The Imaginal Institute

Our Mission

"If one is not half mad how can one give birth to a dancing star?"
Nietzsche

The Imaginal Institute is a conduit for imagining: celebrating and supporting the leap between ideas and action through dialogue, lifelong learning, and creative expression.

Our Vision

Imagination is a key to engaging the world with openness and passion. Without it, we have no empathy, no ability to look beyond the immediacy of our experience, no tools with which to analyze what we are told, taught, and shown. It is crucial to making meaning, and is a most powerful agent of change: if we cannot imagine other possibilities in either our own lives or in the communities around us, we cannot not move from our current circumstances.

Ultimately, imagination is, as French mathematician and philosopher Gaston Bachelard writes, "a voyage into the land of the infinite." Through its various projects, the Institute seeks to be a vessel for that voyage.

In the spirit of imagining, the Institute is an experiment in a variety of ways:

• Building and blending virtual and face-to-face communities.
• Attempting to create enough structure to be a viable support to those interested in working the imagination while maintaining enough flexibility to not get calcified into purely systemic thinking and action.
• Exploring new definitions of business: is it possible to meld the flexibility and sustainability of a for profit business with nonprofit sensibilities and values?
• Exploring new technology and media in the dissemination of ideas.
• Making a consistent commitment to working across traditionally defined disciplines, creating communities of practice that are simultaneously embracive and committed to quality.

For more information on specific Imaginal Institute projects, check out Our Play.