About
The Imaginal Realm Project
The Imaginal Realm Project is a decentralised collective of leaders exploring how connection to the imaginal realm can be propagated on a global scale.
We are doing this through:
- creating opportunities for people to have direct experiences of the imaginal realm
- researching this aspect of experience on an individual and collective level
- sharing the knowledge and frameworks that help people understand reality better when it includes the imaginal aspect of experience
We’re interested in practical ways in which an understanding or experience of the imaginal realm can open up a radically new way of being for people.
Experiential
The project is necessarily experiential. The imaginal realm can’t be understood purely through the intellect, it has to be embodied and experienced.
Everyone’s projects include working with the experiential aspect of the imaginal; both embodying it themselves and leading or guiding others into connection with it.
David Lassiter describes his direct experience of the imaginal, “The imaginal is an intersection of creativity, flow, receptivity, sensitivity, openness and alignment.
I’ve encountered the imaginal most in my life when I am deliberately involved in a creative project. Another early portal for me was psychedelics and the associative intuitive energies that came crashing down on me and out of me in those experiences. Lots of immaterial, imaginal realms can also emerge through meditation practice that are very meaning saturated.
Most recently experience of the imaginal emerges in my relationships, there is a sense of fine-grained attunement, a listening and sensing. The imaginal feels like tapping into a noosphere or an existing field and my humanity is an access point for that sphere.”
Problem-Solving
The imaginal realm has the capacity to increase the possibility for radically new solutions to all kinds of problems to emerge. From deep therapeutic insights that can reorganise the way one sees the world to understanding the deepest workings of the Universe.
Imaginal practice is in part a shadow work process – it is revealing what was previously obscured from view or not being included in experience. It has the power to profoundly impact people’s ways of looking and ways of being in the world by revealing new layers of truth and possibility.
The project aims to give people access to this way of working with experience and to open people to a more mystical connection with life and creativity.
“To create a new world, we need to nurture our ability to foresee it,” Cheryl Hsu, on her project An Infrastructure of Care for the Oracular.
Mystery
The mysterious nature of experience needs to be honoured and included for the imaginal realm to open up.
We are taking an explorative approach to the project itself, as well as advocating for the value of allowing for mystery in experience.
Joost Vervoort describes, “In the dominant social imaginary, things have to be concrete and defined. There is no space for ambiguity and vagueness. Through imaginal ways of being, people can move from having concrete ideas about the world to being in touch with undifferentiated potential. They’re coming out of ideology and into a kind of pregnant void, where they are more in touch with the unknown and the unknowable.
From here, experience is fluid, open, constantly changing, unknowable and, importantly, you are a part of that story and unfolding. It reveals itself as it goes along and part of what is being produced and created is you. A natural presence opens up from this where you recognise the core dignity and importance of all experience and existence. It can be at once deeply important and serious and deeply playful and absurd.”
Sam Hinds describes how collective attunement to the imaginal realm can unfold, “The blueprint of what is already present can reveal itself in imaginal form, which allows for the possibility that things have a life of their own. It’s important to value mystery in that process of emergence and be open to that which can exceed current comprehension. It can have its own logic to it and within imaginal causality, time frames can jump around.
In a capitalist paradigm, mystery is meaningless and valueless because things need to be explicit and controllable, but sitting in the not knowing together allows something new to take form.”
Individuation & the Collective
The imaginal bridges the gap between what is often considered paradoxical – everyone is at once a uniquely individual expression of their own Universe of experience and they are also one part of the greater whole.
Being in touch with the imaginal makes it possible to find the balance between creating the space for full individual expression, while also feeling the ways that reality is innately interconnected.
Being in touch with the imaginal allows people to be sovereign in their own experience, to recognise the dignity of other people’s experience and to feel the interconnected nature of reality on a social and Universal level. We are interested in:
- studying the science of this reality
- communicating the richness of this paradigm
- researching what is required to initiate people on their individuation journey
- creating the infrastructure and systems that make the imaginal realm more accessible for more people
“When imagination degrades into a minor appendage of the intellect, the future can only be what the intellect already sees.” River Kenna