Aaron B. Daniels

Imaginal Reality

Aaron B. Daniels

This is Volume Two of Imaginal Reality, a work that has been described as «The finest book on contemporary existential magic I've ever read» (George Holochwost, Magus (1), Illuminates of Thanateros).Readers will dive deeper into the imagination of magic and learn to develop the fictional gaze necessary to claim authority and authorship of their lives. This second volume contains an extensive glossary of over 300 scholarly entries on esotericism, existentialism, psychology, and the magical revival.This volume moves more explicitly into the practice of magic – that is, the ongoing journey of claiming our lives more fully and deeply. This cultivation of intentionality and vision, though never a one-time decisive victory, can become a more habitual attitude. To gird these hard-fought realizations, this volume presents the other four voids – Nothingness, Meaninglessness, Freedom and Responsibility, and Change and Finitude – in detail.

Imaginal Reality

Aaron B. Daniels

Our world is a far wilder, weirder and more mysterious place than we ever admit, yet the magic we perform every day hides beneath the countless explanations we foist onto life. In the face of these convincing yet empty explanations, we displace our hunger for a sense of the magical onto other goals, addictions, and distractions. Left at odds with the very sublimity that animates our every moment, we have turned magic into an exception, a collection of superstitions, a historical backwater, and a cinematic spectacle, rather than the very fabric of life as lived. This book is about recovering the imagination of magic and the magic of imagination.This, the first of two volumes, introduces the landscape of the imaginal and the existential voids. Through illustrative stories and self-assessment exercises, this book brings the often-obscure language of existentialism, esotericism, and imaginal psychology to life.