If all things flow and one can never step into the same river twice—Heraclitus’s phrase is, I believe, a brilliant evocation of the core reality of the right hemisphere’s world--one will always be taken unawares by experience since, nothing ever being repeated, nothing can ever be known.
— Iain McGilchrist, The Master and the Emissary, p. 31.
I stand barefoot at the water’s edge; my toes dipped into the stream. If they are symbolic of anything, it’s that the body already participates in the relational matrix. Our toes have always been in the stream. We have always been included. Even before we recognize it, belonging is already true, which is another way of saying reality is relational before it is conceptual. If, ontologically, no single phenomenon can be isolated, what we are always perceiving are shifting relationships, the interaction of innumerable ongoing relational events rippling throughout the matrix. Things in any given moment are only their most obvious expression. The body is an expression of a changing relationship with the world by which identity is sustained. If separation is an ontological error, then the notion of an independent self is derivative, not even a verifiable fact.
The aggregate knowledge on brain function says the right hemisphere is more at ease with the constancy of change, while the left hemisphere, so readily objectifying the world, is more inclined to stop the river, to know. Yet to know anything, there must be a knower. Moments must be extracted; experience must be reified, pinned and collected for analysis, and filed as memory. If belonging is already true, then my left hemisphere, by virtue of instinctively abstracting and re-presenting, tries to convince me that we can step into the same river twice, that experience can be known.
The left brain collects a library of experience with which, in combination with the right brain, it reflects, plans, and designs. This is one of the most distinctive and useful functions of the human brain, which presents an ongoing dilemma of sorting out dueling agendas to collect and categorize experience or to slip the restraints of what we already know and return to not-knowing, the tabula rasa. Whether the left hemisphere accepts something new, whether it admits what didn’t work in the past, or powers ahead at the risk of harm, or even death, is not always predictable. This is one of the most challenging uncertainties we live with.
Allen Ginsberg said, ‘You can’t even step into the same river once.’ Why, you ask? For one thing, except in the modern left-brain-driven domain of fixed-is-ness, there’s no such thing as same. There is no view abstracted from the river. The moment you breathe, you’re already implicated in its flow. Observing the flow and deciding to participate are not sequential events. However you look at it, wading in, swimming, or floating free is participation. By the time your foot enters the water, the river has already changed. Your body has changed. The intention you stepped in with is already an action. Even “once” evaporates. Reality moves so quickly that the grasping mind can’t keep up. The only way we can keep pace with or make sense of experience is to overcome left-brain dominance and (re)integrate right-brain awareness, global, sensuous, intuitive, that already knows it belongs. Even though the right hemisphere is grasping the whole, sensing and processing the emotional character of experience, consciousness can barely keep up. Your toesmight believe you are stepping into the same river, but you, the river, have already exceeded such rational formulations.
We have inherited centuries of exploration of the archetypal, the mythological, the cognitively elusive, and in many respects the ineffable terrain of the deep brain. To the modern ethic of separation, materialism, individualism, monotheistic patriarchy, the panentheistic belief in all gods has never been acceptable. Due to what twentieth-century French philosopher Henry Corbin calls the Western ‘agnostic reflex,’ the idea that the world is a projection of the fractured self is dismissed as an unscientific dream, an irrelevant archaic fantasy. Because it’s not a measurable resource to be extracted?
Similarly, every utopian dream is dismissed as insubstantial, a figment of the imagination. The original commons, the natural world, may not have been originally conceived as anything other than material. But as the evolution of consciousness and the meta-crisis now grip every domain, and because images of empowerment, embodiment, freedom, safety, and a common spiritual destination are always generating in the imaginal field, we find ourselves on a much deeper journey into a greater understanding of what the commons truly is, how to create it, live it, and protect it from the predations of capital.
The commons includes the physical, the conscious and the unconscious, the existential and what Corbin called the imaginal. He made a sharp distinction between the presumed unreality of imagination and the substance of the imaginal. As a scholar of Eurasian mysticism, he was familiar with the Seven Climes of Islam, a set of pre-Columbian geographical designations of the known world. The Eighth Clime was/is a poetic augmentation of the physical map to include the domain of consciousness, the imaginal universe. Corbin called it the ‘cognition of the planet,’ in which we all share the status of captives who long to return home to a common metaphysical origin.
The imaginal is not fantasy. It is the preternatural realm of meaning. Where meaning arises before conception. Even though it cannot be perceived by the senses as any other physical body would be, it is as real as anything discernible. The imaginal may be difficult to put into words because it is intangible, especially if the effort to give it language is deliberate. It takes practice to be so undeliberate as to become fluent with the imaginal because its descriptors don’t fit into conventional linguistic categories. It flies with iridescent wings. Its view is grand and particular, sharp and boundless, ancient and wild. Its reality is not really anything at all.
Similarly, the Buddhist Shambhala kingdom of the future is neither fantasy nor substance. It is a timeless realization of universal participation that only comes as the mano-mayakaya, the ‘mind-made body,’ is realized through disciplined meditation and visualization. Mano-maya refers to the subtle body of existence, also neither ethereal nor material. It is the precious source of ultimate wakefulness, an essential aspect of the Buddhist cosmological system. The subtle body is sometimes considered an intermediate existence between the imaginal and the physical, a formless repository of wisdom beyond knowing, the part of you that knows the truth before you do.
Is this not a description of the broad explorations of consciousness emerging everywhere today—the investigations of the formless, evidenced by the continuous emergence and decentralized propagation of intuitive truths we’ve always known? Are we not driven by the promise of transforming personal ego-driven clinging for the sake of the universal? Are we not captives of a system that cannot reform itself, that tightens its claim on every relationship that matters? That courts extinction as it edges toward unspeakable harm? The image of return is central to all these investigations, the construction and the institutional invention of re-imagined human and more-than-human relationships. The concept of individual liberation no longer holds. We wake up together because together has never been otherwise.
Corbin speaks of visionary tales and enlightened acts whose ultimate object is arrival in the ‘country of non-where,’ a no-place and a no-time in which, ‘no matter how widely you may journey, you always return to the same point of departure.’ No matter how elaborate, utopian, emotionally and spiritually captivating the mystical journey may be, no matter the frequency or duration of rituals traversing collective imaginal territory, we must still wake up in the morning and find our ground, manage our physical and psychic resources, refreshed and determined to midwife a new world.
Here is where an essential Tibetan Dzogchen principle describes exactly where we are and where we are going: the paradox of ‘being there while getting there.’ This is the essence of practice because all of us are caught somewhere between fully relaxing into the vast and singular expanse of fundamental awareness where isolated phenomena no longer exist, and where all struggle has dissolved, and being lost in the captivating display of constant ego-gratification. We are ever on a path of actualizing the formations of the imaginal in a world deeply entrenched in division and suffering. The question of the moment is the degree to which we become specifically aware of our condition and act skillfully to transform it. But essentially, those skillful means must surely address the influence of struggle that accelerates the swing between the two. Indeed, every moment spent in the sublime belonging of ego-less presence reminds us that struggle is a comically poignant waste of energy.
The imaginal is therefore not a place. It is not a thought, a goal, or even a process, all of which suggest substance or linearity. I could make a wild claim and say the imaginal is the universal matrix of aspiration and respiration, the fabric of love that brings being into being, the nature of nature, as material as a handful of soil and as insubstantial as a dream. In some sense, the World is already the Eighth Clime, the Shambhala Kingdom. The imaginal is a bridge world beneath cognition, the pre-cognitive world to come, the hidden capacity we share for enlightened activity. We are already there even as we are still getting there, which means we are always under its influence. So, the commons, imaginal, material, immaterial, both and neither, is without center or boundary. It is the river of belonging, the subtle home and source of a multiverse of possibilities, a world of potential beneath the sensible world.
If we were fully awake, we wouldn’t worry about getting there. Being there is full presence to the indivisible, the absence (emptiness) of conceptualization, and the spontaneous generation of enlightened activity. Getting thereacknowledges not only our containment within duality, but our evolution toward a rebalancing of brain function. The view of absence is a vacation from containment, finding rest and recovery in the uncontainable. The entanglement of the two is the alchemy of unity and separation in a troubled world, living with the intrinsic tension of the imaginal and the material commons, still learning to make the choices necessary to actualize the truth of universal belonging.
Holding the paradox of being there (the right hemisphere) while getting there (the left) requires some familiarity with the true dimension of the imaginal commons. To tread this terrain only requires certainty about one thing: uncertainty. The many modes of possible participation in this drama encompass time and the timeless, presence and absence, love, joy, grief, the ecstatic union of wisdom and compassion, and the hell of separation, the endless hunger of desire, never having enough. We are all on a journey to nowhere, tempered (and fueled) by the knowledge that mortality places a limit on participation, that we exist in a universe of irreversible consequences. The luxury of stating every moment anew is reserved for our digital companions. Here I’m not referring to mortality as the loss of the world at the end of life, but as a constant presence to that loss such that it naturally, like breath, deepens our belonging and gives meaning to time.
For Corbin, the promise of the imaginal was that the reality that was once internal and hidden would eventually emerge and transform the outer world. That the spiritual world would once again be recognized as the universal container. And that, personally, we would then know ourselves to be un-containable. So, in a sense, the destination of spiritual growth is no destination at all. There is no there there.
By becoming more sensitive to the relative influence of hemispheric function, we can more consciously explore capacities previously relegated to the periphery. And the more sensitized and adept we will become at finding expression for what the imaginal holds. Since reality is relational, then we already belong to the weave of sensation, imagination, and the flow of phenomena, the commons of being. We are already participating, consciously or not, in the irrepressible evolution of consciousness. We don’t need a theory of the river. We are already the river, and it is us.
ཤིན་ཏུ་རྣལ་འབྱོར་
Shintu naljor kyi tekpa
Practicing the primordial union of mind
Note:
Corbin, Henry, Mundus Imaginalis, or the Imaginary and the Imaginal, excerpted from Swedenborg and Esoteric Islam, trans. Leonard Fox, Swedenborg Foundation, 1995.
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