When you pray, is there anything visual happening — or does it feel like sending a message into a void?
This episode traces the modern suspicion of imagination to a seventeenth-century doubt experiment, and recovers what Paul actually called the faculty: the eyes of your heart.
This is Episode 8 of Inside Out — a twelve-episode series for the person exhausted by the gap between what they know and how they live, and for the person who has watched that exhaustion in others and kept a careful distance.
In this episode:
• Why the equation "imagination equals unreal" isn't in the Bible
• Aristotle's phantasia and why it's necessary for all human thought
• Aquinas's case for imagination as the bridge between the material and spiritual
• Descartes' 1641 doubt experiment and the four-century inheritance it created
• Paul's own term for the faculty — the eyes of your heart — and the practice that opens it
The companion to this episode is Chapter 8 of the Inside Out Study Guide at TEDtalking.life.
Next episode → The First Encounter