Some images do not explain a life so much as wake it. In Issue 2 of The Liminal, “A Roadmap of the Soul” becomes the threshold: Stephen Farah treats boredom, deadness, and lost purpose as signs that the psyche may have misplaced the images that carry its energy.

The rest of the issue follows that problem outward, from altered states to inner pirctures. You are invited to read the set as a field of images asking which forms still know how to guide a life.

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Stephen Farah of the Centre for Applied Jungian Studies argues that deadness, boredom, and loss of purpose are not fixed conditions of life but failures of imagery. The piece turns on Yoram Kaufmann's idea of a person's unique imaginal language: a psychic fingerprint formed by primal images. Its symbolic force lies in the move from raw numinous experience into a form the psyche can hold. Personal mythology becomes a practical roadmap, not a decorative belief. Read more→

Andrew Zaleski, writing for Popular Mechanics, reports on a woman who can enter a psychedelic-like state without drugs while researchers track her brain activity with fMRI. The case turns on double consciousness, serenity, unity, and a loosened sense of time while she still knows she is lying in a scanner. That makes the story more than novelty about altered states. It becomes a threshold study in how consciousness can widen without leaving the body behind. Read more→

Jamie Wheal, in a Substack essay "Amerika in the Upside Down," reads American identity through inversion, regression, and collective crisis. The piece keeps its pressure in the collision between patriotism, tribal belonging, Enlightenment ideals, and the shadow language of public life. That makes the political argument psychologically charged rather than merely partisan. Its symbolic force is the question of what kind of inward discipline can keep collective belonging from becoming possession. Read more→

Medical Xpress reports on research from the Estonian Research Council showing that people with aphantasia can reason about concrete and abstract domains without visual imagery. The piece matters because it loosens a centuries-old assumption that abstract thought depends on inner pictures. Here, the absence of image becomes its own symbolic pressure. It asks what forms of language, concept, and attention can carry meaning when imagination is not visual. Read more→

In a Sounds True interview, Rainn Wilson turns atheism toward doubt, biography, and the persistence of spiritual hunger. The exchange keeps belief and unbelief close to lived experience rather than treating either as a settled position. That gives the piece its psychological charge: religious language returns as a search for orientation. The symbolic pressure is how meaning survives when inherited forms no longer feel simple. Read more→