Owen Barfield: Imagination and Spiritual Sight, Pt 3

Having considered the insights of William Blake and Carl Jung in the first two talks of this series, I now turn to those of Owen Barfield. He presents the biggest possible story for the imagination, integrating it into nothing less than our creation and return to the divine. What is fascinating is that he arrived at this conclusion from his story of words - those vehicles of the imagination that not only enliven our everyday but can become fossils of consciousness when used to track how human experience has shifted across millennia. In this talk I briefly introduce Owen Barfield before describing: How imagination plays a part in the human story How imagination plays a part in the cosmic story How various kinds of spiritual materialism deviate from this big picture What the "final participation" Barfield outlined might be like. The talk ends with two heralds of this destiny, William Blake and Thomas Traherne, whose poetic words become prophetic, offering felt intimations of the inside of the whole world.