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Thinking Allowed, conversations on the leading edge of knowledge and discovery, with psychologist Jeffrey Mishlove. Hello and welcome. I'm Jeffrey Mishlove. Have you ever wondered what imagination really is? Today we are going to probe what Gary Lachman, my guest, has called the lost knowledge of the imagination. Gary is a historian of esoteric culture. He has written books on Carl Jung, Swedenborg, Madame Blavatsky, Rudolf Steiner, the Hermetic Tradition, the Gurdjieff Tradition and P.D. Uspensky, and many others. This interview is being conducted via the internet and now I'll switch over to the internet channel. Welcome Gary. It's a pleasure to be with you once again. Well, thanks for having me on again, Jeffrey. We're going to talk today about the lost knowledge of the imagination and I'm very pleased with this book. It reminded me quite a bit of Colin Wilson's great masterpiece, The Outsider. It's a book about ideas and you've really taken the notion of imagination and pointed out how much people have thought about it throughout history and how little we seem to understand it today. Well, yeah, that was basically the central idea in doing the book. The title, Lost Knowledge of the Imagination, comes from the poet, Blake scholar and essayist Kathleen Raine. In quite a few of her books, in writing about Blake or writing about WB Yeats or the romantic poets, she talks about what she calls the lost knowledge of the imagination or the rejected knowledge of the imagination or the forgotten knowledge of the imagination. And this was something I think you can look at in two ways. You can look at it in the sense of knowledge about the imagination that we've lost track of and also knowledge that the imagination can provide, that in even a broader way I would say we've lost track of. And what I do in the book is I try to show how this shift from a kind of more imaginative way of knowing the world that we can trace back to ancient times, that this is around 500 BC, around the period that the German philosopher, Karl Jaspers, calls the Axial Age. While this was a time when you had the great flowering of the ethical and religious and sort of moral teachings that transformed the world. And it was all over the world. It was a strange kind of shift, global shift in human consciousness. So you had Lao Tse in Confucius in China. You had the Gautama Buddha in India. You have Zoroaster in Persia. And you have the Jewish prophets in the holy lands. But what happened in Greece was something a bit different, where there was a shift from a sort of earlier mythical poetic, we can say, way of understanding the world to what we know today as sort of a science. I mean, these early Greeks, they're known as the priestocratic philosophers, people like Thales and Anaximander. They started asking the kinds of questions that we still ask today in terms of science. And they weren't interested in a mythical answer to how the universe came into being or why we're here. They wanted to know what this stuff was made of. What is that rock made of, or what are the clouds made of, and what's the basic stuff that everything is made of? And this was a very different kind of question. And this was sort of the first step away from an earlier, more mythical kind of intuitive way of understanding the world. And now it would seem with the rise of the scientific revolution of the 17th and 18th centuries, the 19th century, the industrial revolution, we've gone a long way, much further than the ancient Greeks and the philosophers and prophets of the Axial Age, away from this mythic view of the world. Oh yeah, I mean, it's become pretty much marginalized or sidelined. Or as they say in the book, I mean, imagination, well, we can look at it today in a few different ways. There's the sort of negative way, well, that's just your imagination, you know, you're letting your imagination run away with you, sort of wishful thinking or daydreaming or that kind of thing. Or we have a more positive way of looking at it in terms of it helps us on the cutting edge. You know, we can be more innovative and come up with new technologies and more ideas, or we can be sort of novel and creative and new entertainments and things of that sort. And while I'm not denying that aspect or element of imagination, what Kathleen Raine was talking about was something more central and had much more to do with our whole relationship to the world, how we understood the world. And what I try to show in the book through a variety of different sources is that even though, yes, as you say, this more empirical, rational, utilitarian, scientific way of knowing the world has triumphed and it's done remarkable things. It's given us washing machines and it's put us out into the solar system. This other way of knowing has always been there. It's not gone away. It's been sort of repressed in a certain way. And it's been kind of castigated as something not as important as the other way of knowing. But you can find figures throughout the history of Western culture that had feet in both camps. The historian Jacques Barzin talks about Blaise Pascal, and he was one of the figures that was around the time of the rise of science, where he developed geometry. He actually worked on one of the first computers, kind of a system of computing that he helped his father because his father was a tax collector. But he also talks about the heart. The heart has reasons that the mind doesn't know about or that there's another, there's what he calls the spirit of geometry and the spirit of finesse. The spirit of finesse is a sort of way that you know in an intuitive kind of feeling way. We talk about finesse when you're playing billiards or basketball, there's a certain kind of something that you can put on the shot that you can't quite explain to somebody else, but you know how to do it. But you know it in a literally hands-on kind of way in that sense. And this is something that's part of this other way of knowing. And what I try to do is initially in the book is show that there are different ways of knowing things. There's one way that we know about already, the scientific way, but there's other ways that we can know things too. What we know through that way informs us about the world in a different way that the other way does. You refer quite a bit to the work of Owen Barfield, who we discussed in our previous interview on Rudolf Steiner, because as I recall, Barfield was largely responsible for introducing the works of Steiner to the English-speaking world. Oh yes, Barfield was a very important figure. He's most known to readers of C.S. Lewis as Lewis's great friend. They had something called the Great War that went on between them because Lewis really had no time for Steiner or anything like that. But he respected Barfield and they had an ongoing kind of dialogue or argument about this. And he was also in that circle of writers known as the Inklings in Oxford that included J.R.R. Tolkien. And actually, I mean, to give Barfield his credit, he was writing sort of fantasy novels before either Tolkien or Lewis were doing something called the Silver Trumpet, I think, in the early 20s. But he was most known today as a philosopher of language. And I draw on him because he argues that if we look at the history of language, we can detect what he calls an evolution of consciousness. And basically, he's saying that the way ancient language tells us that the way people of an earlier time saw the world is very different than the way we see the world. And fundamentally, they saw it in a more poetic, metaphoric kind of way. The language was more living. Language, what we have today, is full of dead metaphors. This is something that Ralph Waldo Emerson talks about as well. It's kind of a used up poetry. I mean, if we pay attention to how we speak, we'll see that we use metaphors all the time, but we don't even know that we use them. And what a metaphor is, basically, it's a kind of vivid, almost visceral kind of way of describing a kind of inner experience. So if you're talking about, oh, I'm trying to grasp that idea. Well, I'm trying to grasp it. I'm trying to get my my hand around it. Or, you know, if you're undergoing a thorough search of something, you know, you will leave no stone unturned. Well, at some point along the line, somebody first said, you know, when I'm really looking for something, it's like I'm lifting up every stone. And the other guy said, well, you're right. It is like that. And then that became something that we just say all the time now without even thinking about it. But why this was important for Barfield is he said, well, people saw the world like that back then. They saw it in this way that was much more living and vital and what we would call poetic. And they weren't going out of their way to write poetry. I mean, poets try to do this. Poets try to come up with new, vivid metaphors. The ancient language kind of does it itself. And this suggested to him that actually this was because the way people saw the world then was like that. And hence, OK, if they saw the world like that, then we see the world in a different way. We don't quite see it in the same vivid sort of way. We've moved from what the German scholar Eric Heller calls the age of poetry to the age of prose. And again, this is this kind of this kind of transition from living vital metaphors to being kind of dead flat ones, which we don't recognize as metaphors anymore. And this Barfield said, this is something that's, you know, parallel to a change in consciousness. And this is how he actually got interested in Steiner, because Steiner talks about an evolution of consciousness like that as well. And Barfield came to it on his own. And then when he was introduced to Steiner's work, he said, oh, my God, he's talking about this in the same way. And then, as you say, yes, he became very, very influential in sort of disseminating Steiner's ideas to the English speaking world. Well, Steiner himself owes a real debt of gratitude to Goethe. Exactly. Well, I mean, the romantics very much, you know, Goethe was sort of the head of them in a certain way, you know, the first one who sort of opened that whole stream up. But as I said, Kathleen Raine, she wrote a great deal about the romantic poets because they tend to see the world in this way. They tend to see nature as a living kind of being. And Goethe was immensely important for Steiner because of well, Steiner basically got his career going as being an editor of Goethe's scientific writing when he was a young man. And no one actually wanted the job because the literary people thought Goethe's scientific writings were dull reading and the scientific people thought they were just rubbish. But Goethe was one of these great, you know, brilliant Renaissance figures who not only a great poet and dramatist, a statesman, he was also a scientist. And he made important discoveries in evolutionary theory. He also took on Newton with he argued against Newton's ideas about color and the spectrum and all that. But the area of scientific study that was very influential on Steiner was Goethe's work in plant morphology, how plants grow and the kind of forms they take. And he talked about something that he called the Erflanze, which is a really good German word. It means sort of like the primal plant. And it's difficult, even Goethe says, it's difficult to describe what it is exactly, but we can say it's kind of like an archetype of a plant, let's say a Jungian archetype of a plant or something like a platonic idea. It's a sort of central blueprint out of which all other plants grow. And Goethe believed, though, that he trained, he had trained his imagination in order to actually see this. It wasn't just an idea. It was something that he could perceive through his trained imagination, what he called active seeing. And he says he saw it for the first time when he was in Palermo on his famous Italian journey. And he, as all good Germans did, he went down south. I mean, all the good Germans go down south and to the land where the citrons bloom. And while he was in Palermo and he was at the Botanical Gardens, he was studying the plants there. And he said it was incredibly different studying them there than rather back in Weimar in a hothouse, you know, here they're out in their natural setting and in the sun and all that. And he was staring at the plant and he said he saw the Erflanze. And it was this kind of, not imaginary, it's imaginal in the way that the French phenomenologist and student of scholar of Persian mysticism, Henri Corbin, talks about imaginal, which is this kind of in-between realm between the physical and the purely conceptual. It was something that was perceived, but not with the inner eye, as it were. Now, this is crucial. I don't want to lose this point about Corbin's notion of imaginal because I think it's the centerpiece of your whole argument, really, because it's not just sort of an intermediate realm. He says it's ontologically real. Yes, yes. Well, the imaginal has its own reality. It has its own ontology, just as our physical world has a kind of physical ontology as a physical being. And this conceptual world, say, the pure kind of platonic ideas, you don't see the platonic ideas. You see them expressed in physical realm. So we can only conceptualize a pure circle and we see lots of other circles out in the world. And none of the circles that we encounter in the real world are actually perfect circles. But the one circle that we can conceptualize, and this goes back to Steiner, Steiner says the same thing. He says he had a very strange idea that, you know, when each of us conceptualize a triangle, we're all conceptualizing the same triangle. But I mean, another example for Goethe of this kind of act of seeing earlier than this was when he visited Strasbourg. And this was when the cathedral, famous cathedral, which for a time is the tallest building in Europe, was under construction or just about finished or something along these lines. And Goethe, you know, being a very good scientist and wanting to study, you know, architecture among everything else he studied, he observed the cathedral for many different positions and in daylight and, you know, twilight and all this sort of thing. And while he was at a tavern with some friends and talking about it, he just said, you know, I really believe that at some point the the the builders changed the plan of the original idea, the original plan of the architect. And someone then said, well, you're actually absolutely right. But how did you know? Because this is this wasn't common knowledge. And he said, well, the cathedral told me itself. I studied it from all these different angles and I sort of felt myself into it. And this is this kind of participatory epistemology, to use a very fancy kind of term. It's a way of sort of participating with the object of knowledge, the object that you're studying. So we tend to cut it off and that's sort of the scientific ideal of being objective. Whereas for Goethe, for Steiner, Barfield, Corbin, Kathleen Raine, the poets and all these others, it's a more participatory. We share with it. And by doing that, we learn things from it that we wouldn't necessarily know if we had cut ourselves off. And this was something Goethe really believed that he could do. And that was the spark, really, for Steiner's whole what he called spiritual science, what he later termed super sensible perception, where you can somehow learn how to get into a similar state like that. And not only would you be able to see something like the Erflandse, but you'd be able to go into further realms that Goethe didn't really enter, but realms of sort of spiritual reality. This is how Steiner talks about reading the Akashic records and things of that sort. And Owen Barfield, who was a Steiner scholar, you report believed that Steiner was really a much greater figure than even Goethe, who is, I think, today probably regarded as the greatest literary figure of the German language. Well, yeah, Barfield was very much, you know, overwhelmed by Steiner's work. He felt that because he said he believed that he was doing the same sort of thing. But then when he saw what Steiner was doing, it was kind of like, well, you put it this way, he was he was working in a little chapel and Steiner had built this huge kind of cathedral, this huge erection of different, you know, systems and levels of being. And if you know Steiner's philosophy, it's like that. It's a huge, huge, huge construction. It's very Germanic in that way. You know, it's kind of Hegelian where you have different levels of being. And, you know, they're all kind of mapped out and in different structures. And the human being shares that as well. And there's a history of the cosmos and the history of the planet and all that. And but I think, you know, that may well be true. But Barfield's a better writer. I think if you want to get an idea, an easy idea of what sort of Steiner's about, you can read some of Barfield's essays on Steiner's work because he wrote, well, he wrote in the 20s. And after a while, he realized he couldn't make a living as a writer. And he went into his family's law firm and he worked as a solicitor for many, many years. And it wasn't until the 60s that he had a revival. I mean, he wrote throughout throughout 30s and 40s and 50s. He was writing articles for different sort of Steiner journals and things of that sort. But in the late 50s, he wrote a book called Saving the Appearances, which talks about this participatory kind of consciousness. And this got picked up by theological schools in the United States. And there was kind of a Barfield revival. And amazingly, I mean, he lived until I think he died in 1997. I met him in 1996. I conducted what I believe is the last interview with him then. And he was 98 then. So he was around for quite some time. Well, it's interesting you mentioned that Barfield was also known as a member of the inklings that included J.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis, who are regarded as probably two of the greatest fantasy, imaginative writers in the English language. Yes, you're absolutely right in this. And we might think that, oh, well, this is imagination in this fantasy kind of way, this kind of make-believe way. But both of them, both Lewis and Tolkien and Barfield as well, they didn't see themselves as creators in the same sense that, say, many artists or writers would see themselves because they had deep belief in Christianity and God, in some deity that was the true creator. I mean, so they use terms like forging in a certain sense that, you know, you take materials that's already available and you make something with them rather than make something out of whole cloth. But yes, I mean, that's the whole world of the Lord of the Rings and Lewis with Narnia and also with his space trilogy. I mean, they both made fantasy kind of respectable. I mean, they're works of literature. I mean, I remember first coming across them when I was reading this sort of stuff ages ago in the early 70s, there was a whole kind of revival of what was known as adult fantasy. And it wasn't eroticism. It was sort of, you know, fantastic literature. And George MacDonald and E.R. Edison and other people like that, William Morris, you know, they were writing sort of mythic tales and sort of fairy tales, but for adults. And it was of a high, high caliber of literary standing. But this, yeah, this is a way in which the imagination can create or reveal imaginal worlds. You know, I mean, one of the people I talk about in the book a bit is the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who's famous for Kublai Khan and the Rime of the Ancient Mariner and things of that sort. And in a huge book of his called Biographia Literaria, where he basically writes about anything coming into his head and the different things he's read, he makes a distinction between true imagination and fancy and or fantasy. And fancy for him is where you take things that are already made and kind of smack them together in novel kinds of ways. So a flying pig is a product of fancy. It's not a product of imagination in the true sense, because imagination is original, but not in the sense of being novel, of being shocking or new or, you know, that kind of thing or, you know, innovative. It's original because it goes back to the origin and the origin of things for Coleridge and for the German philosophers that he read quite a bit, like Kant and Schelling, was the imagination. And also in the Hermetic tradition, this is true. And again, this is something that was part of our Western kind of culture up until around about, you know, the early 17th, late 16th, early 17th century, with the rise of the more empirical kind of rational science, which was an outgrowth of that initial shift that Jaspers talks about in the Axial Age. Yeah. Now, you also write about an interesting controversy, a time in which Goethe got angry with his friend, I think it was Schiller, and it was about Kant. It was about Kant's distinction between an experience and an idea, and Goethe's anger that Schiller would agree with Kant about that. Yeah, I mean, this was a famous story where they were both attending a scientific conference, a city in Germany, Jena, and they knew of each other. And Goethe knew Schiller, but he didn't like his work that much. He thought he was too shocking. Schiller wrote a play called The Robbers that was a very kind of violent, revolutionary kind of play. And although Goethe basically got the romantic ball rolling with his novel The Sorrows of Young Werther, which tells the story of this young poetic character who's in love with nature, but he has a failed love affair and he winds up blowing his brains out or something along those lines. And incidentally, kicked off a series of copycat suicides across Europe. He had outgrown that and he had become a bit more classical and a bit more Olympian and distance and all that kind of thing, where Schiller was actually still kind of in the grip of this romantic kind of fervor. But they met at this conference and both of them felt that it was a scientific con. Both felt that the way that science then, again, this is in the late 1700s, the way nature is being talked about was too mechanical and was too much about cutting it up into bits and pieces, which is the whole empirical, scientific sort of way. And Goethe believed, no, we could understand we could understand nature, something from within working out, something that's working throughout the whole and it's all connected. And Schiller agreed, but he said, well, you know, what can you do? This is how it is. And we don't you know, we don't really know how to approach it in a different way. And then Goethe decided to tell him about his story about the Erflanze. And, you know, Schiller listened and all that. And he said, yes, that's a really nice story. But in the end, that's just an idea, isn't it? You know, it's not a real experience. And Goethe, although he was angry, very tactfully said, well, in that case, I happen to see ideas. And the thing with Kant is that Kant's fundamental argument was that we grasp the world through what he called the categories. And there's a long story behind how he came up with that. And this was to sort of defend reason and rationality and the pursuit of knowledge from the skepticism of David Hume, a Scottish philosopher who had basically undermined, you know, the whole idea of causality. He said, even though the sun rises every morning, there's no absolute reason that it's going to the next morning. We're just used to seeing it that way, even though every time you hit a billiard ball against another one, it bangs the other one. There's no absolute certainty that that's always going to happen. And Hume's argument for that is actually quite complex and quite compelling. But Kant said it woke him out of his dogmatic slumber because he realized this can't be the case because the whole edifice of science and knowledge will collapse without causality. So he had a counterblast. And it was basically the idea that instead of the mind being filled up with things coming from outside, you know, this was John Locke's idea of tabula rasa. There's the blank slate and there's nothing in the mind that isn't first in the senses. And Hume took that idea and ran with it. Kant said, no, it's the other way around. We wouldn't even know anything about any kind of external world unless what he called the categories reached out and sort of shaped that world. And you can see Kant's categories is kind of in the same camp as Plato's ideas or later Jung's archetypes. It's a kind of blueprint or stencil that the mind reaches out to the outer world with and organizes it. One of the interesting things about the earlier mythic way of looking at the world is that they saw the world as being populated by spirits. If you go back to the animistic cultures, they saw spirits in every rock, in every bush, every tree. The world was alive, but not just alive in a vague way, alive in a way with entities that you could interact with. Yeah, that's absolutely true. This was this whole idea that in the ancient world, the poetic world was really like that. I mean, we in the modern age or later on, we tend to think of it as metaphoric. It's a fancy way of using language in order to get an effect. And again, this was something that Barfield encountered because he realized that the same effect that the poetry he loved had on him could be induced by reading ancient language. So as I said, it's this kind of living character that modern poets or poets in the modern age, the romantic poets that he read, the modern in the sense of contemporary poets or him, weren't doing that anymore. But the romantics were doing this. And also with the romantics, the subject matter is the poet's soul. Lyric poetry is about the poet. So you have someone like Shelley talking about the West Wind and how the West Wind has made him a liar, not in the sense that he speaks untruths, which is, you know, many people think that's what poets do, but a liar in the sense of the musical instrument. And just as the breeze, you know, passing through the strings on a lyre will vibrate them and create the tones and the sounds, the West Wind passing through his soul did a similar sort of thing. And this was a very visceral, concrete metaphor for an inner experience. And if you transpose that back into the ancient way of seeing the world in which there were nature spirits and things of that sort, which is something that Steiner says that we can learn how to see, you know, through sort of taking Goethe's notion of active seeing, active imagination and pushing it further. This was something that we used to have naturally. This was the way we saw the world naturally. And not only were we able to see the nature spirits, we were much more open to and participating with the higher kind of spirits, the higher spiritual forces. And Steiner talks about what he called old moon consciousness, which unfortunately is a not particularly helpful phrase, but this is the way he talked about it. And this was more of a picture thinking rather than conceptual or logical thinking that we have today. We understood things in terms of pictures. And that's something that we experience today in dreams. Or if you're aware of this very strange intermediary state between sleeping and waking that's known as hypnagogia or the hypnagogic state, which is a Greek term meaning leading into sleep, hypnosleep and goga as a guide. As you pass into sleep, we experience this twice a day, either when you're falling into sleep or coming out of it. You go through a brief time and you can actually sort of see dreams take place. And but you're also aware of the outer world at the same time. And although we don't tend to pay too much attention to these weird things that we see or the weird sentences we hear, there's a lot of auditory hallucinations take place at this time as well. If you do pay attention to them, you'll see that they're symbolic. They actually are a commentary on your physical state or your emotional state or what you were thinking about at the time. And so they have they have an intelligence to them. So they're pictures with actually saying something to you. It's speaking in a language, but it's a symbolic pictorial language. And this would be something that Steiner would say and Barfield and others that we all sort of had back in the day when we talked about seeing spirits and dragons and elves and gnomes and that sort. And it wasn't just sort of bad ideas or people being very imaginative. And the funny thing with language, Barfield says, is that the further you go back in language, the more and more it's like that. And he takes argument with the great German scholar Max Muller, who's most known today, if at all, for being the editor of the Sacred Books of the East. There was a great collection of translations of Hindu and Chinese and other Oriental or Asian Eastern books of wisdom that he edited in the late 19th century. But he tried to he tried to explain this strange phenomena that the further you look back into language, the more metaphoric and poetic it is, because the only way they could think about things back then was in this Darwinian way. The origins start out with something really simple, very simple, and then gradually gets more complex. But there's no evidence of a very, very simple kind of language. And what they meant by very simple, I gather, is the way we modern people see the world, where we think it is totally objective and physical and completely separate from what we experience inside ourselves. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. That's exactly, that's like the Darwinian, it starts out with something, you know, this is what Barrfield called sort of the Bow Wow or the Woo Woo kind of way of origin of language where, oh no, it's the Bow Wow and the Ugg Ugg. The Bow wow is that language began trying to imitate animal sounds in some way. But the other one is Ugg Ugg is that, you know, cavemen are pointing at something and saying, Ugg, Ugg, Ugg, whatever, you know, fire or stone or something. And it doesn't work, because in the first place, how do you know what pointing at means? How do you know that that means you should look at it? You somehow have to assume that in the first place. But language initially was very simple, matter of fact, ug-ug about something. And then along some point, along came these people that I call the prehistoric poets. And they were kind of like caveman beatniks back then. And they decided to be, no, man, we're going to play around with this language, and we're going to make it all metaphoric and figurative and all that kind of thing. And that's the reason why ancient language is metaphoric. And no one explains why did these people come around and suddenly change it into poetry. It wasn't like that. It didn't happen. What happened is actually we started out. See, what Muller was saying is that there's prose first, and then somewhere along the line, early on, somebody turned it into poetry. And that's as far back as we can go. We can only see the after effect of these prehistoric poets changing the prose into poetry. And what Barfield's saying, no, it was poetry in the first place. It was poetry first. And what we see as prose is the result of an historical kind of process. We've arrived at this prosaic way of seeing things. And again, that prosaic gives it away. We see things in this kind of bare, matter of fact, very much simple kind of way. And any kind of poetic, metaphoric kind of element is this kind of nice little coding that we add to it. Well, now let's talk a little bit about the great Swiss psychiatrist, Carl Jung. Because probably more than anybody in the professional medical psychiatric discipline, he probed the idea that the, I think, of what we referred to earlier, Corbin's notion of the imaginal world. Jung really explored that in a very deep way. Well, certainly, I mean, I point to Jung as someone who actually plunged into this imaginal world, this world of, he called it the objective psyche. And I tend to think that's a better phrase than his more well-known one of the collective unconscious. And he talks about meeting Salome and Elijah and other kind of characters who spoke to him and talked to him and told him things. And one of the most important ones was this figure that he called Philemon. Strangely enough, if you look at the paintings of Philemon in the Red Book, they look a lot like Freud. So I don't know if anyone's mentioned that before, but they kind of look very similar to Freud in there. But Philemon became this kind of inner guru for Jung. And he told Jung that your problem is that you think your thoughts are yours alone. You think you own your thoughts, but actually your thoughts are like the plants and animals in the forest. You share the forest with them. So Jung realized that he shared his inner world with other beings that inhabited this inner realm. And you can understand how he might want to keep that secret for a while, because most people who talk about people in their heads, they're the ones who go to see Jung. They're the ones who go to see Freud. So he was sort of hallucinating these characters. But it's objective psyche in the sense that it's a realm of the inner world that doesn't have anything to do with you personally. You know, the Freudian unconscious is the personal unconscious. It's all about your own life and your own repressed sort of things and all that. But if you push past that into this deeper realm, then you enter what more popularly known as the collective unconscious. But in the sense that it's objective in the sense that it's not about you. And this is the same kind of imaginal realm that Henri Corbin talks about. And Corbin knew Jung, and he was a familiar figure at the Erinos meetings in Switzerland on Escona in the last century. And he talks about the Persian mystic Suhrawardi who would, through various sort of meditative practices, would go on these kind of inner journeys and likewise meet these inner entities. And they would talk to him and tell him things. And so this is another, this is a real kind of intense way of encountering the knowledge of the imagination because not only is it, you know, you're learning something about imagination and imagination is introducing you to a whole topography. It's introducing you to a whole world that exists within us. And I'd say in this book and others, it's similar to like what Steiner talks about when he reads the Akashic Record, or it's similar to Immanuel Swedenborg's accounts of his journeys to heaven and hell. And incidentally, Corbin wrote quite a bit about Swedenborg as well and relating it to Suhrawardi's experiences. I had a similar experience once and it was actually captured on videotape where I was hypnotized and told to contact my inner healing advisor. And I, under hypnosis, I saw this figure coming, approaching me wearing a toga. And I thought, oh great, this will be, because I wanted to improve my public speaking ability. I'll make him Demosthenes, the great Greek orator, so I can improve my speaking abilities with his help. And so I thought I would have this conversation with Demosthenes and no, the figures told me I'm not Demosthenes, I'm Seneca. And I said, well, what do you want me to do now that we're communicating? And he said, study my life. And ever since then, I've had this like inner connection with the ancient Roman philosopher Seneca. It feels quite real. And the funny thing is that Seneca's very last words, he was ordered by the Emperor Nero to commit suicide. And he was at a dinner party with his friends and he said, well, can't I at least make out my last will and testament? And the centurion said, no, you must take your life right away. So he turned to his friends at the dinner party and he said to them, well, I bequeath to you my life. Study my life. How strange. Yeah, yeah. I found Seneca to be one of the most fascinating characters in human history, actually. He literally ran the Roman Empire for five years. He was Nero's tutor. And when Nero was still a teenager, Seneca was running the empire. So he, at the same time, he was a stoic philosopher who slept on a hard bed and ate only raw vegetables and fruits. And this is the kind of thing you can get these sorts of messages that, you know, if you're not so inclined, they may just seem, oh, this is strange nonsense. But if you actually pay attention to them, they, you know, they actually say something. I mean, this is an example. It's not quite as intense as that, but Julian Jaynes, you know, the psychologist who wrote The Origins of Consciousness and the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, when he was sort of working on that book and trying to understand the relationship, and he actually was trying to understand knowledge in some, you know, very broad sense, and he took a nap, and he kind of fell into a reverie lying on his couch, and he could hear above him a voice say, you know, seek the knower in the known, or something like that, which to, you know, someone of a bit more open-minded point of view would say, wow, that's an insight. But Jaynes was, you know, more or less a materialist, so he thought, oh, well, I'm not going to fall for this kind of, you know, phony mysticism, but that's exactly, you know, something that's spot on to what he was thinking about. He was trying to understand the nature of knowledge, and again, seek the knower in the known, that's the same thing we were talking about before, about the participatory character of knowledge and all that, so unless you're open to these things, they can slip by you, and you don't get them. But I think, thankfully, they seem to be an inexhaustible source, you know, you don't empty them out, and they're very persistent, and actually very tolerant, and they'll put up with your ignorance for quite some time. So there's an important sense in which the imagination is a doorway into what we could call the super-conscious mind, or a realm of wisdom, a realm of higher consciousness. Yeah, I believe so, I mean, and again, we have to be careful, though, because it's not just any imagination. I was saying before, Coleridge's distinction between true imagination and fancier fantasy, and this was something that Corbyn said as well. You know, when you go on these inner journeys, there's certain, what do you want to say, certain guidelines that you need to follow in order to stay on the right path. And this is something that, you know, is part of all kind of inner journeying. If you're familiar with sort of Kabbalistic kind of path work, you know, the different paths on the Kabbalistic tree of life, between the different Sephiroth and all that, there's certain symbols and colors and a variety of other kind of things that are associated with whichever particular path you're on, and a lot of magical practices, they're related to the tarot trumps, although historically there really isn't a connection, but this is sort of the creative aspect of magic, where somebody made that connection and it actually works. And so there's certain, you know, set symbols, colors, you know, whatever, a variety of different things that are associated with that path, and you can check whether you're on the right path or whether you're encountering the right sorts of things. And rather than just strange, fancy, strange, fantastic, you know, because, you know, we can get messages from God or the gods, and they can be very helpful in our lives, but they could also lead us into, you know, fantastic sorts of ways. And one of the difficulties, or perhaps the major difficulty in all of this is that we lack a kind of external criteria, whereas like in the external form of knowledge, we can test things, you know, you can test whether, you know, those two chemicals together produce that result, or, you know, those angles add up to something else, or if you follow that trajectory, you'll get to the moon or something like that. Inner, this inner kind of knowledge, these inner kind of experiments, that we don't have this external way to test it. So it's a kind of taste, it's a kind of, it's a finesse. It's that sort of spirit of finesse that Pascal talked about a long time ago. It's a way of developing a kind of familiarity with it that you kind of know in an intuitive way, whether you're on the right path or not, and you're not encountering things that don't belong there. Gary Lachman, once again, this has been an incredible journey. You do an awful lot to help awaken people to realities that are occulted, hidden, and sometimes suppressed in our culture, and I think are desperately needed. So once again, thank you so much for being with me. Well, once again, absolutely my pleasure, Jeffrey.