The Influence of the Imagination on the Knowledge of God

About the Book

Most adult believers would acknowledge that the absolute reality of God is unimaginable, and yet the ordinary mind cannot think about divinity without creating images of that reality. This book explores a variety of ways in which our imagination influences what we believe and think we know about God. Even as some theories and the methods behind them yield better results in practice, so certain forms of the imagination yield a truer connection to the divine. Curiously, cutting-edge science—often viewed as inimical to engagement with the divine—is itself creating new images for a conception of divinity that intimately penetrates all that is. Frontier cutting-edge science will thus become one of three interpenetrating streams that impact the influence of the imagination on the knowledge of God. The other two are the conceptual dimension of mind and what I distinguish as the awareness dimension of mind. The application of my theory about the influence of the imagination on the knowledge of God is whether the reader can make practical connections to their experience of suffering in the world and find some diminishment of that suffering. If that does not happen, I apologize to my readers for wasting their time.

About the Author

Robert Colacurcio has written many books on the subject of spirituality and its application in contemporary American life. This book is the culmination of that effort; it has been gestating for over forty years in the author’s mind. Society doesn’t teach us much about the cultivation of the soul in relation to its ultimate destiny. The author has been thinking about these things since his early upbringing in Catholicism developed into training for the priesthood as a Jesuit. He left before ordination and began an extensive exploration of many spiritual avenues, among them Sufism, Zen and the Human Potential Movement which flourished in NYC in the ‘60s and ‘70s. He earned his PhD in philosophy from Fordham university, and for the past thirty five years has been an avid student of the Buddha in the tradition of the Nyingma School which comes from Tibet. He currently makes his home on a mountain top in Virginia with his wife Carol Jo whom he gratefully acknowledges and credits as the first editor of his work. Together they watch in wonder as their children and grandchildren make their own way in the world.