Soul Guidance · Rachael Duffy
Imagining a New World
into Being
On imagination, the imaginal realm, and the dream of the Earth
Diane di Prima
The only war that matters is the war against
The imagination
All other wars are subsumed in it.
The crisis of imagination
The Biggest Crisis of Our Times
As we find ourselves descending deeper into these times of collapse and renewal, we sit at the convergence of several crises -- climate and biodiversity, the ever-widening gap between the richest and the poor, increasing division, xenophobia and all other forms of othering. As humans, individually and collectively, we are being asked to step into a radically different way of being. And yet, our ability to reach this, is hampered by what is perhaps the biggest crisis of our times: The crisis of imagination.
The rational mind, for all it gifts, has a significant limitation when it comes to envisioning a 'new world', or different way of being. It can only think into solutions it's already come across. Ask the rational mind to deliver a genuinely new world and it will hand you, every time, a slightly rearranged version of this one. There may be greener growth or more equitable markets, but it's essentially the same dream, repurposed.
The rational mind cannot dream a new world into being, because dreaming is not what it is for. However, we do have one faculty that is fit for this task, and that is the Imagination.
Over the years the meaning of 'imagination' has been diminished to mean the unreal, 'make believe', or our subjective inner world. Tragically, through rendering the word imagination to mere fantasy, we have taught ourselves that to imagine is to wander away from reality rather than deepen into it.
And while creations of the mind exist, there is a much deeper understanding of the faculty of Imagination. And that is to recognise it not as an author of scenes or images, but rather as a mode of perceiving images, and accessing the imaginal realm.
Alam al Mithal
The Imaginal Realm
The Imaginal Realm, originally spoken of by Sufi mystics and named 'Alam al Mithal' is an ontologically real world of living images and forms that stands between pure being and physical matter. Tom Cheetham writes, "Visible reality has its complement, its completion, in the other world." It is the place where the unseen becomes seen. Where the formless becomes visible without becoming material. It is in the Imaginal realm that spiritual realities take shapes that human consciousness can perceive and interact with.
Sharon Blackie
Sharon Blackie calls the Imaginal Realm "the place where the stories live, and have an independent existence (no, we don't make them up). The place where synchronicities are created -- a world in which events are connected by meaning, rather than by physical cause."
A different way of perceiving
The Imagination as Organ of Perception
To perceive what lies beyond the material world, and to access the Imaginal Realm we need to engage a different way of perceiving: the active or deep imagination.
To engage the deep Imagination is to make ourselves available to images, symbols, dreams, visions or revelations that are unbidden and often surprise us. This is the place where information about our Soul's purpose is revealed, and it's also the way we will be able to sense what the world is asking of us in these times.
The word itself carries the clue
When a caterpillar enters the chrysalis and its body begins to dissolve, it is the imaginal cells that hold the form of the butterfly and build it from what is dissolving. These cells have been present all along, dormant until metamorphosis. They share a root, these two: imaginal, from imago, the image. The same is true of us. In the dissolving of the old world, the imaginal is where the form of the next one is waiting.
Thomas Berry
The Dream of the Earth
If imagination is perception rather than invention, then imagining a new world is not us, alone, manufacturing something clever out of our own resourcefulness. It is simply allowing ourselves to attune to what already wants to be born, through us.
This was at the heart of Thomas Berry's work. He understood the universe not as a collection of objects but as "a communion of subjects". The greater visions, he believed, rise up out of the wild depths. The Earth dreams. And we, earth beings with the capacity to imagine, are one of the ways she dreams herself into being.
Against the language of transcendence, Berry coined its opposite: inscendence, a descent. He believed that we will not think our way up and out of where we find ourselves, but rather we must climb down, beneath the rational mind, into the wilder, instinctive ground of our being.
The practical work
Recovering the Faculty of Imagination
If imagination is a faculty and not a fantasy, then the most practical thing any of us can do in these unravelling times is to recover it. It's a capacity that we all have, even if it is lying dormant.
Oddly, we do not strengthen it by force. The reasoning mind works hard, pushing toward the answer it can already half-see in the distance. Imagination works the other way round. It comes when we allow ourselves to be in stillness and a place of 'unknowing'. Imagination surfaces when the running commentary in our heads falls silent, when conditioned responses and thinking patterns are put to rest. And it comes when we slow down!
The organ of perception of imagination is a muscle that can be developed through use and will also atrophy without use. And so our challenge today is to slowly rebuild this muscle.
There are old and reliable ways to do this. In the Sufi understanding, the seat of imaginal perception is the heart, and the power that strengthens it is called himma. Corbin named this "the creative power of the heart". Himma is concentrated, almost devotional attention, closer to prayerful longing than to effort. This is attention, as prayer. Longing toward something with your whole being until it reveals itself.
'There's a song that wants to sing itself through us, we just have to make ourselves available.'
Joanna Macy
We must feed the Imagination, and protect it. A life steeped in myth, poetry, dream, and relationship with the living world will build a strong capacity for Imagination. A life given only the engineered, endlessly refreshing scroll, or an over-reliance on AI will result in an atrophy of our capacity to tune into the images and possibilities that await us.
The great work
Imagining the New World into Being
The more beautiful world our hearts know is possible is not naive optimism. Our hearts know it because, in the Imaginal, they have already glimpsed it. The work of a human life, and the Great Work of our time, is to enter the Imaginal, to listen, and to carry back what is revealed there as a gift to all of life.
This is something each of us can begin in this very moment. "The future," as Joanna Macy reminds us, "is not out there in front of us, but inside us." We co-create the new world in every act of attention, every time we make ourselves available to the dream.
A closing inquiry
Can we grow still enough, and brave enough, to receive the dream that is already dreaming us?
Let us imagine the new world into being.
Begin now
Three Simple Ways to Begin to Recover Your Imagination
'Court' your Muse
Steep yourself in beauty and image. Read poetry slowly, and aloud, copying out the lines that arrest you. Read myth. Let music move you and move through you. Make something, paint, draw or doodle. Create the conditions for the Muse to re-enter your life.
Pay attention to your dreams
On waking, stay still and let the night's images return. Write down whatever you remember and stay with the images that have been gifted to you. Stay curious and allow more to unfold, rather than trying to analyse. Our dreams are a powerful way of accessing the Imaginal Realm.
Wander in wild nature
Go out with no aim, letting yourself be drawn by whatever calls for your attention. Be a participant in the communion of subjects, rather than a spectator. Speak, and listen, engage all your senses, and remember you are in living, reciprocal relationship with all whom you meet.