Practicing Possibility at the Threshold of Despair

The Wild Imagination, Quantum Physics, & New Sacred Dreams

“In re-visioning our ideas of the world we live in, we change our perception of the possibilities available in our world, thus opening up previously unimagined pathways of creative and effective action.” ~ Paul Levy

Dear Ones, I am about to get nerdy. No apologies, just disclosure.

Please stay and play with me…

Archetypal psychologist James Hillman wrote that we are always in the embrace of an idea. Everything we do grows out of an idea, every action emerges from an imaginal landscape. In this way, we might begin to perceive the tangible world drenched in the imaginal, nourished by the Imagination.

Right here at the start, I am inviting us to play with this possibility: contrary to the positivistic materialistic position, the Imagination is primary and just as real (if not more real) as the material world. It is almost as if the Imagination ~ the invisible, metaphoric, mythic ~ is the soil out of which the material and the tangible grow.

This is a very transgressive suggestion to a culture that insists on the primacy of the material world. It is very transgressive to a culture that insists on a Newtonian world where everything is solid and separate, an unaffected objective world that can be observed from the outside. And yet, for over a century science has shown us a different world.

But before we get into that, let’s explore the mythic landscape we are wandering.

In other words, let’s spiral into the soil of it all: the stories.

Once upon a time many moons ago, Newton declared that everything was solid and separate. A new world was imagined. It was a world where time and space were absolute. It was a world where the Universe was determined and independent of its inhabitants. It told a story of the Universe standing in its immovable and permanent truths and of its objective observers uncovering its laws.

But myths live and die, they are Nature after all.

New myths emerged from the soil of the Imagination.

Einstein imagined and elaborated on something he called the theory of relativity. Here, time and space were not absolute, and measurements could not exist outside of method and context. This story told us that there is no one objective place from which to see the Universe. And then quantum physics took the story further: maybe there is no one objective Universe to see.

The seer and the seen required a third thing: the seeing.

Double slit experiments suggested a responsive and dynamic reality, where photons appeared as wave or particle depending on if and how they were being observed. Stories started quietly spreading of strange entanglements and the possibilities of multiverses being created at each moment that a particle is observed and localized.

Quantum physics suggested a world where subatomic particles seemed to travel in time and space as if those did not actually exist. They seemed to know when they were going to be, were being, or had been observed and to create the present moment from that knowing.

Is what we are made of particle or wave? Maybe both. Some have suggested we are made of a third thing. It is almost as if subatomic particles act more like metaphor than matter, portals into mysterious truths rather than the truths themselves.

What if what we have been told was not real, metaphor, became the most real thing?

What if matter is made of metaphor?

Let’s continue playing and spiraling together…

Once upon a time many moons ago, the world had endured an industrial revolution, a decline in collective religion, and an increase in a positivistic materialistic worldview. It was a time of profound loss of earthy instinctual roots. It was a time of mass extinction of symbols, and with them metaphoric meaning. From the center of this wasteland emerged another myth, like a sapling growing out of a crack on the sidewalk.

It told stories of a great Unconscious, a creative autonomous matrix of our being. Invisible psychic presences once again began to coagulate out of the mists of the Imagination and turn into form. We heard stories of an objective archetypal psyche that scaffolds and shapes our realities. A realm we perceive not directly but through its effects upon us.

At the same time, we began to hear stories about matter that is dark or transparent. That is, matter we cannot perceive because it does not respond to light in the same way as baryonic matter (the kind of matter we can see) but we know it through its effects. We know it because it seems to scaffold and shape the material world. We cannot make the visible world make sense without this invisible realm.

Material and psychospiritual worlds met as both named the phenomenology, the lived experience, of a Universe that seems to consist mostly of what we do not know and where the visible is shaped and moved by what is invisible.

The separation of spirit and matter were deeply challenged as new myths told us stories of a participatory responsive reality. The exclusive worship of what is visible was challenged by profound reverence for the power of the invisible ~ dark matter, dreams, metaphor, gravity. The exile of the acausal and exaltation of the causal were disrupted by shared stories of synchronicities.

It was as if we were witnessing the invisible and the visible in a strange mirroring dance.

The belief that the Universe exists independently and objectively outside of our participation is outdated and harmful. In each moment, we are being made and we are making. These stories tell us of a reality that is responsive, relational, and co-creative. Each particle is in a continual state of communion and response.

At the threshold of collective despair, I am reminded of the infinite possibilities of living in a creative participatory world. In the places of profound fear, I remember we are each an intricate inevitable part of this mystery. We are not outside of the universe observing it.

We are being made and making.
We are loving and losing.
We are destroying and creating.

For every time I hear about the collapse of what we know, I am devoting myself to also remembering this, the potentialities of what we are made of. My son recently commented in passing on the hopelessness of the future. My heart broke. We will fail our children if we forget to imagine. If we only accept the end without dreaming of a new beginning.

What world do we want to make?

I don’t know if we will make it. But I know we must keep imagining new sacred dreams for our world.

I don’t think it is cool right now to hope and imagine a better future. I fear when I speak this way, that I will be misunderstood and accused of sugar coating, bypassing, reducing, ignoring. Oh well. I take that risk for the sake of the possibility of new sacred dreams. Because I think we must imagine the future we long for and need, even as we grieve and tell the truth of the horrors around us.

I experience profound relief when I remember that we don’t know most things. We don’t know almost everything. I picture sweet toddlers sincerely explaining the world to their parents and peers. Earnest and so unable to understand what is happening. We are those toddlers.

From that perspective, everything we know is wrong, absurdly incomplete. Everything we know is play. Everything we know is dancing over the abyss of unknowing. Within the embrace of that Unknown, may we name the catastrophes and also enact the power of the Imagination to create space for the unknown possibilities. In other words, we make room for dreaming and for the unmet potentialities of our unfolding world.

What if:

We spend time every day imagining a world we want our children to inhabit. Every time we hear ourselves or someone else talk about the rise of fascism, climate collapse, the perils of late-stage capitalism, we allow ourselves to feel the weight and sorrow of it all and take whatever action we can take, and also, call up our courage and vision to stitch the grief to hope: Imagine the possibilities. Let ourselves dream.

What if:

This world grows out of the soil of the Wild Imagination. Matter is metaphor and myth turned visible.

Remember that the Universe is not something permanent and determined. We are making and being made. One tiny particle still responds and creates moment to moment. We are those particles. We are metaphor and matter. We are the world making itself.

What I am trying to say it this:

I am inviting you to join me in this devotional practice: To keep imagining and dreaming a more loving inclusive thriving world for all beings.

To practice possibility at the threshold of despair.

Upcoming Offerings

The Mythic Imagination & The Stories Living Through Us: Three Sessions (Virtual) in March

A Journey Into the Creative Wild: An in person retreat in April

Certificate In Depth Practices: Cohort starts in March