Jokes aside, reimagining imagination is unimaginably important. There has never been a better time to attempt to grasp the ungraspable and eff the ineffable. That’s why I am trying to make better sense of the imaginal realm over on the Perspectiva Substack (please consider subscribing there). In plain terms, and without undue reification, the imaginal realm is our near beyond, a layer or dimension of reality behind the veil of sense perception that communicates to us in a cosmic nondual grammar of images and intuition. In the post, I mention encountering it in various ways, through meditation, synchronicity, the I-Ching, and constellations inquiry, and I try to situate it within the view of the vast majority (c85%) of people around the world who have a broadly spiritual or religious outlook on life.
In other words, with care and discernment, I seek to argue: it’s not woo if it’s true.
The imaginal realm is to be experienced rather than described, but here’s what I wrote:
My impression is that the imaginal realm is a real place that is not a real place. The imaginal is both within and between our material and spiritual realities in ways that are hard to fathom. Although the ‘realm’ has no spatial extension, it has a temporal and causal reality, and that possibility is untroubling for those who can grasp that consciousness exists in time, but not in space. The imaginal realm also appears to be an abode where indwelling occurs, and that becomes credible when we discern that what dwells there are not physical entities, but something that appears to be at once personal, archetypal, normative, ideational, and agentic. This repository of virtuous form reaches us through intuitions and imagery, and these dispatches are not directives of celestial oversight from above but more like a kind of noetic solidarity, liquefactions of our collective mystical heart in the near beyond. While that heart is not a being, it is interactive and agentic Being-in-Action. Meaning arises from there, filtered through experience in patterns we can only perceive in particular ways that might best be described as chiastic, namely those myriad phenomena that criss-cross into the very centre of our lives, a centre that makes us explode with laughter and well up with tears of joy, and that is perhaps best understood as what Jean Gebser called the ever-present origin.
I will continue to deepen the inquiry on Perspectiva, but I thought I’d revert to my personal site with this lateral post, with a question that feels like part of our shared joyous struggle. There are plenty of sources on what the imagination is, does, and why it matters, so here’s a different way in:
What does Imagination want?
That’s the discombobulating question I posed to Eleanor Robins at the Kairos club in London a fortnight ago after a great talk about the relationship between memory and imagination, and the practice of memorising poetry. We were given ten minutes with an extract from Blake and asked to memorise a stanza. I chose this one:
Hear the voice of the Bard,
Who present, past, and future sees;
Whose ears have heard
The Holy Word
That walk’d among the ancient trees.
Of all available memory techniques, I opted for vivid and meaningful associations. ‘Bard’ became the iconoclastic Swedish philosopher and musician, Alexander Bard, but that thought co-arose with another bearded man, Alastair McIntosh, who often speaks of “Bardic Politics”. The second line evoked David Runciman’s podcast, Past, Present, Future - no beard, but an unusually orange logo and a typically excellent podcast that is one of my audio staples. The third line reminded me of two operations for a burst eardrum that wouldn’t heal by itself, the first of which failed, but both made me value hearing.
The register deepens in the fourth and fifth lines. The holy word could be many things, including ohm, or any other mantra, but in conjunction with the next line, it reads to me as Logos, in the Gospel of John sense of ‘in the beginning was the word’ (which is the main translation of the Greek). Logos means something more like the creative and communicative intelligence at the heart of reality through which all things are made, in which all things participate, and which seeks to be known from within creation rather than above it - but ‘word’ is how it is usually translated, and thereby reduced. In any case, we are told that the word became flesh, latterly as Jesus, whom I can picture walking among the ancient trees, i.e., he was there from the start; but the words also evoked Tom Bombadil, and Tree Beard in Middle-earth, both of whom, we are told, are ancient.
With all those associations and vivid images in mind, it was not so difficult to hold the stanza in memory, but that’s the point - it was the effect of trying to remember the lines that made the experience so profound. I began with what felt like random images and associations, and through them, I ended with something more like an experience of transcendent immanence. The idea of the ancient word that walked among the ancient trees took on a whole new life, and I saw and felt in it the Christian idea that we are all now God’s body.
Is it too much to say that, in this context, what imagination wanted was for me to make that connection?
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There is no easy answer to the question: What does imagination want? - which has a koan-like quality, and it mostly dangled in the air on the night. But I think it’s a useful provocation.
Unlike the important but question-begging idea of the imaginal realm, imagination is a relatively familiar notion. While we should not conflate or confuse the imagination with the imaginal, nor should we, as they say, tear them asunder. There is also the idea of the social imaginary or the collective imaginary to consider - Charles Taylor calls it “The widest grasp of our whole predicament”. I reflected on this challenge of judicious discrimination in Tasting the Pickle:
One way to grasp the relative difficulty of imagining the end of capitalism is by distinguishing between the imagination, the imaginary and the imaginal, with some heuristic rather than canonical distinctions. It helps to think of the imagination as a distinctly human capacity that is in some sense real, cultivated most directly in the domain of the arts and humanities, as detailed, for instance, in Northrop Frye’s classic CBC lecture series in the sixties: The Education of the Imagination.
The imaginary is more helpfully thought of as a minimally malleable constraint. This concept from social and cultural theory is about the limits of what we can imagine and the idea is developed explicitly by, for instance, Cornelius Castoriadis, Charles Taylor and former Perspectiva researcher Sam Earle; it is also tacit in the idea of The Sociological Imagination, which is also the title of Wright C. Mill’s 1959 classic text. And the imaginal is neither a capacity nor a constraint, but more like a cornucopia to be discovered in the terrain of depth psychology, mythology and comparative religion. Almost anything by James Hillman is of value here, but the classic text might be Jung’s autobiography, Memories, Dreams and Reflections.
With these distinctions in mind, while the end of the world is a mere act of imagination – an event characterised by stock imagery and widely portrayed in cinema, capitalism has become a defining feature of our collective imaginary – a shared social construction that circumscribes our relationship to imagery and our imagination. Moreover, the impact of social media might be that because we pass each other so much of the same imagery, our imaginations are becoming less individuated and more collectivised, such that the renewing power of the individual imagination is at ever greater risk of being subsumed by the collective imaginary. And perhaps the reason we appear to be struggling to see and think beyond our imaginary is partly that we don’t take the imaginal realm – our psychic, mythic and archetypal resources – seriously. Indeed, we may need our theories of change to be premised on something like what Cynthia Bourgeault calls ‘imaginal causality’, which taps into a source that is deeper than ideas and values and habits, and powerful enough to change them fundamentally.
I am out of my depth here, and I say that because my experience of dreams and therapy and synchronicities leads me to feel that the imaginal realm is in some meaningful and non- reductive sense real; and yet it is still mostly terra incognita, for me at least.
I don’t know what follows, but I see the imagination as a frontier, and our last best hope to loosen the grip of the collective imaginary may well be forms of praxis that explore the imaginal. Those forms of praxis may arise from socially acceptable forms of artistic endeavour. However, they may also be relatively transgressive forms of shamanic inquiry, psychedelics and everything between and beyond. We will need courage and discernment as we go.
Curiously, five years on, with fascism, technofeudalism and war to worry about, ‘capitalism’ as such feels like the least of our worries, but I am grateful to my younger self for those words. I’m also reminded of a noteworthy remark in History, Guilt and Habit where Owen Barfield writes of the ‘obsessive confusion between distinguishing and dividing’. The imagination, the imaginary and the imaginal can be seen as different things, but I think it is truer to say that they are different aspects of the same ‘thing’. And it is because of this same-but-different cross-pollination between what I describe above as the capacity of the imagination, the constraint of the imaginary, and the cornucopia of the imaginal that I think it is only reasonable to ask: What does imagination want?
Imagination may be a cognitive capacity that we develop under the constraints of our collective imaginary, but it flows from the same rivers as the imaginal, which feels less tethered to neurons and history and more psychoactive and primordial. The imagination cannot credibly say: “I don’t know what I want, I am just a capacity”. That approach denatures the imagination by disavowing its wellspring in the imaginal.
We do not tend to think of the imagination as in any way autonomous, a psychic polity with its own population, or having self-like coherence, volition, or agency. Most of us are educated into the idea that we (subjects) have imagination (object), rather than imagination(subject) having us (objects). And yet, so much depends on the underlying metaphysics of consciousness and whether we feel the psyche is objective. In many forms of therapy, there are explorations into agentic energies ‘in the room’ that are not assumed to be merely products of the embodied humans in conversation. Indeed, I have noticed a range of educated, thoughtful people speak of the images playing out within the imagination as archetypal energies in ways that are not dissimilar to James Hillman’s idea, as I understand it, that the healthy psyche is fundamentally polytheistic. As I say, it’s not woo if it’s true.
I hesitate to say all of this. With psychosis in my family, I don’t consider the imagination to be inherently benign. Yet my inquiries have led me to consider imagination as a primordial phenomenon that exists in a substantive but not exactly spatial sense between mind and matter. While I am not sure, I don’t find it crazy to think imagination is somehow constituted of or inhabited by beings or archetypes or other forms of agentic energy that literally have lives and perhaps even wills of their own. Hence my question: What does the imagination want?
Colin Wilson’s definition of imagination - “the ability to grasp realities that are not immediately present” - makes imagination sound like a kind of extra-sensory epistemology. Coleridge distinguished between primary and secondary imagination; the former is described as “the living power and prime agent of all human perception…a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM”. That makes it sound rather important. Another great poet, W.H Auden, clarifies that this primary imagination is concerned only with the sacred beings and events, in which the sacred calls to us in an irresistible way. Then, in Blake, there’s a link between Eternity as a form of perception/knowing within a lived reality of a fourfold imagination. And there are overlaps between imagination and psyche and soul in post-Jungian thought, and it’s not always clear to me where the objective psyche ends, and the subjective imagination begins.
More recently, I have noticed a need for political imagination, and I am mostly supportive of the emphasis in civil society on imagination infrastructures, imagination activism, and moral imagination (which some believe is essential for peace). I think we can all be forgiven for feeling a little confused, though, and I wonder what exactly we are reaching for, because it’s clearly more than “good ideas”, or even vision. Even in a time of religious revival, I suspect imagination is becoming a secular surrogate for an underlying spiritual reality that some of us are still a little too scared to acknowledge. The risk of secularising imagination is that we not only desacralise it, but also thereby denature it, and forget what it is, and what it is supposed to mean and do for us. For these reasons and others, Kathleen Raine spoke of the “lost knowledge of the imagination”, later developed in a great book by Gary Lachman by that title (which informed the previous paragraph above).
More on all of this over at Perspectiva over the next few weeks, but that’s all for now.
In the meantime, I hope my question might bring some life to your day.
What does imagination want?
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Jonathan, your Blake stanza quietly answers the question you are raising. The Word does not transmit from outside — it walks among the ancient trees. Participative, not broadcast. Which makes me wonder: if the imaginal reaches us and sends dispatches, have we already installed the separation the imaginal is supposed to heal? How can a wave ask whether the ocean is communicating with it, unless it has momentarily forgotten what it is?
I am really excited to read your thoughts about the imaginal realm as I have just been participating in a really refreshing short online course with Aftab Omar at Meridian University about how to use all this what you are pointing to here as the fundamental framework in a coaching context. They call it “Imaginal Coaching”. Looking forward to read your other pieces on perspectiva.