Imagination: A Doorway to Reality
Photo credit to Viswaprem Anbarasapandian
A few months ago, I was walking with a friend in The Great Wilderness of the Scottish Highlands. We paused to drink from a stream near a bothy. As we entered the basin of the glen, a cuckoo flew from a tree, looped through the air ahead of us, calling its distinctive song, then returned to its perch. We both stopped, looked at each other, and quietly agreed that we’d just received a greeting.
We weren’t ‘imagining things’ or even fantasising that the bird had spoken to us, rather it was a spontaneous experience that glided straight into my limbs, well before any mental reflection. It was a revelation, not something ‘made up’.
This is what I mean by imagination.
So often, we’re taught that imagination is childish, a form of escape or illusion. But true imagination, what some call primary imagination, is something else entirely. It doesn’t take us away from reality, but deeper into it.
It’s an organ of perception, one that lives not in the mind, but in the heart. One that allows us to sense the living world and how it speaks to us.
William Butler Yeats once said that imagination “has some way of lighting on the truth that the reason has not… delivered when the body is still and the reason silent.”
Arriving through intuition, emotion, images and lived experience, imagination isn’t contained by the rational mind. It is the heart’s capacity to see what the eyes cannot; a continuous wellspring of possibility and meaning.
Jonathan Gustin describes the Imaginal Realm — a concept rooted in Sufi philosophy — as a distinct mode of reality: not the physical, not the spiritual, but something in-between. He writes that imagination is not just a human faculty, but “a structural feature of the cosmos.”
Embodied imagination is everywhere and a part of everything, even when people aren’t aware of it. Sometimes it comes as a moment of enchantment, like that encounter with the cuckoo. But other times, it arrives as a thread, an image that weaves through our life, quietly calling us to live it more fully.
So what does this have to do with purpose?
Well, imagination is a medium through which Soul communicates. It’s how Soul reaches towards us and how we reach back. It’s not only how we create, but how we perceive what’s already there in the background of experience. When we engage it, we don’t just express ourselves; we let ourselves be expressed by something greater.
As Michael Meade says, “It’s not simply that we need to imagine what we can become, but more importantly, that we become what the imagination of our Souls would have us be.”
Many wisdom traditions suggest that each of us is born with a kind of image, a seed of purpose unique to our Soul. To live in touch with this image is to live mythically. The mythic imagination doesn’t offer a blueprint to follow, but a deep current to attune to, one that gives shape, meaning and coherence to our lives.
I’ll be honest, connecting with the imaginal realm hasn’t been easy for me. I didn’t grow up learning to trust imagination. Most of us didn’t. It’s been marginalised, dismissed, or confused with fantasy. But in a world so dominated by logic and speed and with so many of us grasping for meaning, imagination is an essential faculty to cultivate. It radically shifts how we relate to the world and our place in it.
Without it, we cannot fully participate in this dance we call life. Without it, I wouldn’t have experienced the depth of that encounter with the cuckoo. Cultivating our relationship to the imaginal realm will help us be more inspired, resourced and willing to contribute.
If this speaks to you, you might want to try:
• Noticing moments in nature that feel charged or uncanny
• Tracking recurring images or metaphors in your life
• Asking the question: What does my heart see here?
This capacity lives in all of us.
The only question is whether we choose to listen.