The faculty by which Consciousness forms images, patterns, and possibilities not immediately present to sense perception - a capacity that operates as bridge between the visible and invisible worlds. Far from the modern reduction to “mere fantasy” or unreal projection, traditional understanding positions imagination as a genuine cognitive power capable of apprehending realities inaccessible to sensory or rational modes alone.
The Neoplatonic and Sufi traditions developed sophisticated accounts of an imaginal realm (mundus imaginalis, or ‘alam al-mithal in Arabic) - an intermediate domain between pure intellect and gross matter where Archetype take on subtle form and become available to human perception. Henry Corbin, recovering this understanding for modern readers, distinguished sharply between the imaginary (subjective fantasy) and the imaginal (objective subtle reality). In this view, prophetic visions, dreams, and certain artistic inspirations do not create their contents but perceive them - the imagination functioning as organ of receptivity rather than mere projection.
This understanding transforms the nature of creativity itself. The Creator who engages imagination rightly does not fabricate ex nihilo but opens to what seeks manifestation - serving as witness and vessel for Ideas descending from the intelligible realm into form. Carl Jung’s technique of active imagination represents a modern recovery of this capacity: the deliberate engagement with unconscious contents through imaginal encounter, allowing archetypes to speak and transform through relationship rather than interpretation alone.
The imagination thus occupies crucial territory in the geography of inner work. It mediates between Nous (pure intellect) and sensory experience, between soul and body, between the eternal Forms and their temporal manifestations. To cultivate imagination is to develop the organ by which the invisible becomes visible, the potential becomes actual, and the divine communicates with the human.
See also active imagination, mundus imaginalis, Henry Corbin, visionary experience, symbol, dreams, Creative Process.