Imaginal Reality

Perhaps the greatest trick ever pulled on modern human consciousness is convincing us that what exists in our imagination is somehow not a part of what is “real.”

Lately I have been returning again and again to a realization and its unfolding implications that I first had many years ago, after reading the Promethea comics by Alan Moore. In these comics, we are introduced to the character of Promethea, who in a sense, is the archetypal manifestation of the human imaginal impulse as a super hero of grand scale and grander intelligence and esoteric majesty.

She comes into form through different writers in different eras who are open enough of a channel for her to come through their work in one form or another, and for a time, according to the needs of the age she is in, she helps to liberate the human imagination into the powerful force for good it is seemingly meant to be. 

I felt her in my bones, in my blood, in the creative impulses towards expression and ecstasy that I had been learning to navigate with since my earliest days.

And then, practically all at once, I had a revelation. 

How we have been tricked into the fundamental assumption of a hardline separation between the realm of our imaginations and the realm of reality. Mutually exclusive. Never the two shall meet. This assumption has become so fundamental to our conception of reality that it takes a moment to even begin to allow oneself to feel it as something that might be a subjective perception rather than an absolute truth. 

But try this.

Your imagination is there, imagining worlds and scenes and sensations and narratives, and it is utterly and completely held inside of reality. Everything you imagine exists, and where it exists is real. It is not separate from reality, it is a part of reality. It is, in fact, a crucial step in the journey that any possibility must make in order to become manifest. Most notions exist first in the imagination, and pass through a magical non-linear series of transformations through many different stages, before becoming an object, or an experience, or an offering, or a piece of language fully expressed in the world.

Our imagination is where magic happens. and it has been incredibly, effectively disempowering to sever our conception of our imaginal processes and creations from what is considered real. 

One of the major roles of magic in contemporary culture is to re-weave this powerful connection between what we imagine and what is real. Because when we are clear and secure in that interpenetration, anything is actually possible. We enter back into the age old wisdom of knowing that our imagination is in fact the breeding ground of reality, it is where it all begins. And that to spend time there, to exercise the muscles of wild, liberated possibility manufacture, is in fact an absolutely revolutionary and practical activity. We got tricked into thinking that letting our mind wander is unproductive. I call bluff. 

Just think of the implications. If we get convinced to not even bother tending to the fertile ground of our imaginations, the garden of our deepest desires for human liberation and ecstatic shared states of being and total patriarchal, capitalist, hegemonic surrender, will never bear fruit, and the powers that be never have to worry about it overgrowing the neatly manicured suburbs of our current cultural ethos. We never even plant the seeds, because somehow we got convinced that they don’t actually sprout. But I’m here to remind you they do. The only way we ever burst into blossom is if we plant and tend the seeds, and that begins in the fecundity of our wildest imaginations.

One of the most insidious aspects of the endless social media feeds is that our minds no longer get a chance to wander. Our imaginations are becoming colonized by endless streams of content that makes passive what could and should be our most active cognitive functioning. So step away from the screen, let your eyes lose focus and see what happens if you just begin to wonder…

Begin with any actual question of which you are not sure the answer.

And just begin to follow the thread…