“Love alone is not enough. Without imagination, love stales into sentiment, duty, boredom. Relationships fail not because we have stopped loving but because we first stopped imagining.”
― James Hillman

Imagination is a faculty of our mental processes that is located in our bodies, and it is a place where we encounter otherworldly beings.

The imagination is located in the body, but not necessarily the brain. We have another “brain,” so to speak, and that is the heart. In the fetus, the heart forms and begins to beat before the brain develops (Heartmath.org). According to Rollin McCraty: “The heart generates the largest electromagnetic field in the body. The electrical field as measured in an electrocardiogram (ECG) is about 60 times greater in amplitude than the brain waves recorded in an electroencephalogram (EEG).”

In many cultures around the world the heart is the place where the Divine reaches you. In the east, the subtle energy of the physical heart is the fourth chakra, named Anahata (“unstruck”) in Sanskrit, located in the center of our chests.

For the Sufis, archetypal images (in the form of deities and inner world beings) reach us in the middle ground: a field of consciousness considered to be the realm of imagination, or mundus imaginalis, a term coined by the French philosopher and Islamicist Henry Corbin. This intermediate world is located between the empirical and intellectual, abstract realms.

[. . .] the world of the…