Imagination and Revolution
I know in my heart that our lives are shaped at some deep level by what some of us have come to call “ideas.” Most of these take the form of unconscious assumptions about how experience habitually unfolds. Most people live most of the time in trance-like states of semi-consciousness. I certainly do. These “ideas,” habits, assumptions and expectations generally both shape and conform to “reality” as it manifests for us. Thus we can make it through the day without major disruptions. Sometimes we are surprised: Where did I leave my glasses? Who is that driving away in my car!? Why is She screaming at me!?? Oh my God, am I about to die???!!!
When we are startled out of our comfortable daze, we adjust. Usually not much. Sometimes radically. The current state of things on our planet, in so far as we can know it, is bleak. We need to radically adjust. At the very least some of us can see pretty clearly that capitalism run-amok is ruinous for life on earth. “Move fast and break things” proves to be an unsustainable way of managing global technologies. What to do?
Many things are necessary, all at once. My tiny contribution over the years has been to teach “environmental studies” and biology. But also, and maybe more importantly, to prod people into thinking more deeply about the fundamental assumptions that govern our societies and our behaviors. Sometimes this is called “philosophy” and I guess that’s fine. But that sounds pretty bloodless and abstract. For as long as I can remember it’s meant far more than that for me. I am certain that “ideas” shape our immediate experience to a degree that most of us are unaware of. A full account of this relationship between “thought” and “reality” is probably impossible, but the attempt lies at the root of the intellectual history of every culture. “Our” culture—late stage Capitalism—is in need of revolutionary change, perhaps actual abolition. And therefore, we are in need of a profound change in how we understand pretty much everything.
If “thought” and “reality” are inextricably linked in a complex web that is likely beyond our grasp (& maybe they are in fact the same), then major changes in one will manifest in the other in unexpected ways. One way to express this is to simply to say that “thinking” can change your experience of reality. Maybe not in one sudden blast, though that can happen, but at least slowly over time as you begin to find access to modes of experience and sensation that had been inaccessible before. This is what education is supposed to be about. “Thinking” in this deep and profound sense is not abstract—it is more like poetry, or even loving. It is what we can call the thought of the heart.
It is also what I’ve been working to clarify for 30 years by long attention to Creative Imagination as it was articulated by Henry Corbin. I think that the most inclusive and useful frame for a Theory of Everything is “imagination.” … But wait. No. I am not looking for a Theory of anything. I’m looking for a way of life, a stance towards reality. Corbin’s term psychocosmology is for me a primal expression of such a fundamental orientation. It lets us begin with the presumption that psyche and cosmos are not disjunct. That in itself dissolves many of the problems underlying the culture of modern technology. No doubt it produces others, but revolutions of necessity do that.
This is part of the background for the work we’ve been doing in these online courses over the past several years. It’s a continuation of the work I began long ago when I quite consciously turned away from the paths followed by Varela, Thompson, Kauffman and Theise (see the previous post) and began my long apprenticeship to Henry Corbin. It’s a revolutionary enterprise, devoted to punching holes in human-centered ways of living, and to knocking down self-imposed barriers that prevent us from living more freely, with more life, with more love, with more sympathy for every being.
As I have discovered during the past year, such a path brings unexpected challenges. How could it not? All manner of things I never would have expected to have to welcome into my reality are now clamoring chaotically for attention. This is uncomfortable, and difficult, but exciting and invigorating. Those who have been followng along this year have watched it happen. It all came rushing in: the paranormal and UFOs, the high weirdness of psychedelic and non-psychedelic reality warps in 1970s California, the encounter with the spirit worlds of Gabonese plant medicine, the eruption of God-self-consciousness in the life and work of Jeremy Vaeni, and from there a renewed appreciation for the curmudgeonly but essential work of Peter Kingsley.
It would be easier to just keep talking about Henry Corbin, and I will probably do a course on him now and then, but the world he opens for us is so much bigger than I had imagined. So even if in his late years he was terribly worried about what he had unleashed by bringing the mundus imaginalis to Eranos, and so to James Hillman and on to me, I will take heart by recalling that although Corbin tried to deny it, his friend Denis de Rougemont reminded him that as a young man he had echoed in his own way the Marxist revolutionaries of those years, saying “Heretics of the world Unite!” And Peter Lamborn Wilson, who studied for a time with Corbin in Teheran writes this:
Years ago I met someone who knew a journalist who had been interviewing him in his apartment in Paris in May, 1968. Suddenly there was a noise outside; they went to the window and looked out at one of the famous street riots of that famous month. “You know,” Corbin mused, “many peope might be surprised to know that my sympathies are with those throwing the stones—not with the police!”
So come with us on the next stage of the journey. The only thing you have to fear, is fear itself. You can read about the course and register here: