"seeing with the eyes of spirit"
"Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire universe, and all there will ever be to know and understand.”
- Einstein
My ten-year-old nephew once described imagination as "walking around inside your mind." For alchemists, it was a private world of infinite possibilities where much of the Great Work took place. To differentiate it from idle fantasy and daydreaming, they called it the True Imagination. It is a special kind of mental imagery or visualization that is directly connected to the ground of reality. In our culture, we are taught to reject the True Imagination and sever our ties to the hidden reality while we are still children. Families, schools, churches—authorities of all types-deny our inborn connection to the Divine Mind and replace it with their own dogma... According to Paracelsus, "the True Imagination leads life back to its spiritual reality, and it then takes on the name of meditation." What he meant was that … Sometimes the person's "inner angel" or "higher self" was invoked. In their meditations, they were looking for the "angelic ray" that unites the world of forms with the divine ideals that are the source of everything… Therefore, when Hermetic writers speak of "seeing with the eyes of spirit," they are describing a process that penetrates the deeper genesis of things beyond their outward appearances… Alchemists believed imagination is a piece of heaven concealed within us, a divine connection to the cosmic One Mind… - Dennis William Hauck. Rosicrucian Digest, No. 2, 2024,