AMMDI is an open-notebook hypertext writing experiment, authored by Mike Travers aka mtraven. It's a work in progress and some parts are more polished than others. Comments welcome! More.

Coleridge: subjective imagination vs primary imagination (latter is as real as the physical world). Sufi mundum ? More reality when you see the thistle an old man. Eh.

Early pioneers: Freud, before him Humphrey Davey with nitrous. Coleridge, de Quincey, Romanticism. Got into cannabis era (early 20th century) and beginning of psychedelic era.

He's making an argument against technology, in part by resurrecting older ones (Luddites, Blake, the Lunar Society romantics like Coleridge and Wordsworth).

"imaginal" coined by Henry Corbin "mystics since time immemorial have been visiting places that are immaterial, yet totally real." – guess this is the crux of his belief. Coleridge, Jung ... "were united by a conviction that at least some of the images we see in visions, dreams, and fabulations are Things in the horror-genre sense of the term. That is, they are beings in a world of beings. Our world is not limited to matter as com- monly understood."

Went looking for his take on Coleridge's line "he blessed them unaware", which is from Mind and Nature

FATHER : Well, for example , I do not believe that the original purpose of the rain dance was to make "it" rain. I suspect that that is a degenerate misunderstanding of a much more profound religious need: to affirm membership in what we may call the ecological tautology, the eternal verities of life and environment. There's always a tendency–almost a need–to vulgarize religion, to turn it into entertainment or politics or magic or power. DAUGHTER: And ESP? And materialization? And out-of-body experience? And spiritualism? FATHER: All symptoms, mistaken attempts at cute efforts to escape from a crude materialism that becomes intolerable. A miracle is a materialist's idea of how to escape from his materialism. DAUGHTER: Is there no escape ? I don't understand. FATHER: Oh, yes. But, you see, magic is really only a sort of pseudoscience. And like applied science, it always proposes the possibility of control. So you don't get away from all that way of thought by sequences into which that way of thinking is already built-in. DAUGHTER: So how do you get away? FATHER: Ah, yes. The reply to crude materialism is not miracles but beauty–or, of course, ugliness. A small piece of Beethoven symphony , a single Goldberg variation, a single organism, a cat or a cactus, the twenty-ninth sonnet or the Ancient Mariner's sea snakes. You remember he "blessed them, unaware," and the Albatross then fell from his neck into the sea.

I am sure that two very different meanings if not more lurk in the word, One. —Samuel Taylor Coleridge

I too have memorized Coleridge's Kubla Khan thanks to my father's habit of reciting it.

poem by Coleridge, dear to my heart because my father used to recite it around the house, and so I have had it memorized from a young age.

Coleridge

18 Mar 2023 - 16 Apr 2026

I have a special relationship since my father used to recite Kubla Khan and so I have it memorized from childhood.

It is among the miseries of the present age that it recognizes no medium between literal and metaphorical. – The Statesman's Manual (PC p388)

Samuel Taylor Coleridge -- England’s Most Underrated Political Philosopher | National Review

As Cheyne observes, the effect of these books “was so impressive that John Stuart Mill named Coleridge as one of the two great British philosophers of the age — the other being Jeremy Bentham, Coleridge’s polar opposite.”

His key move is the distinction between Reason (Vernunft) and Understanding (Verstand), borrowed and transformed from Kant. Understanding is the analytic, categorizing faculty that builds machines and runs markets. Reason is the higher synthesizing faculty that grasps living wholes, moral truths, and the divine. A society organized purely around Understanding — commercial, utilitarian, administratively rationalized — starves Reason and produces what Coleridge called "men of talent without wisdom."

His concept of the clerisy (in On the Constitution of the Church and State, 1829) is a direct response: a cultivated class — not just clergy, but educators and intellectuals — whose institutional role is to preserve and transmit the national culture against the atomizing forces of commerce. This is explicitly a corrective to clockwork society.

In Biographia Literaria (1817) he attacks associationist psychology (Hartley, Locke) as the mental correlate of mechanism — the idea that mind is just billiard-ball impressions combining by contiguity. Against this he posits the primary Imagination as a living, creative power that actively constitutes experience rather than passively receiving it.

His organic metaphor is doing real philosophical work: a clock is assembled from outside; a plant grows from internal principle. Society and mind are more like plants. Interfere mechanically and you get disruption without understanding why.