Thread by @DrJohnVervaeke

You have been invited to consider that the sacred may be something you encounter:

That calls to you, addresses you, transforms you—and that it didn’t disappear—but has become inaccessible because you’ve forgotten how to see it.

This is the forgotten wound of modernity.

And the imaginal is the lost thread which can stitch it back together.

Let me explain…

If the sacred is not accessed by analytical reasoning alone—but requires a reorientation of the whole self to undergo a transformation—it means that:

Such a reorientation cannot occur without the capacity to inhabit ways of seeing and being that transcend our immediate propositional understanding.

The imaginal affords precisely this—because…

…it is the faculty by which we enact possibility, rather than merely analyze actuality—allowing us to simulate states of being we do not yet inhabit.

It is not to be confused with…

…the imaginary—which we often reduce to private fantasy or illusion.

When you plan your day, imagine a difficult conversation, or envision a future self, you are not merely daydreaming. You are inhabiting the imaginal.

It allows you to shift perspectives, simulate futures, adopt identities.

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 you are binding yourself to a vision that:

Reorganizes your perception, your priorities, your behavior.

And if that imaginal frame…

…leads them to confront reality more honestly—then it brings the person into deeper conformity with what is.

From this point of view, the imaginal does not point us away from the real, but draws us into its depth.

The French philosopher Henry Corbin saw this clearly…

…his distinction between the vertical and horizontal gaps is a way of diagnosing the fractures in modern consciousness.

The vertical gap is the rift between the sensual and the intelligible. It’s the severing of appearance from essence, of what we sense from what we understand.

The horizontal gap is the disjunction between the inner world and the outer world—between what we feel, imagine, and experience inwardly, and what we perceive as external reality.

And the imaginal is the domain that…

…does not deny these distinctions but mediates them.

It doesn’t collapse the sensual into the intelligible, or the inner into the outer.

Instead—it holds the tension—and opens a third space (the mundus imaginalis) in which the sensual and the intelligible, the inner and the outer, enter into a reciprocal articulation.

Thus the world is no longer mute matter, and the self is no longer an isolated ego.

The imaginal becomes the place where your subjective depths and the objective world meet.

So the sacred relates to the imaginal not as a content to a container—but as a presence to a mode of disclosure.

P.S.: Live spots for the upcoming course "Seeing God" are sold out! But…

…if you still want to learn what it means to detangle the existing frameworks in our culture of understanding God and religion (to resituate spirituality within a scientific and philosophical worldview)—the self-study version is now available: lectern.johnvervaeke.com/p/sgaft