In dialogue with Carl Jung, Wolfgang Pauli spoke of the need, in our time, for a new house.

Contemplative Labs exists in service of that need.

The name is intentional. A laboratory is a place of disciplined inquiry — of careful attention to reality. We take the imaginal realm with the same seriousness a physicist brings to matter: as a domain with its own structure, its own grammar, its own demand for precision.

Ibn ‘Arabi writes, “All of existence is imagination within imagination.” He distinguishes three registers. Life itself is the creative self-disclosure of the One. The imaginal, the Vast Earth, is the intermediate realm where, in Henry Corbin's phrase, "spirits are corporealized and bodies spiritualized." And active imagination is our capacity to enter that realm consciously: to engage, to discern, to be shaped by what we find there.

Ally work is a practice of active imagination developed by Dr. Jeffrey Raff in the alchemical lineage of Carl Jung and Marie-Louise von Franz, centered on developing a relationship with one's ally: what Raff calls "a face of God that is unique to each human being," and what Corbin names the divine twin: our mystical identity.

Contemplative Labs was founded by Barnaby Willett to develop the imaginative faculty as a rigorous, learnable practice — drawing on the lineages of Islamic mysticism and Jungian depth psychology, rooted in thirty years of contemplative practice.

Together, Contemplative Labs invites each of us to the making of the new house.