I think the thing most needful – needful, that is, to reverse the individual and social decline arising from nihilism (meaninglessness and purposelessness) and despair… is not salvation and spiritual progression (they are several steps down the line, and the process must begin with things much simpler and more basic)…

But the thing most needful is perhaps imaginative awakening – that is the awareness and conviction that there is more to Real Life than what is ‘objective’: perceived by the senses and publicly-shared.

(Imagination here refers to that which is in the mind and from the mind; but not from the senses.)

Here and now, this cannot happen privately, by stealth: for us, imagination must become conscious and explicit if it is to have the necessary consequences.

1. Imagination needs to be noticed, recognised, acknowledged.
2. It needs to be stated that imagination is what is wanted.
3. The primary importance of imagination needs to be acknowledged – that it actually comes first and provides the frame and context for other knowledge.
4. All that is general – talking about the form of imagination; the specific is that we also need to recognise the content of imagination (by looking within, by introspection).
5. Then we must imaginatively interpret the content of imagination (i.e. not take imagination ‘literally’ – as if it was science, maths or a bureaucratic memo – but instead understand the content of imagination using imagination…)
6. The above should happen in explicit terms of Life as an endemic state of spiritual warfare; that is – warfare with spiritual goals.
7. So, the imagination is understood as an arena of spiritual realities; and the primary business of life is to live consciously by imagination in awareness that it is an adventure quest in which we may aim at Good, but must expect to be assailed by evil.

This spiritual perspective is quite natural and spontaneous – but it is incomplete and inadequate. However, I think it needs to be awakened – in and for its own sake, as constituting a partial but valuable reversal of the fatal trend – as a necessary prelude to further and more specifically Christian awakening.

We need imaginatively to re-understand life as being essentially about the world of imagination