The Arabic symbol for Qaf, the cosmic emerald mountain, the boundary between the visible and
invisible worlds (www.ajabanzaban.com/ images/ text/alpha/ qaf.jpg).
CHAPTER 7
THE IMAGI NAL REALM7.1 I ntroduction
I see in fancy – I have a vision of – the world as the astronauts
saw it – a shining globe, poised in space and rotating on its polar
axis. Round it enveloping entirely, as one Chinese carved ivory
ball encloses another within it, is a second, incorporeal, gossamer-
like sphere – the unbroken web – rotating freely and
independently of the rotation of the earth. I t is something like a
soap bubble, for although it is in rotation, real things are reflected
on its surface, which imparts to them glowing, lambent colours.
Within this outer web we live. I t soaks up, transmutes and is
charged with human experience, exuded from the world within ...
The storyteller is he who reaches up, grasps that part of the web
which happens to be above his head at the moment and draws it
down. (Adams 1980:10-11)All of the mythopoeic writers, readers and shamans interrogated in my
research, either directly or indirectly through their writing and reading, stated that
they experience an altered state of consciousness, a reverie, in which they become
aware of a decentred self or an extension of their self in a dimension or realm, an
elsewhere-place, in which they access knowledge not available during ordinary
consciousness. This chapter examines the tradition of a transcendent,
transpersonal realm, a dimension that has been identified in many cultures the
world over and throughout history. I ts attributes may sometimes vary but
essentially it seems to function as a realm of the imagination in its own right and
not as something unreal or a fantasy but rather as something objectively self-
existent; the cumulative product of imaginative thought itself. When the term
‘imaginary’, is used it usually means made up or something other than real.
However, poets and mystics have always believed that the world of the imagination
is a real world, a third kingdom, between the physical, sensate universe and the