Advanced contemplative traditions describe a paradox at the heart of deep practice. As practitioners move toward states of imageless awareness — silence beyond all mental pictures — the role of imagination does not simply disappear. It is transformed. But how? And what does that tell us about the relationship between the human mind and the divine? Dr. Brian Robinette, Professor of Theology at Boston College, leads a comparative project exploring this question across Christian and Buddhist contemplative traditions.
Where Imagination Meets the Infinite
The project begins with an in-depth investigation of select contemplative traditions and their accounts of imagination’s role in mystical experience. A seminar of approximately eight scholar-practitioners will convene twice to examine these questions. Building on those insights, Robinette and his team will host a major public conference at Boston College on imagination and mystical itineraries of transformation. The working assumption, supported across multiple traditions, is that states of contemplative awakening exist which transcend the constructive power of imagination, even as they rely on imagination and extend its reach. Seminar participants will be encouraged to publish their findings, and a team-taught graduate course will be developed alongside the conference.
A Conversation Across Traditions
By engaging these questions through the lens of interfaith learning, the project aims to illuminate the dynamic interplay between imaginative activity and receptive surrender in spiritual cognition. Robinette and his team’s work contributes to wider conversations on imagination in religious experience and the transformative potential at the heart of contemplative practice. The result could be a richer understanding of how traditions that use very different language and imagery arrive at strikingly similar accounts of what happens when the mind opens beyond itself.