Psychedelic Salon 129
Erik Davis at the Playalogue, Palenque Norte, Burning Man 2007

The Imagination and the Environment

Excerpts:

âThe imagination is a key, and pivotal interface, between human beings and the natural world.â

âAny kind of restorative, sustainable renewal of our planet has to exist on the imaginal realm as well as the realm of technical solutions, political developments, and technological fixes. Itâs a multi-dimensional problem.â

âSo the imagination is really the core, the source, the matrix of our multi-dimensional experience.â

âThe creative imagination functions in a different way than religious beliefs allow us to engage with.â

âIf weâre into integration now, with science and technology, that means that we canât avoid that skeptical voice [of scientific, existential materialism]. We have engage and learn to integrate that skeptical voice as well. [To think] itâs our job to just say âNo. Those science people they donât understand. Theyâre locked in rationality. Itâs actually this mystical world, this magical worldâ, is a profound failure, in my opinion, of our role. And the more we go into loosy-goosy mystic New Age stuff as a concretized belief system, rather than as an open, playful world that adds richness to our lives the way that poetry does, or the way that religious imagery does, drawing us to those higher realms but holding them lightly so that we can still engage a skeptical materialist, for me, thatâs what integration means.â

âThe new paradigm is that thereâs not a paradigm.â

plus-circle Add Review

comment

Reviews