Vision is a faculty, not a possession
Lila first launched in 2002. It has had many manifestations, and this is its latest. It contributes to the progression of a body of knowledge and cultural context to understand visionary states, liminality, sacred art. The platform comprises these elements: A network of artists, teachers, scholars, mentors & students A growing library educational resource LaniaKea Project - Collaborative history and consensus building around visionary art Educational Courses Working with the maxim that 'True culture is based upon immanence and transcendence', we seek to gather like-minds who believe in the power of art to cultivate a vision of a long term, positive future within human culture.
We speak as though everyone has imagination the way everyone has eyesight. But the capacity varies enormously — in vividness, autonomy, duration, symbolic depth, and in the brutal final movement: carrying an image across into paint, language, building or conduct without killing it.
The plant, the fast, the dark retreat, the icon canon, the dreaming threshold — and now the machines — are all ways of arranging one condition: the one in which an image can arrive with autonomous force, be held long enough to move, and be interrogated before it is explained. The instrument differs; the discipline does not.
This is why entheobotany, Byzantine iconography and synthetic imagery sit in one archive. They are not a themed miscellany. They are one continuous problem of transmission.
Publish, accumulate, practise
Dossiers
A finite editorial constellation organised around a governing question — released on a rhythm you can keep. Each issue owns one pigment and gathers essays, interviews and primary texts.
The Archive
What the dossiers deposit: seven standing strands, the figures, the working lexicon and the primary texts — entered by search, by enquiry, by form, or by hand.
The School
The consequence of the proposition. If vision is a faculty it can be cultivated and expressed through art — a sequence of trainable capacities, taught as Vision Craft.
Seven strands
- 01 Visionary States How does visionary experience arise, and what distinguishes its conditions? Entheogenic and trance states, dream and hypnagogia, the perinatal and the mystical, awe and dread.
- 02 Myth & Symbol How do visionary images acquire, carry and transform meaning? Archetype and correspondence, sacred geometry, iconography, the traffic between private image and inherited form.
- 03 Psyche & Transformation What does visionary experience do to a person and a culture, and what enables transformation rather than inflation or collapse? Integration, individuation, spiritual emergency, the ethics of altered states.
- 04 Creativity, Art, Embodiment, Integration How is vision carried into form, body, praxis and culture? Pigment, glaze and the icon canon; visionary prose, music and architecture; mark-making; creative vitality; collective integration.
- 05 Ecology, Cosmos & Emergence How does visionary experience disclose relations between living systems, natural form, cosmology and emergent order? Plant intelligence and animism, complexity and self-organisation, the more-than-human world.
- 06 Futures, Cyberdelics, Sociotechnical Imaginaries How do technologies and designed environments produce, mediate or alter visionary experience? How does our dreaming of the future shape it? Digital and immersive media, engineered awe, the politics of induced states (cyberdelics).
- 07 Traditions & Transmission How is visionary knowledge preserved, taught, inherited and revised? Lineages and schools, master and student, continuity and rupture - and the questions of cultural change, inheritance and legitimacy.
Daniel Mirante
British Isles born artist, author, teacher and doctoral researcher. LILA is edited on the conviction that the visionary faculty is not an exotic gift held by a few, but a broad human capacity left largely vestigial — because the culture has almost no serious pedagogy for it.
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Contribute
We commission essays, interviews, primary-text framings and plate commentary across the seven strands.
Make a submission → PatronsSupport
The archive is a working library. Support keeps it open, edited, and free of the churn of the feed.
Support the archive → StudentsThe school
Vision Craft turns the editorial thesis into practice — a rhythm and a curriculum for cultivating the faculty.
Vision Craft →