Dr. Tom Cheetham is a naturalist, poet, and author who has spent the last few decades of his life engrossed in the work of Henry Corbin, who inspired a century of studies of the unconscious mind. Corbin’s aim was to understand the line that cut across the mystic traditions of the world, in the hopes of finding something that was the universal ground of being. To that end, he searched for answers in the work of everyone from Continental philosophers, to the medieval gnostics, to the Persian mystics and honed in on something he called the “imaginal realm,” inhabited by angels who guide their human charges towards a life of meaning and profundity. We talk with Cheetham about the nature of inspiration, the universal ground of experience, the search for truth, and the visionary power of psychedelic experiences