The Lost Knowledge of the Imagination

By: Gary Lachman

Narrated by: Leslie James

Imagination is a core aspect of being human. Our imagination allows us to fully experience ourselves in relation to the world and reality. Imagination plays a key role in creativity and innovation.

Since the 17th century, however, imagination has been sidelined and dismissed as "make believe". Four centuries ago, a new way of knowing the world and ourselves emerged in the west and has gone on to dominate human life: science.

Imagination has been marginalized - depicted as a way of escaping reality, rather than coming to grips with it - and its significance to our humanity has been downplayed. Yet as we move further into the strange new world of the 21st century, the need to regain this lost knowledge seems more necessary that ever before.

This insightful and inspiring book argues that, for the sake of the future of our world, we must redress the balance. Through the work of Owen Barfield, Goethe, Henry Corbin, Kathleen Raine, and others, and ranging from the teachings of ancient mystics to the latest developments in neuroscience, The Lost Knowledge of the Imagination introduces the listener to a philosophy and tradition that restores imagination to its rightful place, and argues that it is not only essential to our knowing reality to the full, but to our very humanity itself.

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Fascinating book! Love the references.

Read at a very fast speed, which is fine in finishing the book quickly, but I couldn't process some of the deeper things before they passed, so I'll have to go over it a few more times to really grasp certain ideas. At least it won't take long.

A worldwide tour of consciousness in 5 hours

Gary Lachman, popular historian of consciousness and esoteric thought, presents what may be at once the most wide-ranging and simultaneously sharply focused books of his career.

It’s the story of a moment when human thought changed, and the consequences and possibilities branching out from that turning point. In the era of the Greek philosophers, the rational, reductionist concept of science gave humankind a newfound mastery of the world — but it lost contact with the holistic, intuitive knowledge of the imagination, which has survived in a subterranean golden thread woven throughout history, connecting the lives of alchemists, Qabalists, Sufi mystics, Romantic poets, and 20th Century scholars and occultists.

From Pythagoras, to Newton, to Goethe, to Swedenborg, to William Blake, to Crowley, to Rudolf Steiner, to Einstein, they’re all woven into this grand tapestry — along with remarkable figures you may never have heard of, though you’ll undoubtedly be chasing down more information.

(Chapter 4 of this book kind of blew my mind with its introduction to Suhrawardi, a 12th Century Sufi, the “Murdered Mystic” whose description of the imaginal realms between matter and spirit explains so much.)

Briskly paced, enlightening, and breathtaking in scope. Leslie James’s confident voice navigates us warmly and invitingly through these strange tides. (My only quibbles are that I wish this dense material had just a l-i-t-t-l-e more breathing room in its dizzying pace — and Gary lost me a bit with a rather conservative stance on modern art in the final chapters, a thought-provoking bit of editorializing that I just don’t happen to agree with entirely.)

Strongly recommended, inspiring, educational & deeply fascinating.

A great book but - get hard copy

I love the book, but the listening is extremely challenging. As other reviewers have stated, it’s completely lacking in any semblance of natural pacing.

Great ideas - not well written

If you are convinced of the importance of spirituality or the questioning of objectivism - worth reading. If you aren't convinced, you probably won't be anyway.

Enlightening content. We'll researched! Just what I was looking for on the topic. Didn't enjoy the narrator unfortunately.

Excellent book, narrator.. meh.

There's a lot of connecting dots between many great minds, love the information. I'm not sure the narrator knows what periods or commas are though.

interesting content, terrible narrator

I am not usually someone who complains about the narrator of a book, but this narration was so uniquely bad, I feel obligated to comment.

The narration of this book was so terrible that it was difficult for me to focus on the content. It sounded almost like a poorly done AI voice. Although the narration wasn't monotone, the rises and falls in the narrator's voice were almost inconsequential to the material being presented. The worst aspect, though, was that there were no pauses between sentences or paragraphs. Each chapter sounded like one long run-on sentence. It was truly exhausting to listen and most of the content of the book went right by me. I forced myself to finish the book because I'm interested in the material, but it was a waste of time. I'll have to buy a print version.

This narrator needs to learn that reading words on a page is not the same as actually communicating the content of the material. Communicating the content requires some degree of interest in the material, not a desire to get through it as quickly as possible.

Good ideas, terrible narration

It's like the narrator ignored all punctuation! there are some complex ideas described, and lots of important players, but the narrator just bulldozes over everything in a hurry. Pro tip: set your app to 0.95 or 0.9 reading speed so at least you can follow it - yes, make it go slower than usual! The book itself is Lachman's usual sweeping story of ideas on the need for an intuitive and creative thinking to match our rational and linear one. The author flows easily from Plato to Heidegger and spending time with poets, most notably Kathleen Raine.

Ridiculous reading

First, I will say that I've loved every book I've obtained by Gary Lachman, beginning with "A Secret History of Consciousness." He shares his broad knowledge of esoteric and occult history, placing each step and individual in the context of general history and and the various streams of philosophical and spiritual inquiry. I'm familiar with much of what he has to say in his books, but I love how he connects the dots and fits it all together. I had been looking forward to beginning this book, and perhaps I should have read these reviews before hand, though I probably would have bought the book anyway.

The narrator is one of the worst I've ever heard. Each chapter seems to be one long sentence, and I even began to wonder if the book was being read by a computer. The material is all there, but it is nearly impossible to absorb the full meaning behind the words being read. On the plus side, in contrast to the reader of Lachman's "Politics and the Occult," Leslie James did generally pronounce names and terms correctly and consistently. It's a shame that this reading spoiled such a fine text.

Lackluster narration detracts from Lachman’s excellent message.

The narrator doesn’t seem to recognize periods as stopping points. He reads the sections with some inflection but overall the otherwise excellent content is relayed as one/ many long, run-on sentences. Very distracting.