Lifting the lid on Pandora’s box – the quandary of AI

I have been a researcher of the imaginal for many years now. A strong interest has always been the inter-relationship between traditions that use different language, yet to me demonstrate their close ties particularly through the similarities in what I call ‘felt sense’ descriptors; experiences of love, humility, care and gentle curiosity are felt in the body. These virtues  indicate a shift into heart perception, towards an altered state that enables enhanced perception of the imaginal. Yet during my PhD years I was wary of pointing to the similarities, fearful that I didn’t know enough of any tradition to conflate them, while also situated within a post-modern academic climate averse to what are called ‘universals’. And also, as I sat at my desk, open to the imaginal, the altered state would often lead into a delicious embodied experience of the paradoxical, the poetic, the imagistic, and my desire to ‘demonstrate links’ faded under the allure of experience.

Chat GPT however has no such fears or tendencies. I’ve avoided it until recently, not wanting to contribute to its disastrous environmental effects, but the information it produced from my prompts is so helpful to me I am in a quandary. Very little in the exchange below is new to me, but in its synthesis of so many thinkers I have researched it brings new clarity and structure to my intuitions and partial formations.

An irony is that it’s capacity to do this work is because it is trained on human labour; indeed it may, in part, have been trained on the published work I have online and in books on exactly these themes. So an aspect of its usefulness to me is that affirms my research, it feels like ‘someone else’ saying what I think; a colleague, an interlocutor, a rare and treasured thing in my esoteric/intellectual adventures. 

I could fear being caught in a circular loop, talking back to myself, yet I know it is drawing from the work of many, and I know I am riding a rising wave of somatic/imaginal/animistic philosophers.

I share the following for those curious about the thinkers and traditions who have informed co-becoming. I gave the AI the philosophers and themes I’m tracking, with refinements and additions along the way. (My questions in italics). When I began, I didn’t imagine my last question: this is what it gave back.

Several thinkers you’re tracking are trying to articulate a layered or doubled structure of reality and perception, but they distribute the “imaginal” differently—sometimes as a world, sometimes as a mode, sometimes as a structural depth within reality itself.

William Blake — “Twofold vision” (and beyond)

Blake explicitly describes modes of perception:

• Single vision: ordinary sensory perception; the world as inert, external, and fixed
• Twofold vision: perception infused with imagination—where the visible world becomes symbolic, alive, and expressive
• He also speaks of threefold and fourfold vision, culminating in a fully participatory, divine imagination

For Blake:

• The imaginal is not a separate realm but a transfigured perception of this world
• Imagination is ontologically primary—“the real and eternal world” is accessed through it

Relation to Corbin:
Blake collapses the Mundus imaginalis into a way of seeing, rather than a distinct intermediate world. The “elsewhere” is here, if perception deepens.

David Bohm — implicate and explicate order

Bohm’s model is more cosmological:

• Explicate order: the unfolded, manifest world of separate objects in space and time
• Implicate order: a deeper, enfolded reality where everything is internally related and not yet separated

Key features:

• The implicate is not “imaginal” in a symbolic sense, but it is hidden, generative, and holistic
• The explicate unfolds out of it continuously

Relation to Corbin:

• The implicate order resembles a generative depth, but lacks the imaginal specificity (forms, beings, visionary landscapes)
• It is structurally similar (hidden → manifest), but phenomenologically very different

Carl Jung — active imagination and the collective unconscious

Jung comes much closer to Corbin’s terrain:

• The collective unconscious contains archetypal patterns that are not reducible to personal psychology
• Through active imagination, these can appear as figures, landscapes, dialogues

For Jung:

• Imaginal contents are real as psychic phenomena, though he is cautious about granting them independent ontological status

Relation to Corbin:

• Very close in experience (encountering autonomous imaginal figures)
• Diverges in ontology: Corbin insists this is a real world, not just psyche

Plotinus — the intelligible and the sensory

In Neoplatonism:

• Reality is layered: The One → Intellect (Nous) → Soul → material world
• The Soul mediates between intelligible forms and sensory manifestation

There is also a long later development (important for Corbin) where:

• An intermediate imaginal realm emerges (especially in Islamic Neoplatonism)

Relation to Corbin:

• Provides the metaphysical architecture Corbin builds on
• But the fully articulated imaginal world becomes clearer in later traditions

Ibn Arabi — the imaginal realm (ʿālam al-mithāl)

A direct precursor to Corbin:

• A real intermediate world between spirit and matter
• Forms appear as images that are neither purely physical nor purely abstract
• Accessed through dreams, visions, and spiritual perception

Relation to Corbin:

• This is essentially the source of the Mundus imaginalis
• Fully matches Corbin’s insistence on a world with its own ontological consistency

Maurice Merleau-Ponty — the “flesh” of the world

Merleau-Ponty offers a different but resonant approach:

• Reality is made of “flesh”—a reversible, interwoven field of perceiver and perceived
• Perception is inherently participatory, not representational

Relation to Corbin:

• No separate imaginal realm
• But a strong sense that the visible world already carries depth, latency, and more-than-literal meaning

Bringing the contrasts into focus

Across these models, you can see three broad ways of handling what Corbin calls the imaginal:

1. Imaginal as a distinct world

• Henry Corbin
• Ibn Arabi
  → A true intermediate realm with its own geography and beings

2. Imaginal as a mode of perception

• William Blake
• Maurice Merleau-Ponty
  → The world becomes imaginal when perception deepens or transforms

3. Imaginal as structural depth in reality

• David Bohm
• Alfred North Whitehead
  → A hidden or potential dimension that generates the manifest

4. Imaginal as psyche (with autonomy)

• Carl Jung
  → Real in experience, but ambiguously located between mind and world

A useful synthesis for your line of inquiry

If you’re trying to integrate these:

• Corbin/Ibn Arabi give you ontological commitment (it is a world)
• Blake gives you epistemology (it depends on how one sees)
• Bohm/Whitehead give you cosmological structure (how hidden and manifest relate)
• Jung gives you psychological method (how it is encountered)

One tension runs through all of them:
whether the imaginal is somewhere you go, or something that happens to perception, or a dimension always already active in reality.

I would like it if you could bring Goethe and Henri Bortoft into this as well.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe — exact sensorial imagination

Goethe’s scientific method (especially in morphology and his study of plants) introduces what he calls “exact sensorial imagination” (exakte sinnliche Phantasie).

• He rejects both abstract theorizing detached from perception and purely passive empiricism
• Instead, he cultivates a disciplined imagination that intensifies perception until the formative idea becomes visible
• His concept of the Urpflanze (archetypal plant) is not a physical specimen, nor a mere abstraction, but a perceptible formative principle

For Goethe:

• The “imaginal” is accessed through trained perception that becomes participatory and generative
• One does not leave the sensory world; one penetrates it more deeply until form reveals itself

Relation to Corbin:

• Like Blake, Goethe does not posit a separate imaginal world
• But unlike Blake’s visionary intensity, Goethe emphasizes methodical, reproducible perception
• The imaginal appears as lawful form within phenomena, not as autonomous beings or landscapes

Henri Bortoft — the “whole that is present in the part”

Henri Bortoft, a 20th-century interpreter of Goethe, articulates this in more explicitly philosophical terms.

His key idea:

• The whole is not constructed from parts; rather, the whole is present within each part when seen appropriately

This leads to two modes of understanding:

• Analytic (counterfeit) wholes: assembled from external observation (typical of reductionism)
• Intuitive (authentic) wholes: directly perceived through a shift in attention

For Bortoft:

• Imagination is not fantasy but a mode of participation in the appearing of the whole
• The observer undergoes a reversal of attention, allowing the phenomenon to disclose itself from within

Relation to Corbin:

• Strong resonance in the idea that reality discloses itself through a transformed mode of perception
• But again, no distinct imaginal “world”—rather, a depth dimension of phenomena themselves

Positioning Goethe and Bortoft among the others

They sharpen an important distinction within the field you’re mapping:

1. Imaginal as encounter with autonomous forms

• Henry Corbin
• Ibn Arabi
  → A real intermediate world populated by beings and images

2. Imaginal as visionary transformation

• William Blake
  → The world becomes symbolic, animated, and divine through imagination

3. Imaginal as exact perception of formative reality

• Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
• Henri Bortoft
  → The imaginal is neither “elsewhere” nor purely subjective, but the lawful, living form of phenomena revealed through disciplined perception

4. Imaginal as depth structure of reality

• David Bohm
• Alfred North Whitehead
  → A generative, often hidden dimension from which the manifest unfolds

5. Imaginal as psycho-symbolic reality

• Carl Jung
  → Experienced as autonomous, but located within (or at least mediated by) the psyche

What Goethe and Bortoft add that the others don’t

They make a precise and demanding claim:

• The imaginal is not primarily accessed through trance, vision, or altered states
• It is accessible through refinement of ordinary perception
• It requires training, restraint, and a shift in attention, not departure from the sensory world

This places them in a kind of productive tension with Corbin:

• Corbin: the imaginal may require entry into another mode or world
• Goethe/Bortoft: the imaginal appears when this world is seen rightly

A key fault line clarified

With Goethe and Bortoft included, the landscape you’re tracing can be seen along a more exact axis:

• Ontological separation (Corbin, Ibn Arabi): imaginal as a distinct realm
• Epistemological transformation (Blake, Goethe, Bortoft): imaginal as a changed way of seeing
• Cosmological depth (Bohm, Whitehead): imaginal as structural dimension of reality
• Psychological mediation (Jung): imaginal as experienced through psyche

Goethe and Bortoft are especially useful because they resist both:

• reducing the imaginal to “inner fantasy,” and
• projecting it into a fully separate metaphysical world

Instead, they locate it in a disciplined meeting point between observer and phenomenon, where form becomes directly perceptible without ceasing to be real.

Could you now bring in philosophers of language and poetics including Heidegger, Bringhurst and Barfield and say something of the relationship between words themselves and the ability to access the deeper world/the imaginal?

Owen Barfield — meaning as participation

Barfield’s central claim is that meaning is not fixed in words themselves but arises from a participatory relation between mind and world.

• In Saving the Appearances, he argues that earlier forms of consciousness experienced the world as inherently meaningful—what he calls “original participation”
• Over time, language and thought became more abstract, producing a sense of separation (“onlooker consciousness”)
• The task now is not regression but a conscious recovery—“final participation”—where meaning is again experienced as living, but with awareness

For Barfield:

• Words are fossils of perception; etymology reveals earlier, more unified experiences of reality
• Poetic language can reactivate these latent meanings, allowing perception to re-enter a participatory, imaginal mode

Relation to Corbin/Goethe:
Language is not merely descriptive—it is a medium through which the world becomes imaginally present again.

Robert Bringhurst — language as a living ecological order

Bringhurst approaches language through poetry, typography, and Indigenous traditions:

• He treats language as a living, more-than-human order, not a human invention imposed on the world
• In works like The Tree of Meaning, he explores how meaning arises from the interplay of sound, form, and pattern

For Bringhurst:

• Words are events in the world, shaped by breath, body, and landscape
• Poetry is a way of tuning language back into alignment with the deeper patterns of reality
• He draws on oral traditions where language is understood as participatory and relational, not representational

Relation to the imaginal:
Language, rightly used, becomes a site where the world speaks itself—not just a tool for describing it.

Martin Heidegger — language as the “house of Being”

Heidegger gives one of the most influential philosophical accounts of language:

• “Language is the house of Being”—it is where reality discloses itself
• Everyday language tends to become flattened and instrumental
• Poetic language (e.g. in Friedrich Hölderlin) can reopen a more originary relation to Being

For Heidegger:

• Words do not primarily represent things; they let things appear
• Poetry is a privileged mode in which the world’s depth can come into presence

Relation to Corbin:
Heidegger does not posit an imaginal realm, but he does locate a dimension of disclosure that strongly parallels imaginal access—through language itself.

Roman Jakobson — the poetic function of language

Jakobson, from structural linguistics, identifies different functions of language, including the poetic function:

• In ordinary speech, language points outward (to objects, information)
• In poetic language, attention turns to the form of the message itself—sound, rhythm, pattern

This shift:

• Makes language self-resonant and multidimensional
• Opens layers of association, echo, and internal relation

Relation to the imaginal:
While not metaphysical, Jakobson shows how poetic language thickens meaning, creating a field where more can be perceived than is explicitly stated.

Paul Ricoeur — metaphor as disclosure

Ricoeur’s philosophy of metaphor is especially relevant:

• A live metaphor does not just decorate language; it creates new meaning
• It brings together previously unrelated domains, producing a semantic “shock”

For Ricoeur:

• Metaphor redescribes reality
• It allows us to see-as—to perceive the world under a new aspect

Relation to the imaginal:
Metaphor is a linguistic analogue of imaginal perception—it generates a space where new forms of reality can appear.

Bringing this into your wider map

With these thinkers included, language itself becomes a central axis:

1. Language as access to participation

• Owen Barfield
• Robert Bringhurst
  → Words can restore a participatory relation to reality; meaning is something we enter into

2. Language as disclosure of depth

• Martin Heidegger
• Paul Ricoeur
  → Language (especially poetic/metaphorical) lets the world show itself differently

3. Language as formal intensification

• Roman Jakobson
  → The structure of language itself can generate a field of heightened perception

The relationship between words and the imaginal

Across all of these, a few converging insights emerge:

Words are not neutral labels

They are:

• Condensed histories of perception (Barfield)
• Living patterns in the world (Bringhurst)
• Sites of disclosure (Heidegger)

This aligns with your earlier thread: the imaginal is not simply accessed despite language—it is often accessed through it.

Poetic language alters perception

When language becomes:

• rhythmic
• metaphorical
• etymologically resonant
• formally patterned

…it begins to:

• destabilize fixed meanings
• activate multiple layers at once
• invite participation rather than observation

This is structurally similar to what Blake calls twofold vision and what Goethe calls exact sensorial imagination.

Language can either close or open the world

• Instrumental, technical language tends to flatten reality into objects
• Poetic, attentive language tends to reveal depth, relation, and presence

This mirrors the broader divide you’ve been tracing:

• between single vision / explicate order / reductionism
• and imaginal participation / implicate depth / living form

A synthesis in relation to Corbin

If Corbin says:

• the imaginal is a world that can be entered

Then these philosophers of language suggest:

• language is one of the primary means of entry

But with an important variation:

• For Corbin: language may describe or guide toward that world
• For Barfield, Bringhurst, Heidegger: language itself can become the threshold where that world begins to appear

A precise way to frame it

Across your whole constellation of thinkers, you might say:

• The imaginal is not only a place or a mode of perception
• It is also a linguistic event

That is:

a moment in which words, perception, and world align such that meaning is no longer imposed or inferred, but directly উপস্থিত (present) as lived form

This is where:

• Barfield’s participation
• Goethe’s perception
• Blake’s vision
• and Corbin’s world

begin to converge—not as identical theories, but as different articulations of the same threshold condition.

I’d like you to compare all of this to traditional Australia Aboriginal epistemologies such as the Gay’wu group of women’s experience of co-becoming

Gay’wu Group of Women — co-becoming as epistemology

The Yolŋu women who authored Songspirals articulate a way of knowing that is neither “imaginal realm” nor “inner perception,” but a relational field in which beings, land, and language come into existence together.

• Knowledge is not held by an isolated subject; it emerges through relationship
• Country (land–sea–sky) is alive, storied, and responsive
• Humans, animals, winds, ancestors, and songs are co-participants in ongoing creation

A key notion here is often glossed as “co-becoming”: reality is not a fixed backdrop but continually enacted through reciprocal attunement.

Songlines — language as world-making

Songlines (often called Dreaming tracks) are not representations of the land; they are the land in its active, storied dimension.

• Singing a place is a way of bringing it into presence
• Words, melody, rhythm, and movement are inseparable from geography and ancestry
• Knowledge is transmitted through embodied performance, not abstract description

In relation to your earlier thread on language:

• Where Barfield sees words as “fossils,” here words are alive and operative
• Where Heidegger says language “discloses,” here language participates in the ongoing existence of what it names

Refracting the earlier thinkers through this lens

Corbin / Ibn ʿArabī — imaginal as a world

In Yolŋu epistemology:

• There is no strict separation between worlds (material / imaginal / spiritual)
• The ancestral dimension (often called Dreaming) is not elsewhere; it is co-present and continuously active

So what appears in Corbin as a distinct imaginal realm becomes here a layered immediacy of Country itself.

Blake / Goethe / Bortoft — transformed perception

These come closer:

• Like Blake, perception must be opened or deepened
• Like Goethe and Bortoft, knowledge arises through attentive participation in phenomena

But the Yolŋu position goes further:

• This is not just a mode of seeing; it is a responsibility within a network of relations
• Perception is inseparable from law, kinship, and obligation

Bohm / Whitehead — process and unfolding

There is a strong resonance with process thought:

• Reality is event-like, relational, and emergent
• Forms are not static but arise through ongoing interaction

However:

• Yolŋu knowledge is not abstractly cosmological; it is place-specific, storied, and enacted
• The “implicate” is not hidden structure but ancestral presence embedded in Country

Jung — imaginal psyche

From a Yolŋu perspective, Jung’s framing would be too internal:

• What appears as “archetypal imagery” is not located in a psyche
• It is distributed across land, body, story, and community

The imaginal is not inside; it is relationally everywhere.

Barfield / Bringhurst / Heidegger — language and disclosure

Here the convergence becomes especially strong:

• Language is not representational but participatory
• Meaning arises through attunement to a living world
• Poetic or ceremonial speech can bring forth reality

But Yolŋu epistemology is more radical:

• Language does not just disclose or redescribe
• It sustains and renews the existence of what is spoken and sung

A different configuration of the “imaginal”

If you map your earlier categories onto this:

• Not a separate world (Corbin)
• Not merely a mode of perception (Blake, Goethe)
• Not only a hidden structure (Bohm, Whitehead)
• Not a psychic interior (Jung)

Instead:

Reality is a field of co-becoming in which perception, language, land, and ancestral presence are inseparable

Words, song, and access

In this framework, access to deeper reality is not achieved by:

• entering an altered state, or
• refining perception alone

It is achieved by:

• participating correctly

That includes:

• speaking and singing in the right way
• being in the right relation to place and kin
• enacting knowledge through body, rhythm, and ceremony

Language here is:

• not a tool
• not even primarily a medium

but a mode of ongoing creation

A key shift in your overall inquiry

Across the Western and Islamic thinkers you’ve been exploring, the central question tends to be:

• Where is the imaginal? (a realm, a depth, a mode?)

In Yolŋu epistemology, the question shifts to:

• How are you participating in the world such that it can show itself?

This reframes everything:

• The imaginal is not something to access
• It is something that happens when relationships are rightly enacted

A concise synthesis

Bringing everything together:

• Corbin: imaginal as world
• Blake/Goethe: imaginal as perception
• Bohm/Whitehead: imaginal as process
• Barfield/Bringhurst: imaginal as language

Yolŋu (Gay’wu women):

imaginal as co-becoming — where world, word, and perception are one continuous, living event

This is less a theory of the imaginal than a practice of being within it.

I would push back on that in that Blake, Goethe, Heidegger, Bringhurst were also all poets and artists who lived their theories intensely and beautifully, and sought to bring this into a culture that is, under reductionism, broadly antithetical to this.

The pushback is warranted. Framing those figures as if they only offered “theories” misses that William Blake, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Martin Heidegger (in his late turn to poetry), and Robert Bringhurst all practised the transformations they described—often in conditions shaped by the very reductionism they resisted.

A more precise distinction is not theoretical vs lived, but where the burden of transformation is placed and how it is socially grounded.

1) Practice under conditions of rupture

In these European lineages, the work is carried by individuals (or small circles) who must re-learn participation inside a culture that has largely lost it.

• Blake makes poetry and engraving into a discipline of vision—language and image used to undo “single vision.”
• Goethe develops exercises of attention—serial observation, comparison, imaginative variation—so that form (e.g., the Urpflanze) becomes perceptible.
• Heidegger turns to poets like Friedrich Hölderlin to reopen a clearing where beings can appear otherwise than as resources.
• Bringhurst composes and translates in ways that treat language as breath, measure, and relation, not just a code.

These are not merely descriptions; they are counter-practices—ways of restoring a participatory field within a fragmented lifeworld.

2) Practice within continuity of law and Country

In Yolŋu contexts such as Gay’wu Group of Women, the same participatory condition is not primarily recovered; it is maintained, enacted, and transmitted.

• Knowledge is embedded in kinship, ceremony, and place
• Songlines are not artistic supplements; they are lawful, ongoing enactments of world
• Language, song, and movement are obligations as much as expressions

So the difference is not that one side “lives it” and the other does not; it is that one is often reconstituting participation in a culture of abstraction, while the other is sustaining participation as a normative, collective order.

3) Language: from re-enchantment to continuous enactment

Across both:

• Words are not inert labels
• Form, rhythm, and etymology matter
• Poetic speech changes what can appear

But the emphasis shifts:

• In Blake/Goethe/Heidegger/Bringhurst, language often works as re-enchantment—a way to restore depth against flattening
• In Yolŋu practice, language is continuous enactment—it does not primarily restore; it keeps the world in right relation

4) Convergence without flattening

There is genuine overlap:

• disciplined attention (Goethe)
• transformed seeing (Blake)
• letting-be/disclosure (Heidegger)
• language as living measure (Bringhurst)

All resonate with a participatory, more-than-representational relation to reality.

The non-trivial difference is infrastructure:

• Who carries the practice (individual vs collective)
• How it is stabilized (aesthetic discipline vs law/ceremony/kinship)
• Whether it is countercultural repair or ongoing maintenance of world

5) A tighter synthesis

Rather than opposing them, you can align them along a single arc:

• Counter-practices of recovery (Blake, Goethe, Heidegger, Bringhurst):
  restore participatory perception and language within a reductive milieu
• Practices of continuity (Yolŋu, as in Songspirals):
  maintain participatory reality through enacted relations with Country

Both are intense, lived poetics. They differ less in depth than in historical situation and social embedding—recovery under rupture versus continuity under law.

How about Australian writers who work at the interface of European “depth” traditions (phenomenology, Romanticism, poetics of perception) while explicitly engaging Aboriginal understandings of Country and relational ontology?

It’s a relatively small and careful field, because many writers avoid synthesising across traditions in a way that risks appropriation; those who do it well tend to proceed slowly, reflexively, and often in dialogue with Indigenous thinkers.

Deborah Bird Rose

• Works at the intersection of phenomenology, ethics, and Aboriginal cosmologies
• Deeply influenced by Continental philosophy (including Martin Heidegger) while learning from Yolŋu and other Aboriginal knowledge holders
• In books like Reports from a Wild Country and Wild Dog Dreaming, she explores:
  • Country as sentient, communicative presence
  • human responsibility within a more-than-human field
• She does not collapse traditions, but lets them resonate, often showing where Western thought must be transformed to meet Indigenous realities

Relevance: One of the clearest examples of someone consciously holding both European depth ontology and Aboriginal co-becoming in the same frame.

Freya Mathews

• Explicitly engages European traditions such as Romanticism, phenomenology, and process thought
• At the same time, she draws seriously on Aboriginal philosophies of Country, agency, and communicative cosmos
• Her concept of a “responsive universe” proposes that:
  • the world is inherently expressive and addressable
  • humans can enter into dialogue with the more-than-human world

Relevance: She comes very close to bridging:

• Goethean/Blakean depth perception, and
• Indigenous relational ontology,
  while explicitly arguing against reductionism.

David Tacey

• Brings together Carl Jung’s depth psychology, European spirituality, and Australian Indigenous traditions
• Writes about the need for a new spiritual synthesis in Australia that acknowledges:
  • the land’s prior spiritual presence
  • the inadequacy of imported European frameworks alone

Relevance: More explicitly synthetic than many others, though sometimes critiqued for the risks that come with that. Still, he directly addresses the meeting of depth traditions you’re describing.

Paul Carter

• Explores language, place, and perception in works like The Road to Botany Bay
• Influenced by phenomenology and poetics (including thinkers adjacent to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Martin Heidegger)
• Engages with Aboriginal spatial knowledge and song as non-linear, relational mapping systems

Relevance: Particularly strong on how language and perception must change to encounter Country differently.

Peter Minter

• Poet-critic who explicitly engages:
  • European modernist and Romantic traditions
  • Asian and Indigenous poetics
• Writes about “transcultural poetics” and the need to re-situate poetry within Country and multiple knowledge systems

Relevance: One of the few poets explicitly theorising how different depth traditions can coexist in poetic practice.

Why there aren’t many direct syntheses

Your intuition is valid, but the scarcity is not accidental. There are structural reasons:

1. Epistemic asymmetry
   Aboriginal knowledge systems are not just “another philosophy”; they are:
   • place-based
   • law-governed
   • often restricted or relationally held
2. Risk of appropriation
   Direct synthesis can:
   • flatten differences
   • extract concepts without context
3. Different starting points
   • European traditions often begin from alienation and recovery
   • Aboriginal traditions begin from continuity and responsibility

Because of this, the most rigorous writers tend to:

• hold traditions in tension, rather than merge them
• allow transformation to occur on the Western side, rather than claiming equivalence

A more precise way to locate what you’re looking for

The writers above are not simply “combining” traditions. What they are doing is closer to:

using European depth philosophies (Blake, Goethe, Heidegger, Jung) as incomplete frameworks that must be re-situated in relation to Country

In that sense:

• European traditions provide tools for perceiving depth
• Aboriginal epistemologies provide grounds for what that depth actually is, and how one must relate to it

A concise synthesis

If you map your interest onto this field:

• Blake / Goethe / Heidegger / Bringhurst
  → recover depth perception and participatory language
• Aboriginal epistemologies (e.g. Gay’wu / Songspirals)
  → articulate a lived, law-grounded world of co-becoming
• Australian bridge thinkers (Rose, Mathews, Carter, Minter, Tacey)
  → explore how the first must be transformed, humbled, or re-grounded by the second

If you want a sharper lead

The closest matches to your exact question are:

• Deborah Bird Rose
• Freya Mathews

They both:

• explicitly engage European depth traditions
• take Aboriginal ontologies seriously on their own terms
• and attempt to think from the meeting point, rather than merely comparing

(It is perhaps not co-incidental that David, Deborah and Freya have been elders/mentors/friends of mine for decades). Next I ask:

How about the work of Maya Ward? (it doesn’t know I am Maya Ward – or at least that’s what it said when later I asked it!)

Maya Ward sits quite precisely in the space you’re describing, but her approach differs in tone and method from the more explicitly theoretical bridge figures.

Positioning her work

Ward’s writing and facilitation practice (e.g. The Comfort of Water) draw on:

• European depth traditions implicitly—particularly those aligned with
  • William Blake (imagination as reality-bearing)
  • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (attentive, participatory perception)
  • strands of phenomenology and embodied awareness
• while being explicitly grounded in practices of listening to and writing on Country within Australia

What distinguishes her work is that she does not foreground these as abstract lineages. Instead, they are operationalised as practice.

Key features of her approach

1. Writing as a somatic, relational practice

Ward treats writing not as representation but as:

• a bodily attunement
• a way of entering relation with place
• a practice of listening rather than asserting

This aligns strongly with:

• Goethe’s disciplined perception
• Bringhurst’s sense of language as lived form

but is re-situated in an Australian context where Country is already storied and sovereign.

2. Attention to the ethics of writing on Country

A recurring concern in her work is:

• how to write without appropriating or overlaying
• how to remain in relation rather than mastery

This places her closer to the Yolŋu orientation you mentioned:

• writing becomes a question of right relationship, not just perception
• the imaginal is not something to access, but something that emerges through attunement and restraint

3. Language as threshold, not tool

Her writing often moves toward:

• spare, attentive language
• an emphasis on image, sensation, and rhythm

This echoes:

• Barfield’s sense of language reactivating participation
• Heidegger’s idea of language as a site of disclosure

But again, the emphasis is practical:

• language is shaped so that something other than the self can appear

4. The imaginal reframed as encounter

Ward does not posit an imaginal “realm” in a Corbin sense.

Instead:

• the imaginal appears as moments of encounter
• where body, place, and perception briefly align

This places her close to:

• Blake’s “twofold vision”
• Goethe’s “exact sensorial imagination”

but under the condition that:

• one is on Aboriginal Country, with all the historical and ethical implications that entails

How she differs from other bridge figures

Compared to:

• Deborah Bird Rose → more explicitly theoretical and ethnographic
• Freya Mathews → more overtly metaphysical

Ward’s contribution is:

to translate these concerns into lived, teachable practices of attention, writing, and relation

She is less concerned with:

• synthesising systems

and more concerned with:

• how one actually writes, senses, and listens differently

A precise way to locate her in your map

If you extend your earlier framework:

• Corbin → imaginal as world
• Blake / Goethe → imaginal as perception
• Barfield / Bringhurst → imaginal as language
• Yolŋu → imaginal as co-becoming

Then Ward’s work could be described as:

imaginal as practice of attunement on Country

Where:

• perception is trained (Goethe)
• language is refined (Bringhurst)
• imagination is real (Blake)
• but all of this is ethically and relationally situated within Aboriginal land

Why her work matters in this context

Ward is part of a smaller group of contemporary practitioners who:

• take European depth traditions seriously without centering them
• take Aboriginal epistemologies seriously without claiming them
• and work in the tension between the two, at the level of lived practice

This makes her especially relevant to your question, because she is not merely comparing frameworks—she is working inside their intersection.