A New Cosmology: Feeling Our Way into the Imaginal with Ellie Robins

Thursday November 28th
Doors & drinks 6.30pm; Talk starts 7pm

What is imagination? Today, we usually understand it as a private capacity for creative thinking. But for mystics through the ages, imaginal practice has meant something far larger: the capacity to access an expanded field of reality. This expanded dimension—the imaginal realm—is in fact more real than the material world, since it is the source and ground for events in the material world.

Over thousands of years of invasion and culture loss, increasing antagonism with land, economic strictures, and, for the last 500 years, ascendant rationalism, English culture has forgotten the existence of that realm. The result is our current reality of overlapping crises, with a crisis of cosmology at the heart of them all. The leading scientific scholarship tells us that we live in a fundamentally disjointed, irreconcilable universe, tattered by impenetrable dark matter. Little wonder that the future looks so dark.

What’s missing in our current cosmology is the healing, whole-making field that is the imaginal realm. It is the recognition that the full truth of our universe cannot be known by the intellect alone. Remembering how to access the imaginal means remembering and revaluing lost ways of knowing, primarily the way of the heart. It means redressing the centuries-old imbalance between rationalism and embodied, resonant, sensory, and heart-driven knowledge. And it means restoring cosmology as a felt sense, rather than a cognitive construct.

In this talk followed by discussion, independent scholar Ellie Robins will present a cosmology of the imaginal, and trace how English culture has become severed from it. She’ll argue that what we’re missing is the healing, whole-making field that is the imaginal realm, and explore how we might rediscover and deepen our access to it.

The evening will include a break for a one-pot vegan supper.

Kairos, 84 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4TG

Doors open at 6.30pm for drinks. Event starts at 7pm.

£8 Kairos Club Member, £15 Non-member, £10 Struggling financially, £20 Supporter. Food complimentary.

Before requesting a discounted ticket, please consider sincerely: Are you struggling to meet your basic needs? Would you have to make a genuine sacrifice to buy a full priced ticket? Do you have reduced earnings through a lifestyle choice or because you’re dedicating your time to unpaid work relating to the climate and nature crises?