In all the discussion of the metacrisis, its causes, consequences and possible solutions, I’ve seen little or no attention given to the great crisis that underscores it, the one crisis to rule them all. From this great crisis do all the myriad metacrises stem. If the metacrisis exists without, then this crisis lurks within. An Infracrisis, if you will. Whilst the metacrisis is a many-headed hydra, the infracrisis is a unicorn. What is the infracrisis? It is the complete breakdown and failure of our deep Imaginal and the degradation of our Imaginal Commons. And if we wish to find a path out of the metacrisis, we must begin here.
When I speak of the Imaginal, I’m drawing Sufi philosopher and mystic Henri Corbin’s description of the “mundus imaginalis”, the Imaginal World. I capitalise the term Imaginal to essentialise it as a realm (although not necessarily a material realm) situated somewhere liminal to the waking world. In the Imaginal dreams, myths, archetypes and gods breathe, take form, and infuse the wisdom of our shared reality. The Imaginal is to the collective what the imagination is to the personal.
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The Imaginal is not synonymous with the collective unconscious. The collective unconscious is a cellar all humanity shares, a repository of its collective forms and symbols dwelling in protean darkness. The Imaginal is what is revealed when the full moon shines through that cellar’s trapdoor and illuminates whatever lies in its path; in its white light is the font of our waking dreams, visions and nightmares. It is our Treasure House of Images.
The Imaginal operates as a form of imaginative Commons. Traditionally, the Commons were open and accessible spaces whose resources were made available for the community’s benefit. Our Imaginal Commons are like gardens that bear cultural fruit in the form of myth, poetry, story, and song. They are the wellspring of our philosophies and Mysteries. They are the hunting grounds of lovers, saints and mystics. Consuming the Imaginal’s fruits grants us closeness to the immanent, archetypal symbols predicating art, culture, and civilisation.
Relationship to the Imaginal Commons also entails a sacred contract. In return for receiving its abundance, we serve as custodians so that its gardens may be renewed and replenished for subsequent generations. We water, weed, and tend to the Commons and sew art and visions for future harvests. We keep our cultural artefacts healthy by tilling the Imaginal Commons’ soils so that future generations may draw upon their fruits.
Indigenous writer Tyson Yunkaporta writes of the responsibilities of this custodianship:
We have to be careful of the metaphors we use to make meaning, because metaphors are the language of spirit and that’s how we operate in our fields of existence either to increase or decrease connectedness within creation. We are the custodians who are uniquely gifted to do this work, so we need to do it consciously and with mastery, within cultural frameworks aligned with the patterns of creation. If we allow the I-am-greater-than deception to enter this process, all is lost.
We have absconded from the responsibilities of our custodianship and all is lost.
Like the Commons of yore, the Imaginal Commons have been ringfenced, privatised, and overdeveloped. Their once-abundant gardens have been replaced with monocultural cash crops as late-stage extractive capitalism sells us the same highly processed, low-caloric cultural kibble over and over again. Fed on a low-sustenance cultural diet, we’ve become too imaginatively malnourished to regenerate the Common’s once fertile soil.
What remains are strip-mined and arid lands at massive risk of ecological and environmental collapse. A garden after a long and withering drought, yellow and thorny plants grow in its once fecund soils. These fruits bear little fruit or beauty. When was the last time you watched a science fiction movie that wasn’t dystopian? The Imaginal Commons lack the conditions to sustain beautiful and inspiring utopian visions. Our future visions are almost as barren as the soil they grew from.
It’s not hard to see how we’ve degraded our Imaginal Commons: more American children want to be influencers than astronauts; we hold more information and knowledge in the palm of our hand than the entirety of humanity has had in its short existence, but are drowning in the shallows of modern-day life; in our media, millennia worth of underlying myth and story patterns are sold back to us as money-making franchises; the retreat into tribalism and nationalism because we cannot even agree to disagree on a progressive, unified vision of human culture and evolution; the retreat into radicalisation and conspiracy thinking; the inability of the best minds of our generation to work their way through the world’s wicked problems. And on it goes.
Modern life has left our nervous systems and attention spans so fried that we cannot even access the deep states required to access the Imaginal Commons. When was the last time you wandered as lonely as a cloud?
How will we Dream our way out of the metacrisis with these environmental conditions? How did we even let this happen in the first place?
It’s well known that the planet is experiencing unprecedented ecological loss. We are aware of the vast wildlife and habitat loss presently occurring around the globe. At the same time, there is a massive loss of languages. It is estimated that over the past 100 years, the number of human languages has dwindled by a third. We are also experiencing an unprecedented reduction of culture from diversity to monoculture. This monoculturalism isn’t just happening in the West, although Western culture is a massive driver. We can see it manifesting in the dominance of Han culture in China, the Hinduvata nationalist movement in India and the various pan-Islamic movements. Cultural domination has always been a driver of civilisation. With the rise of social media and the corporatisation of culture, the ability to drown out quieter cultural voices has never been easier.
As language and cultures tend towards the monocultural, humanity’s repository of ideas, symbols, images and archetypes dwindles. Monocultural movements are, by nature, regressive. I suspect it’s also a combination of Western rational materialism and American hegemony and the extractive nature of capitalism to exploit and sell everything it comes upon. Perhaps the plundering of our Imaginal Commons began with privatising the English Commons. Fencing off wild public spaces was a metaphor for losing our imaginative wild spaces.
The Imaginal has become corporatised and commodified. Look at every Marvel movie you’ve ever watched; the Hero’s Journey is no longer a motif for the individual’s journey towards maturation and individuation but a safe formula for printing dollars. The Hero’s Journey has been hollowed out, drained of all meaning, and sold back to us at the ticket counter on discount Tuesday.
When the Imaginal Commons is gone, what will be left to dream? Capitalism’s end game is a shopping mall where all our sacred motifs are sold back to us as trademarked merchandise. When the Vandals sack our empire they will arrive at the Treasure House of Images to find its cupboards bare, contents already plundered.
The principle of ecological diversity argues that diverse ecosystems are resilient ecosystems. Diversity allows multiple avenues and strategies for survival in the face of various multifaceted threats. It’s a case of not putting all your eggs in one basket. In the face of the metacrisis, we need all the diversity and depth we can get, yet we keep coming up short. Too late do we dredge the wisdom of previously colonised cultures to see if we can find anything that might save us from our own inanity.
As we ringfence culture and make the world safe, predictable, and kid-friendly, we remove ourselves from the dangers of the Imaginal but also its bounty. “Beware unearned wisdom,” wrote Jung. The Imaginal cannot be made safe or secure. Our Imaginal is wild, dangerous, frightening and terrifying. It is as awful as much as it is lustrous.
We need new myths, a regenerative myth. Wrote Joseph Campbell:
And what it will have to deal with will be exactly what all myths have dealt with—the maturation of the individual, from dependency through adulthood, through maturity, and then to the exit; and then how to relate to this society and how to relate this society to the world of nature and the cosmos. That’s what the myths have all talked about, and what this one’s got to talk about. But the society it’s got to talk about is the planet’s society. And until that gets going, you don’t have anything.
We have yet to find this myth, but the hour is calling upon us to search for it. We must go deep and put it all on the line. It’s time to take the risk and reclaim our Commons. Without risk, we receive no vision and no new myths. And we need new visions and myths to escape from the metacrisis.