The Imaginal Institute

Our Play

Ideas are like rabbits.
You get a couple, learn how to handle them,
and pretty soon you have a dozen.
John Steinbeck

At the Imaginal Institute, we play in a variety of ways.

 

Community: Gatherings and Practicums
Gatherings of those interested in imagining, that currently come in three flavors:

• Fools Gatherings: Annual gatherings of the sacred fools and imaginers of all shapes and sizes to share ideas, challenge thoughts, meet the chicken of power, and generally laugh our tootsies off.
• Conversations with Master Seekers: Periodic weekends with some of the great wonderers in imagination, creativity, and myth. A chance to play with great minds as they ponder the questions they're most intrigued by, intimately and informally.
• Imaginal Practicums: Hands-on as well as minds-on explorations into the practice and practicality of imagination.

Print: Meandering Press
The Imaginal Institute is starting its own press!
Meandering Press is being born to produce work that seduces the imagination. Our first works are slated for publication in 2008. As we move forward, Meandering Press will be publishing a combination of new and old works that invite the reader to wander, with whimsy and wonder, in the world of and with imagination. Check out Meandering Press for more details.

Education: ImagineU
We've just launched a series of e-learning opportunities helping you to bring imagination, myth, and delight into the process of making meaning in your life. Explore the mysterious, be a-mused, and invest in your own life long learning. Check out our newest course offerings at ImagineU. We've got grand plans for ImagineU -- come and be a part of it from the beginning!

Consulting: IDEA
Need help in your life or your organization? Imaginal Institute IDEA consultants bring ideas to life, through a rich facilitation process: Imagination-Dialogue-Evaluation-Action. For more information, check out our IDEA Consulting page.

Opining: Imago, a Blog
All of the things that amuse and bemuse us. You can check it out here.

Imagining: Projects and Events Percolating
Here are some ideas that we're playing with.

Virtual Community Project
Hipbone Games/Friends3 Platform
We're working with two brilliant folks, Institute Fellows Charles Cameron and Derek Robinson, to support their work as they develop an extraordinary melding of community, question-asking, and gaming within a powerful new Web 2.0 platform. We think it's going to explode some of the boundries between real and virtual and real and imaginal in some really cool ways. Stay tuned for more information!

Event
Mythos of Community
What is the interplay between how a community imagines itself and how it literally exists? What is the mythos of community that swirls in each of us, and what is its relationship to the literal? How does this come to life in communities of practice and geographical community?  

Event
Monopoly versus Polyphany: The Way of the One and the Way of the Many
What are the complexities and triumphs of holding multiplicity? How does an approach of the many enrich in ways that the one does not?

Event
Oral or Written Culture, Or Somewhere in Between?
With the development of the media and digital industries, where are we landing? What reflects the constructs and values of a predominately oral culture or of a written culture? Where are we landing in the continuum, and what does that say about us?

Event
What Time is it?
How do we look at time, and how does it look at us? A collection of physicists, religious studies scholars, artists, mathematicians, neuro-psychologists, etc. all taking the time to look at time. What are our metaphors for time and how do they shape our thinking?

Broadcast Project
Intellectual and Not Elite
A series of radio conversations with young doctoral candidates and recent PhD's, challenging them to tell us why we should be excited about their thinking, with the goal of bringing some of the newest ideas in academia into an accessible arena.