Next month and into early December, I’ll be giving a three week live online course at Nura Learning, based on my book Lost Knowledge of the Imagination. The course will cover material from that book, as well as from The Secret Teachers of the Western World and A Secret History of Consciousness. With all these secrets and lost knowledge available to us, we should be able to have an interesting time.

You can find a description of the class, some ideas of what it will cover, and other useful information at the Nura Learning site. Here’s a preview. See you there perhaps.

When we hear the word “imagination,” what do we think? Mostly we tend to see the imagination as a substitute for reality, as a form of wishful thinking, a pleasant alternative to the hard facts of life. Or we see it as a way of developing novel ideas, of being on the “cutting edge” of technology, a way of making things “bigger and better.”

But this is not the only way to understand the imagination. For poets and scholars like Kathleen Raine, Henry Corbin, Owen Barfield and others, the imagination is not a substitute for reality, but a means of grasping its essence. For them, imagination isn’t a form of “make believe,” but a faculty of cognition, a way of knowing things that would otherwise remain unknown.

This knowledge was accessible at earlier times, but in recent centuries it has been minimized, if not vigorously rejected, by our emphasis on “hard,” “scientistic” thinking. This course will look at imagination as a faculty for grasping the invisible realities that surround us, and at the tradition of knowledge rooted in it. A tradition that, if lost, can still be recovered.