40 Spirituality Studies 9-1 Spring 2023 Imagination, Time, and Spirituality – Mircea Eliade’s Timeless Grasp of Reality Barbora Čaputová Received December 28, 2022 Revised March 12, 2023 Accepted March 13, 2023 Keywords Mircea Eliade, spirituality, sacred, religion This article not only discusses the ideas of Mircea Eliade, but also draws attention to the human need for spiritual experience. It is possible that the ideas of this historian of religions may be surprisingly contemporary in the context of spirituality today. Eliade’s assumption was that the essence of humanity is religious, which means that our perception of the world is originally holistic, in a sense that it is necessary for us to perceive the sacred side of the world. One of the criticisms aimed at Eliade’s work is the idea that Eliade’s philosophy of sacred is comprehensible only to a religious person. However, Eliade did not speak only to believers. On the contrary, if we want to perceive his readers in a limited way, we can say that he spoke more to the educated ones and those who are interested in philosophy or science in general. But in the context of today’s spirituality, Eliade’s work may be particularly interesting for anyone who shows interest, since his philosophy of time, or the demand for imagination can open up possibilities for insight into the essence of all spiritual phenomena.
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