Encounters with the Religious Imagination and the Emergence of Creativity

Ervin Laszlo's notion of the interrelationship between evolution and creativity as being intrinsic to universal life processes has been influential to the biological and social sciences. Central to Laszlo's thinking is the notion of convergence in biological and social systems that are posited on creative complexity. In this article, I employ Laszlo's concept of creativity in relation to the human religious imagination. Cross-cultural studies of the religious imagination examine the architecture of human consciousness and ways of knowing. These two areas are interlinked and generate new kinds of knowledge and understanding of the self and the world. In this way, the religious imagination is a means of generating new possibilities of mind and consciousness.