Imagine That | Inside Out Ep. 8

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