The essence of the following argument is that the reality of the imaginal realm is mostly a reality of inner space that we have lost the collective capacity to perceive. Our loss is due to the default substance ontology that is the defining characteristic of our mental-rational mode of consciousness in its deficient mode at this stage of history, and due to other major biases of the modern mind that preclude the proper appreciation of depth and latency, and because we don’t really understand what space is. What exactly the imaginal realm is was touched on previously, and I will say more about it while discussing why it matters in the following post in this seriess “It’s not woo if it’s true”, but for now, the challenge is to consider our conceptual and perceptual constraints and how they get in the way of worldmaking based on a different and better relationship to reality.
As indicated, 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 is a kind of space, and 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 as we know it. 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.
So that’s what I want us to see, and the question is why we struggle to see it.
With his world-historical moustache, Freidrich Nietzsche could hardly be considered woo, but in the context of this inquiry series the following passage from Ecce Homo (1888) is striking:
After all, no one can draw more out of things, books included, than he already knows. A man has no ears for that to which experience has given him no access. To take an extreme case, suppose a book contains simply incidents which lie quite outside the range of general or even rare experience — suppose it to be the first language to express a whole series of experiences. In this case nothing it contains will really be heard at all, and, thanks to an acoustic delusion, people will believe that where nothing is heard there is nothing to hear.”
A person who is hard of hearing does not reject a sound as unreal; they simply do not experience it and have nothing to react to. The classic HG Wells novel, The Country of the Blind, is also noteworthy for the attribution of madness and non-conformity to the precious gift of sight. In both versions of the book (1904 and 1939), the community considers an operation to remove the eyes as a kind, compassionate solution. Only by removing the ‘so-called sight’ can the visitor ‘fit in’. The attribution of deviance and delusion to a form of perception that is of considerable value is tragic precisely because it is understandable and even recognisable. Radically new perspectives on reality threaten the coherence and culture of a world created without that perspective.
Beyond senses, in a geometrical (and satirical) vein, Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions, by Edwin Abbott (1884) features a sphere visiting the world of squares, triangles and lines, trying to describe the third dimension, and again this perspective is mostly ridiculed. However, a particularly fascinating (and amusing) detail is that Sphere lifts Square to help him see the third dimension, Square suddenly gets it, but then asks Sphere about further dimensions beyond the third, and Sphere denies any such possibility!…
I remember reading both these sources for my Philosophy of Religion paper at Oxford in 1998. My gratitude to Tim Mawson, who is still there, for offering these lateral perspectives. From memory, that week’s essay was about finding the right epistemic relationship to people who claim to have had spiritual or religious experience, and these lateral readings have stayed with me. They helped me to feel the significance of an important and widely quoted line by CS Lewis in A Grief Observed:
Five senses; an incurably abstract intellect; a haphazardly selective memory; a set of preconceptions and assumptions so numerous that I can never examine more than a minority of them — never become conscious of them all. How much of total reality can such an apparatus let through?
Beyond Substance Ontology
If we care to understand what might be meant by ‘imaginal realm’ as intimated by Corbin, Hilman, Bourgeault and others, and why it might have cultural and supra-political power that is needed today, as I believe, we have to resolutely shed the substance ontology that most educated Western minds are formed by, and riddled with, including our folkish understandings of space and time. In another of Katie Teague’s wonderful videos, Cynthia Bourgeault connects the perception of the imaginal realm with Jean Gebser’s integral structure of consciousness, and makes this point resolutely:
Substance ontology and the mental structure of consciousness are almost synonymous.
Substance ontology is essentially the idea that the stuff of the world has a material, quality-bearing substrate and that we live in a world of things with qualities rather than relationships between processes. Substance ontology gives rise to a dualistic view of the world in which subjects ‘in here’ perceive objects ‘out there’. The ‘mental structure’ is a reference to the Swiss archaeologist prophet Jean Gebser, but it has wider application, including in Vanessa Andreotti’s ‘House of Modernity’, and it is part of the argument in Iain McGilchrist’s The Master and His Emissary and even more so in The Matter with Things. This determination to move beyond the limitations of substance ontology also appears to inform the work of Matthew David Segall (heavily influenced by Whitehead) Bonnitta Roy, Nora Bateson, Bayo Akomolafe, Zak Stein, and myriad others in Perspectiva-adjacent networks who recognise we have to stop seeing the world merely as a place with things. While we, apparent mere subjects of experience, are indeed what Pureland Buddhists call Bombu - foolish beings of wayward passion - we are also blessed inhabitants of a mysterious panexperiential creative process that we can, do, and should participate in.
It’s really difficult. It’s very hard indeed for beings who valorise rationality, with centuries of modernity in our figurative veins, in a culture that is still endemically materialistic; where Science in its culture-bearing influence is mostly not rigorous curiosity enchanted by wonder, but institutionalised materialism, sometimes known as scientism. What I am gesturing towards with reference to the imaginal realm in this series is actually pretty conventional in the long sweep of humanity’s history. But today, I believe we have to be willing to perceive very differently to even begin to get it. I say this not as someone who is there, but as someone who has been trying to get it for a few years now. On hearing ‘imaginal realm’, most minds immediately look for a what, a kind of object to locate in space, as if it might be a kind of celestial ozone layer, but that starting point, while perhaps necessary for an initial orientation, has to be set aside to make any progress.
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The idea of polycrisis appeals to the biases of the modern mind.
To make a lateral point, the reason the language of polycrisis is fundamentally inadequate is that it reaffirms the way of looking that is the heart of our current predicament. When considering the limitations of the idea of polycrisis a couple of years ago now, I noticed two main things: the centrality of the admission that the world is increasingly unintelligible, which is valuable, but also the lack of any sense of the potential importance of human interiority (consciousness). These things are connected!
Most polycrisis theorists effectively say we can’t inform action in political economy because we can’t make sense of the world with the epistemic frames and empirical methods we have at our disposal. Yet, and this is stunning in a way, there is no apparent reflection on the possibility that features of reality like the human psyche, collective imagination, spiritual experience or aesthetic sensibilities might have any causal influence on the state of the world. Moreover, while a defining feature of polycrisis is the inability to say that one thing causes another and that we cannot therefore trust in a particular policy to address a particular issue, the implicit theory of causation seems underdeveloped, because while it recognises emergence, it does not seem to recognise that emergence might arise from phenomena that are not (yet) materially manifest.
With the possible exception of Anthropology, the existing scholarship on polycrisis appears to be informed by an unacknowledged metatheory of ontological actualism, namely that what is real is what is actual, typically manifest as empirical events. Actualism is part of one of what Paul Marshall, in his excellent book, A Complex Integral Realist Perspective: New Axial Vision, calls ‘biases of the modern mind’, which are all manifest in the limitations of the idea of polycrisis. What follows is my potted summary of an extensive analysis, so please go to the source to be sure of the finer details.
As I understand it, the analytical bias is about the limitations of what Piaget called ‘formal operations’ becoming institutionalised and entrenched in science and philosophy departments, for instance, through the exclusive use of analysis as the definitive quality of thought, failing to properly understand emergence, non-linear causality, recursive causation, reflexive awareness, the complexity of open systems. There is also an over-reliance on logic, a weakness for reductive and deductive reasoning and perhaps a failure to understand dialectical processes.
The epistemological bias has its roots in positivism, and it is ultimately about using epistemic criteria to substitute for any other ground of being. The key distinction here is between what Bhaskar called the transitive dimension of pre-existing knowledge and the intransitive dimension of a mind-independent world. The inference that there is a mind-independent world allows for the possibility of a depth ontology, including a real domain of hidden structures, mechanisms and powers that produces what is ‘actual’, only some of which is experienced in the empirical domain. That intransitive dimension and depth ontology potentially includes mind, agency, social structure and many more things that make a transformative or emancipatory project possible – it is no small thing that it is mostly ignored!
The presence bias denies that absence is something that exists in the world. This apparently arcane point is what upholds the epistemic fallacy above, but it also prevents us from seeing ideas mentioned earlier like Bonnitta Roy’s complex potential states, Nora Bateson’s aphanipoiesis and also even subtler notions like dark matter in physics or emptiness in Buddhism. As Deacon(?) puts it:
There is more here than stuff. There is how that stuff is organised and related to others. And there is more than what is actual. There is what could be, what should be, what can’t be, what is possible and what is impossible.
The exterior bias is often grounded in a default materialism and it stems from ignoring the extraordinary (and yet entirely ordinary) mystery of consciousness and our first-person access to our own interiority. These are arguably irreducible features of the world, but consciousness is still often explained away as some kind of illusion, or an epiphenomenon of matter. However, there is a vast field of transrational and mystical insight on ‘the perennial philosophy’, dating back to Upanishadic philosophy, from Plato to Plotinus, Buddha and Nagarjuna, Jesus, Aurobindo and many others. As Marshall puts it:
Their insights are all unique…but there is a common core, a minimalist perennial insight that points to the same essential vision: there is a spiritual infrastructure to the universe, whose ground is also the essential nature of all being.
These four biases, outlined by Marshall (analytical, epistemological, presence, exterior) give some texture to what is meant by the mental structure of consciousness being in a deficient mode. That idea of Jean Gebser, alluded to above by Cynthia Bourgeault, stems from evidence for the transformations of the structure of consciousness as they are concretised in historical artefacts. While Gebser does not think of consciousness ‘evolving’ or ‘progressing’ or ‘developing’ he does recognise very distinct structures that follow a kind of sequence from archaic to magic to mythical to mental to integral. In Gebserian terms, the polycrisis is the mental mode of consciousness in its deficient mode, noticing its inadequacy in the state of the world it has created.
Marshall again puts this in an elegant way. The mental mode entails a standing back and looking at the world, which is about the subject (interior) viewing the world (exterior) and is the basis for much that we consider good about science and objectivity today. However, that mode of perception is only one part of the mental mode, and when it becomes the exclusive mode it is deficient because we have the problems of the four biases already mentioned. When the mental mode is in its efficient mode however, the standing back is combined with a looking within (to subjectivity and individuality) and beyond (to being itself and monotheism) which were spiritual breakthroughs of the axial age that remained in Ancient Greece when the mental mode was relatively efficient.
When standing back is combined with looking within and beyond, the problems of the subject/object split are mitigated and this mode of consciousness is perhaps in some sense ‘closer’ to the integral mode, but it remains what Gebser would call perspectival, with the world still viewed through a mental frame of reference, rather than a form of aperspectival (free from a single perspective) or diaphanous awareness, or ‘seeing through the world’ which he believes is the quintessence of the integral mode.
**
Modernity’s impact on time and space
I cannot do justice to modernity or the metaphysics of time and space over the next few paragraphs or even years (go figure), so for now I will reuse material from a post on my personal Substack, The Joyous Struggle, that fits the current inquiry.
Anthony Giddens describes ‘modernity’ as the world-historical impact of the gradual severing from tradition in post-feudal Europe, through the institutional expression of industrialism, capitalism, surveillance, ‘total war’, and the nation state, all of which are discontinuous with the pre-modern world. He calls modernity “a runaway world”, and in The Consequences of Modernity (1990), he uses the metaphor of a juggernaut.
Modernity is a juggernaut. It is not just a juggernaut, but one which we can to some extent steer. However, it is a runaway engine of enormous power which, collectively, we can steer only to a limited degree.
In a subsequent summary in Modernity and Self-Identity (1991), Giddens highlights three things the juggernaut does to the world through what he calls its “universalising properties that explain the expansionist, coruscating nature of modern social life”. These are the separation of space and time, the disembedding of experience, and institutional reflexivity. I just nod to the first point here.
The juggernaut separates time and space by de-situating their relationship from particular places. There was once a time for things, but then the time arrived, through the normalisation of calendars and the spread of the mechanical clock. Practices were de-localised and universalised, and the question of what ‘the future’ might bring loomed larger as the operative question. Once, we only bought bread at the market on market day, but then when and where ceased to be co-extensive. In The Condition of Postmodernity(1989) David Harvey offers a variation on this point by arguing that modernity accelerates time while shrinking space, and this chimes to some extent with arguments of Paul Virilio in Speed and Politics (1977) that speed is the defining feature of modernity that serves to kill all forms of depth (ultimately a spatial metaphor), and it anticipates Castells in The Rise of the Network Society (1996) and Bauman’s Liquid Modernity(2000) where spaces have turned fluid, sublimated into network flows. In this respect, time and space are increasingly severed. Technology tames space, and denatures time to a shallow present.
Geography sees things differently, which is not altogether surprising. Doreen Massey’s work in For Space(2005), for instance, critiques the notion that modernity separates space and time. She contends that we have needlessly accepted space as being inert and passive, rather than seeing it for the relational, dynamic, co-constructed phenomena it is. Her concern is not to over-romanticise places, but she is eager to argue that we must not surrender the human capacity to use space in ways that shape or resist time. I’ll say that again: we should not surrender the human capacity to use space in ways that shape or resist time.
Chapter twenty-four of Iain McGilchrist’s The Matter with Things sheds some light on the enigma of space, for instance in the following vintage McGilchrist paragraph (p. 997 of the hardback with some references removed):
‘It is interesting that in some mythologies, Time appears as a god, a mythic person of sorts’, observes Jan Zwicky, ‘but, to the best of my knowledge, space is never so represented.’ Time speaks profoundly to the human condition in a way that space, however fundamental it might be, simply does not. Time is relentless, like another being’s will, where space is pliable and may be fashioned, though not without limits, to our own. Time is emotive; space is bland. Time is always single. ‘I venture to say only one true integer may occur in all of physics’, says physicist David Tong. ‘The laws of physics refer to one dimension of time. Without precisely one dimension of time, physics appears to become inconsistent.’ By contrast space is multiple: it has between three and eleven or even more dimensions, depending on whose theory you are inclined to embrace. Time is irreversible: space open to endless revision. Time creates and corrodes: space lends (temporary) permanence to what is. Writing, for example, was invented to give permanence in space to the fleetingness of thought. Consciousness exists in time, but not in space. For elements that are often conflated, their qualities could hardly be more different.
I read this rich and beautiful paragraph as a useful provocation. The line “consciousness exists in time, but not in space” builds on work by Colin McGinn, and feels mind-blowing, but is it entirely right? To put it another way, while consciousness may not exist in space, can consciousness exist as entirely a-spatial, without space, and all that this means for extension, depth, and resistance or is it more likely that we need an idea of space that is (somehow) not extended? As for mythology, I take the point, but aren’t ghosts, extant or not, space-subverting phenomena? And when I see ouija board summonings in horror movies, I always feel it’s about accessing spatial dimensions that are otherwise off limits. Can anything with an enigmatically multiple number of dimensions really be thought of as bland? And places speak profoundly to the human condition; while places are full of memory and not merely spaces, their aesthetics are inextricably shaped by space. And yes, space may be pliable, but it is also critical to resistance, which is essential to creativity. Later in the same chapter (p1021-22 of hardback) Iain suggests:
“Matter is whatever occupies space and has mass. Or rather, “exists spatially”, since space should not be thought of as a container for ‘things’. But it must have mass. And what is mass? Fascinatingly, mass is the tendency of an entity to resist - changes in course or speed. This should resonate, since, from a purely metaphysical point of view, I have been arguing that, though flow is generative, nothing comes into existence except by means of resistance to flow. The recalcitrance of mass gives rise to the possibility of enduring form.”
Again, beautiful, but again I am left with so many questions. If a defining feature of space is mass, and mass is critical to the resistance to flow, and nothing comes into existence except through resistance to flow, does this not make space a contender for being the unsuspected metaphysical hero at the beating heart of creation?
Later in chapter 24, Iain explores depth, which is, of course, a spatial metaphor. To be clear, I am not saying that Iain is unappreciative of space; if anything, the opposite, as indicated, for instance, in his quoting of the Tao Te Ching on page 1005:
Thirty spokes meet in the hub,
but the empty space between them
is the essence of the wheel.
Pots are formed from clay,
but the empty space within it
is the essence of the pot.
Walls with windows and doors form the house,
but the empty space within it
is the essence of the home
The Missing Fifth Element
One detail not mentioned by Iain (as far as I can see) is that while in the West we still sometimes work with a folk ontology of four elements: earth, fire, air and water, in several eastern traditions they work with five. The Eastern tradition I know best is Vedanta, particularly how it is expressed in the philosophical roots of traditional Indian medicine, Ayurveda. Their fifth element is Akash (Ākāśa (आकाश)), a term loosely translated as ‘sky’ but closer in meaning to space or ether. Akash is considered the subtlest element, and it contains and maintains the others. No akash, no vibrations. No vibrations, no sounds. No sounds, no ॐ, no Ohm, no primordial sound from which existence arises.
I have had several amusing conversations with my Indian mother-in-law, Vatsala, where I have expressed my confusion about how this fifth element differs from air. To take the second stanza from the Tao Te Ching above (a different tradition, but it serves the purpose). The western mind tends to think the pot is a kind of ‘earth’, it contains ‘air’, but we do we really need ‘space’ to make sense of it? I would ask my Amma: What does the idea of space do here that air does not? And she would seem perplexed and say: “The air is in the space”, and look at me for recognition. The meaning of Akash is encapsulated in the idea that the space that makes it the essence of the pot.
In the West, we used to have a similar idea of ether, and even Aristotle invoked it. Ether and Akash are not identical, but they are both a recognition of space as a subtle holding phenomenon with real effects. There is a history of how ether was abandoned in the history and philosophy of science that I remember studying at Oxford. Just as I expressed incredulity to my mother-in-law, our intellectual tradition gradually discarded the notion of ether as redundant and gratuitous, decisively so in physics due to Einstein’s work on special relativity (c1905), which indicated that light does not need anything other than spacetime to travel through. While that may be so for physics, I am beginning to think the loss of ether may have been collateral damage to our metaphysics, from which we have arguably not recovered. And now I understand better why the theosophists speak of history in terms of ‘the akashic records’.
Our loss of appreciation for depth may be related to presuming to understand space. Just because we can draw lines for the dimensions of up-down, back-front, left-right doesn’t mean we know where we are. As Colin McGinn warns:
What we need from space, practically speaking, is by no means the same as how space is structured in itself. I suspect that the very depth of embeddedness of space in our cognitive system produces in us the illusion that we understand it much better than we do.
I wonder, then, if practices like Yoga and Tai Chi (and Gurdjieff’s weird and wonderful movement practices) are not just about reconnecting the mind and the body, but also attending to space as a feature of reality, almost as if tasting it. I also wonder if ‘being in nature’ is partly about reconnecting with space emotionally, almost like keeping in touch with a friend. Perhaps much of mental illness is about the literal loss of space, in our living arrangements, in our built-up cities, in the narrow range of movements involved in pulling a screen towards our faces. Perhaps space is the primary nutrient of soul food; maybe we are meant to taste it together.
Maybe what is happening today is not really about the severing of time from space. Perhaps a better way to understand why we are afflicted by the juggernaut is that we have lost the capacity to resist it. And why? Because the quintessential element of resistance is space, and we have created a space-shaped hole in our metaphysics.
I think we have forgotten and forsaken the subtle nature of space and the profound importance of space. What if the injunction of our times is not to allow modernity to die, as such, but to find ways to slow down the juggernaut by using space to resist the severing of time from space? Perhaps, in a Gebserian sense, we do not develop beyond modernity, but move beyond its exclusivity, by reincorporating much that has been unwisely jettisoned in the name of progress. Perhaps only then can something suitably new truly emerge, rather than being forced upon us. What would it mean for modernity to be resisted by the reimagining and reinhabiting of space, and how might that relate to becoming reacquainted with our long-lost fifth element?
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The space in question is not exactly the space that physicists measure, or the space architects design, but the space that contemplatives have always insisted is the most fundamental thing there is, the empty fullness and full emptiness that tacitly contains everything else, that makes everything else possible. I find myself returning to this issue of ineffable unextended space because I think it has something to do with, let’s say, the mood of the universe, at least as I experience it.
The vocabulary for what I am trying to say has mostly been sequestered inside traditions that Western secular culture is either embarassed by or relegates to esoterica. Akasha, for instance, sits in Sanskrit texts and gets taught in yoga studios, but will not get you far in analtyical philosopher tutorial. The same goes for Plato’s khōra, that strange receptacle of all becoming he introduces in the Timaeus, which he himself cannot quite describe; it is neither being nor non-being, having no qualities of its own yet receiving everything. I recently learned that Derrida spent an entire essay circling ‘khora’ and more or less concluded that it resists every conceptual tool the tradition has developed. This looks to me like circumstantial evidence that Plato was pointing at something real and beyond him, rather than merely being confused.
Then there is the word entos, from Luke’s gospel, where Jesus tells the Pharisees that the kingdom of God is entos hymōn. The usual translation is “within you”, though the Greek also carries the sense of in your midst, a kind of presence that is both interior and surrounding at once. The hesychast tradition, a Christian contemplative lineage that developed the practice of stillness as a form of direct perception reads entos hymon not as metaphor but as ontology: the innermost space of a human being opens into the same primordial depth as the ground of the cosmos. Then there is the Chandogya Upanishad that says something structurally identical and poetic, namely that the small space within the lotus of the heart is as vast as the sky outside.
What I think connects akasha, khora, and entos is a claim that modern thought has almost entirely lost the language to make: space is not merely empty, but somehow generative. This sounds banal. But the assumption that runs underneath almost everything the modern West has built, through Aristotle’s rejection of the void (kenon) Descartes splitting the world into thinking substance and extended matter, and Newton’s infinite warehouse, is that space is empty, passive, inert, a container defined only by what it holds. The result is a civilisation of considerable surface competence that has progressively lost the ability to speak about depth. This is not a new observation, but I am not sure we have fully reckoned with what it costs.
The deepest formulation of what was lost is something like this: in the older metaphysics, across traditions that developed independently and arrived at strikingly similar places, space is ontologically prior to what appears within it; in a sense this is the modest claim that the womb came before the baby, but I make no comment on the abiding controversy of the chicken and the egg, which is much tougher. Space appears to participate in what arises rather than standing neutrally aside. The Sat of the classical conception of God (according to Theology guru David Bently Hart) in Sat-Chit-Ananda is usually translated as Being, but something like “carrying the sense of the primordial spatial ground within which consciousness and bliss can appear” is Being unpacked.
I am not qualified to say whether modern physics has stumbled toward the same recognition through a completely different route, but I have it on good authority that it does not quite know where it has arrived. We do know the quantum vacuum seethes with energy and structure. The holographic principle suggests that three-dimensional reality may be a projection from a deeper spatial order of tiny dimensions of space folded over each other in ways we struggle to fathom. And David Bohm spent years trying to describe what he called the implicate order, a domain in which things that appear separate in ordinary space are enfolded together. None of this is “the missing fith element” as such, and it is in some ways pre-elemental, but it is significant that physics does have live inquiries that are consonant with a much richer and deeper view of space.
Gregory Bateson’s distinction (developed from Jung) between Pleroma and Creatura helps explain why the scientific and the contemplative conservations do not intersect. However exotic it gets, Physics remains Pleromic: it deals in forces, quantities, mechanisms, causal connections. The imaginal realm, which I have introduced and will develop further - for now remember is Henri Corbin’s term, borrowed from Islamic Neoplatonism, for the domain that Bourgeault, following Gurdjieff, calls World 24, is Creatural, by which I mean it is organised by meaning, pattern, relationship, and something that functions like orientation or desire, a pull toward coherence that operates through invitation rather than compulsion. Pleromic instruments will not find these things and can’t even really see them, just as a thermometer can’t evaluate music, but they are part of the same world that is in conversation with itself all the time.
All I can really offer from this extended disquisition into space is that recovering the vocabulary for space as akasha as luminous, generative, participatory, the ground within which physics and consciousness and love and meaning are simultaneously possible, is not nostalgic and not anti-scientific. It is the recognition that the deepest questions were asked by people paying a quality of attention we have largely stopped cultivating, and that what they found was not superseded by modernity so much as set aside, for reasons that made local sense and have accumulated, quietly, into something like a civilisational blind spot. I do not know exactly what it would mean to address that. But I think the first step is to notice it.
That’s one of the longest throat clearings I have ever done, but I needed to talk about the limitations of substance ontology, the biases of the modern mind, and our limited grasp of space to make sense of why ‘the imaginal realm’ has become so difficult to perceive and accept. In essence, as indicated, the reality of the imaginal realm is the reality of a kind of inner space that we have forgotten about. In the next post I’ll say a few things about time, and get more deeply into what the imaginal realm is, and why I think taking it more seriously matters today.
I applaud this and future “throat clearings”. The substance ontology needs a lot of that thx much
Jonathan, the territory you're exploring in this series is crucial to understanding not just where we currently stand, but the generative processes by which humanity evolves. What I most appreciate is that you're not simply offering (yet another) deconstruction of modernity, but some essential - and paradoxically practical - process elements of what Jennifer Gidley calls a participatory futures approach. I have the feeling that a book is in the wings ... at least, I hope so.