What is Luminous Imagination?
The Imagination is the golden pathway to everywhere. - Terence McKenna
Luminous Imagination is a place to explore and contemplate soulful, beautiful and enchanting, weird and wondrous arts and artefacts from the depths of human history to now.
From the first sparks of imagination, humans have had an irrepressible urge to “make special”—to embellish a tool with ornamentation, decorate our homes, create symbols, myths, fairytales, sing, dance, and make music.
We should appreciate and cherish the imagination, a universal and ancient human faculty. For the imagination creates worlds and expresses the soulful, mythopoetic, and archetypal dimensions of life and the cosmos.
Our capacity to open our own imagination to take in the images of other times and places, other human beings like us, reconnects us with ourselves in the end, for we are they, and they are us. - James Hollis
History is a portal of possibility, for from the old comes the new.
Exploring the history of arts and artefacts can expand our worldview and build an expansive aesthetic palette. As Otto Rank notes, what clips the wings of imagination is an unquestioned “aesthetic form provided by the style-laws” and the dogma of a cultural-social era.
Through humble and curious exploration of past arts and artefacts, we become aware of what aspects of our worldview restrict and hobble our imagination and creativity. Humble and curious encounters with past worlds and aesthetics expand our aesthetic palette and enrich our hearts and minds.
Adults cannot be content any more than children, with the mere fact of a humdrum life - the imagination must adore and exaggerate life, must give it splendour and grotesqueness, beauty and infinite depth. - William Carlos Williams
Aesthetic Time Travel
Become an aesthetic time traveller and voyage into the depths of history, seeking encounters with arts and artefacts from lost worlds - infinite expressions of mythopoetic imagination and creativity from prehistory to now.
Aesthetic time travel reveals the infinite depth and complexity of the arts and worlds past to present. An enchanting aspect of aesthetic time travel is that an artefact, a symbol, or a pattern from a world long gone can transcend time and place, speak to us, touch our hearts and minds, and live another life within us in another time and place.
The spirit of our voyage is to seek and explore with humility and curiosity - no matter how strange and mysterious things may seem to our modern, hyper-rational, often dogmatic and secular sensibilities.
Creativity itself is a matter of seeing afresh what is already there and reading its implications and omens. There are poems, novels, and paintings that roll onwards through history, perennially redefining our places in the cosmos that are initiated by such seeing. - Gary Snyder
Our aesthetic time travel and exploration may yield a cross-pollination between the ancient and modern imaginations. An image, pattern, sculpture, or artefact from the past may captivate, resonate, and spark inspiration. That poetic resonance and inspiration will flow into our imagination. The creative process of synthesis and metamorphosis begins, and slowly, something new from the old unfurls.
Of course, we all have unique temperaments that influence our preference for specific historical eras and aesthetics. Some may be more attuned to the melancholy moods of ruins and Fayum mummy portraits. On another day, we may prefer the elaborate buoyancy of a Baroque church or palace interior. Some of us might be innate minimalists or maximalists, which will influence whether we appreciate the sleek simplicity of a Japanese temple or the decorative abundance of a Hindu temple.
When we travel through past eras and worlds, we discover things that captivate us, fit our mood at the moment, and nourish our souls, hearts, and minds.
Always be on the lookout for the presence of wonder. - E.B.White
Ultimately, grounded in deep history, we join a great chain of artisans and creators who, from the first sparks of imagination, have brought soulful, beautiful, enchanting, weird and wondrous arts and worlds into being.
Let’s join the continuous chain of human imagination and creativity and, with love and devotion, bring beauty and enchantment, the weird and wondrous, into our lives and the world.