Mind Palaces: The Art of Psycho-Technics, or Soul-Craft — Philosophy for Life

For a taste of this mystery, simply close your eyes, calm your breathing, and try to still your mind. This will be next to impossible; thoughts and feelings will come up regardless. The calmer your mind is, the more disconnected and arbitrary will be the thoughts that arise. Images will appear out of nowhere, things you had long ignored or forgotte

... See more

there is very little time or attention given to what you could almost call learning the art of inwardness; or a pedagogy of interiority. That’s why I find the aesthetic things, like poetry, fiction, good film, theater, drama, dance, and music, actually awaken that inside you and remind you that there is a huge interiority within you.

the memory was also the very instrument that she used to design and build new mental structures from the materials she had at hand.2 In Late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages, the memory was where monks did some of their most complex concentrating. To do that, monks learned how the memory worked—rather than treat it like a black box, as we often

... See more

So, the imaginal world is a kind of interface between unseeable spiritual reality and the dense, immutable corporeal world. Reality is multi-layered, and the Imaginal Realm is one of the important, generative layers. The West had such a place for imagination through the medieval period, but in the development of empiricism we lost it completely. No... See more