ABSTRACT
Science has two sides, such as, the project of enlightenment and its shadow, disenchantment. This chapter examines the scientist and poet-mystic, not as professional types, but as complementary archetypes. Both are seekers; both explore the world around them, the scientist with an objective and generalising eye, the poet with a subjective and specific voice. The scientist uses his curiosity to understand, whereas the poet transforms the world through his imagination. The chapter focuses on the scientist or other scholar who has burned out with over-focus, overanalysis, excessive attention to the outside world at the expense of his feelings, his inner world and a particular kind of poetic imagination. Memory and imagination are intertwined: memory feeds imagination; imagination embellishes memory. The enemies of soul and imagination are the weight of actuality, completion, clarity, logic, busyness, incessant input and demands, excessive impinging stimuli that lead to shutdown, or equally the opposite—a poverty of stimulus.
