Editorial:

Sounds, songs, images, ‘image’, and moving pictures, when creating space and filling up time will unleash the hidden verve of imagination. Not only to the mystics and those who have their own religion, these ‘imagerial’ realities always bring necessary interruptions to the most non-spiritual people on earth. Our senses are no more of a lesser degree for any philosophical discourse. In truth, discourses are always a communal act involving people of very different angles but, frightfully, of mostly the same space and time. This is no more an age to decry what we see and hear and touch as something we can ‘under-stand’. Perhaps the most challenging attitude in our time is to share those standings in every possible community and connectedness.

“Expert language is a prison for knowledge and understanding. A prison for intellectually significant relationships. It is time to move beyond the institutional practices of triviledge, toward networks and surfaces, toward the play of superficiality, toward interstanding” (Mark C. Taylor and Esa Saarinen, 1994). Thus we learn that our standing will have to be shared and told so as to cross the borders created by art, religion, mysticism, and even theology. This issue of Melintas brings you toward the borders by presenting the discourses over musician Carlos Santana, religion and cinema, images of the church and Christian imagination, mysticism without bounds in vachana songs, and Krisna Murti’s video artworks. We might find out that these are the world’s imagerial realities that even if we do not (want to) understand, we still are summoned to interstand them. Knowledge becomes an interstanding only when imagination is at work.

Communicating is positioning. Probably the most troubling restlessness of human beings is the hope for not being alone. And that is the very reason for them to be ‘in position’ among the others. Undoubtedly we cannot position ourselves without the presence of the others. We constantly want to be acquainted with where we are now. Therefore, a small spot of indifference is another forewarning light for us. Without going too much in contrasting the position of one or another, we always need others in the course of positioning or telling our standings and getting their responds appropriately. When we don’t get the appropriate responds, perhaps that's the time we sense that we don’t know where we are exactly.

At the end of the day, there is yet a circular path we all are by now familiar, that is, the epistemological circle from appearance to experience, and from experience back to appearance. We wish our readers a pleasant journey to the borders but don’t forget to come back home to day-to-day communal realities bringing fresh insights to share again and again.

Editor.