Discover how you can optimize the power of your imagination to unleash your innate genius and build a better world.
If ever there was a time and a place to reconnect with imagination, that place is here, that time is now. For anyone looking for a new way forward for yourself, your community, and our struggling planet, Stephen Aizenstat, Ph.D., offers a powerful message of hope. The trailblazers are people like you—the seekers, creatives, dreamers, doers—who are willing and ready to tap into a collective purpose so vital, so vibrant, so resonant in the world of today.
“You have within you a limitless source of creativity waiting to be unleashed. Its promise is nothing less than the next evolution of human consciousness.” — Stephen Aizenstat, PhD.
In The Imagination Matrix, Aizenstat expands upon his world-renowned Dream Tending method to present a step-by-step process for unlocking your potential. He reveals how anyone can gain access to the “source code of imagination” which energizes your capacity to innovate new outcomes, evolve real-world solutions, and nurture your well-being. The book explores:
- Opening the Curious Mind—a new method to engage imagination and wonder
- Answering the call of your Innate Genius
- Growing your capacities of Imaginal Intelligence
- Maintaining your humanity in an increasingly technological world
- Claiming your creativity and purpose to meet the pull of the future
The Imagination Matrix offers a practical and uniquely personal path for becoming more purposeful, resourceful, and resilient–even when we feel overwhelmed as individuals—while developing a profound connection to the creative force that animates and flows through us all to become the agents of change that our world needs today.
Meet Stephen Aizenstat, Ph.D.
Stephen Aizenstat, PhD, is the founder of Pacifica Graduate Institute, Dream Tending, and the Academy of Imagination. He has devoted his life to understanding the profound wisdom and healing power that exist within each of us. His work centers on the insight that, through our dreams and imagination, we can access limitless creativity, innovation, improved relationships, and, ultimately, our human potential.
Such an inquiry was a driving force in his creation of Pacifica Graduate Institute, a center for the study of the human experience through depth psychology, mythology, and the humanities. Surrounded by the beauty of the natural world where the mountains meet the sea, the institute is located on two university campuses in Santa Barbara, California.
Within this setting, Aizenstat pioneered his revolutionary, patented Dream Tending approach, a proven system based on four decades of rigorous scholarship and practical application road-tested with students, clients, and global workshops. This approach led to his work on The Imagination Matrix, a new paradigm for thinking more creatively and for living more authentically. He has conducted sold-out dreamwork and imagination seminars, workshops, and popup events in the United States, Asia, and Europe.
Aizenstat’s methodologies have helped thousands of people to unlock the realms of deep imagination, increase intellectual and emotional bandwidth, and realize personal and professional goals.
Stephen Aizenstat, Ph.D., has served as an organizational consultant to leading tech companies, international leadership teams, and the Hollywood entertainment industry. He has also lectured extensively around the globe on the experiences of dreams, Deep Imagination, Imaginal Intelligence, and unleashing your Innate Genius. He is affiliated with the Earth Charter International project through the United Nations, where he has spoken. Professor Aizenstat has collaborated with many notable leaders in the field, including mythologist Joseph Campbell; depth psychologists James Hillman, Marion Woodman, and Robert Johnson; visionary Jean Houston; Chinese Jungian analyst and scholar Professor Heyong Shen; and Aboriginal dreamer and artist Yidumduma Bill Harvey. Dr. Aizenstat honors his associations with sustainability and seed-saving activist Dr. Vandana Shiva, Aboriginal dreamer Bill Neijdie, and community organizers Dolores Huerta and Cesar Chavez.
Early Praise
“Reading The Imagination Matrix gives us access to our capacities to cocreate the higher dream that is longing to come into existence. The practices and gifts of this extraordinary book offer training and participation to redeem the unread vision of the higher dream. The Imagination Matrix is the essential reading for those who want to bring profoundly new ways of being and doing into this world and time.”
—Jean Houston, PhD, principal founder of the Human Potential Movement, coauthor of the Future Humans Trilogy
“The Imagination Matrix offers portals of awareness through which each reader can find their inner code of life and their living core of creative imagination. This kind of shift in consciousness impacts individuals and communities, and also affects the entire planet.”
—Michael Meade, author of Awakening the Soul
“Imagination is different from knowledge; it is the knowledge of the heart. Through the Imagination Matrix, you can enter and feel the realms of deep imagination, live an imagination-centered life, and access imaginal healing. What a magnetic calling, as the Imagination Matrix is alive in each of us.”
—Professor Heyong Shen, Jungian analyst; dean of the Institute of Analytical Psychology, City University of Macau; author of Chinese Cultural Psychology and eleven other volumes
“In The Imagination Matrix, Stephen Aizenstat assembles a wealth of sources, as well as his own reflections on stuckness versus creativity, and offers a multiphase plan for a renewed relationship to that generative source within each of us. The capacity for reimagining the materials of daily life is inherent but often blocked by the inner tyrants of complexes and routinized life. This book will ask the reader to break some of those restraints and open to the insurgent images that reframe our dilemmas and that wish expression through us in the world.”
—James Hollis, PhD, Jungian analyst and author of multiple books, most recently A Life of Meaning
“Stephen Aizenstat is unquestionably one of the great leaders in the field of deep imagination and dreaming of our generation. His work as a Dream Tender and as the founder of Pacifica Graduate Institute has profoundly changed the lives of thousands of people. And now there is this book, which will give many more the opportunity to tap into the healing creativity of the involuntary imagination as it establishes itself around us constantly in the endless stories it spontaneously spins. Dive in with this experienced guide of souls and find your way into the creative genius that surrounds us day and night.”
—Robert Bosnak, PsyA, Jungian psychoanalyst, originator of Embodied Imagination®, author of Red Sulphur
“The Imagination Matrix by Stephen Aizenstat is an imaginal companion that everyone should have. It is a true gift to the world that activates and calls upon our creative genius for taking on the greatest challenges of our time, infusing our lives, work, and relationships with meaning, story, and the powers of the imaginal realms of consciousness. Through it we learn to partner the essences of the Four Quadrants—Earth, Mind, Machine, and Universe—supported by cutting-edge research and breakthrough practices and applications from the fields of earth sciences, depth psychology, new technologies, and cosmology.
“This powerful guidebook will significantly uplevel your life and work, in ways seen and unseen. Aizenstat’s brilliant storytelling evokes your Curious Mind and guides you home to your beloved Soul Companions, as you discover how to empower each other and answer our deeper calling for being.
“The Imagination Matrix prepares us for the massive transformations that are required from us at this time and in ways that rekindle our Imaginal Play, invite fun, increase joy and wonder, and deepen our love for life, Gaia, and each other.”
—Anneloes Smitsman, PhD, founder of EARTHwise Centre, coauthor of the Future Humans Trilogy
“The Imagination Matrix is an exceptional gift. Stephen Aizenstat provides the essential tools to live a life with richer meaning and awe. The reader will be immediately transported to a life of wonder and possibilities and be renewed in their dedication to a positive future. The timing of this book could not be more ideal and relevant.”
—Jennifer Freed, PhD, author of the bestseller A Map to Your Soul
“A marvelous journey into the worlds of imagination! Through stories, practical examples, and supportive ideas, Stephen Aizenstat leads you to connect with the creative and healing powers of imagination. Become friends with your Soul Companions, and go on an adventure of a lifetime!”
—Machiel Klerk, founder of Jung Platform, author of Dream Guidance, psychotherapist
A long-awaited, new, wise, and soulful offering by the creator of Dream Tending, The Imagination Matrix offers a passionate vision for fulfilling our human potentials. Stephen Aizenstat brings a 21st century understanding of depth psychology into a rich and complex engagement with the world through a disciplined cultivation of the imagination. Using a contemporary re-visioning of the four elements, we are offered a set of salient tools for animating and enlivening our world, including its material, technological, ecological, and spiritual dimensions. Written with an utterly charming and enchanting narrative style, this book also conveys profound wisdom through stories that open our minds in a practical and immediately applicable manner. Engaging with this book will transform you.”
—Joe Cambray, PhD, IAAP past-president, Pacifica Graduate Institute
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