal frame leads them to confront reality more honestly, then it brings the person into deeper conformity with what is.
Course Curriculum
A Cognitive Account of the Imaginal
We are introduced to how 4E Cognitive Science, Predictive Processing and Relevance Realization frameworks provide a cognitive account of the imaginal.
Dimensions of the Imaginal
We investigate how the imaginal is used, to bind the self to aspiration, for self-awareness and reflection, as well as how they are bound together
Crossroads of the Real Enough
We will revisit Corbin's classic article on the imaginal and itnegrating it with 4E cognitive science before showing the vital role of the imaginal in understanding and therefore science.
The Rational and Imaginal
We will posit how the imaginal can itself be rational and the imaginal nature of the Self in preparation for both Segall and Hedley.
Imagination as a Way of Knowing
We build on Segall and begin to explore how imagination can be a way of knowing. This will tie in and expand on arguments from Einstein and Spinoza's God and The Cognitive Science of Ritual.
On Aesthetics and Ether
We learn how Segall's proposal that the imagination allows us to overcome the subject-object duality, and how non-duality requires what Segall calls "etheric imagination."
The Spiritual in the Imaginal
We will reflect upon the spiritual/religious knowing that is afforded by the imaginal.
Synthesis and Conclusion
Here we will finish and draw the whole course together.