The Heart Imagines

Painting by Grandma Moses

“We are things that labor under the illusion of having a self. A secretion of sensory experience and feeling. Programmed with total assurance that we are each somebody, when, in fact, nobody is anybody.”

— Rust Cohle

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I do not know how to distinguish between waking life and a dream. Are we not all living the life we imagine we are?

— Thoreau

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While all of our senses may be involved in beholding an image, Hillman follows the ancients in insisting that the heart is the organ that perceives and feels the aesthetic impact of an encounter with an image — first the heart, then the mind. He further states: “psyche is image,” and to propose that we ourselves are images among images.

— Iona Miller

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“The human soul has a mythic propensity and cosmological instinct for making something out of nothing. We are being asked to participate creatively in the changes sweeping through the world. In the great drama of life, the awakened human soul becomes the extra quantity and uniquely living quality needed to help tip the balance of the world away from destruction and toward ongoing creation. The counterbalance to collective forms of terror and destruction is found in individuals awakening to the underlying wholeness of…