Our Solipsistic Society must Die
Addressing Reality Blindness is our Only Next Step…here’s a Kick Off Start
Excerpted from Ivo J. Mensch in Perspectiva
To free ourselves, it seems like we’ll have to dismantle our inner machine that commodifies our attention, steers our behavior, constrains our imagination…
–our internalized Social Imaginary of late-capitalist modernity.
If societal solipsism is reproduced through collective self-perpetuating beliefs…how we can approach moving beyond our predicament?
A Solipsistic Society is not a mere collection of self-centered individuals, although that is one view.
Instead, it refers to collective beliefs about what is real and possible, as though everyone is wearing an epistemic straightjacket; unable to imagine how things can be known differently.
Solipsism deals with the problem of the self being trapped in the self…by the self…in a kind of perpetual self-reference.
This closed loop can lead to the collective belief that only individual perception, thoughts, and experience can be known to exist and therefore to be considered real.
Solipsism can be grouped into two categories:
ontological: dealing with reality directly…says only the self is real
epistemological: dealing with the knowledge of reality…says only the self is knowable.
The condition of late modernity is Solipsistic in a Collective sense. The unit of analysis is the Social Imaginary, which can be taken as our shared psychocultural home and as forming the limits and shape of our collective awareness…focusing our attention in fixed directions. This is a valuable concept because it speaks to the roots of fundamental problems that underlie many of our collective action problems, our immunity to change, which is compounded by an atrophied faculty of the imagination.
The history of Western philosophy also has a long tradition of reality-denying -only taking what can be experienced as real- thereby forming cognitive horizons that make it harder for our imagination to go beyond. The widely quoted claim that it is ‘easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism’ captures the problem of societal solipsism and the constraints the system puts around our imagination well.
We like to think we are free, but we are also kept entranced in this dream we call reality, from which we are now being rudely awakened by the really Real, which reasserts itself as the manifestations of the Metacrisis.
The opposite of stuckness is what I call collective unfolding.
If we accept that in the West, we are in the process of losing our current, late-modern Social Imaginary as our stable home, as it is now appearing to liquify under the reassertion of the Real and pressures of the manifold crises, then we’ll have to learn to be in Right Relationship with the Real. We can overcome our stuckness by learning to creatively participate in its flows, processes, and unfoldment into new patterns of unfolding and decay, which must include new forms of our own Selfhood and Knowing.
Entering and embodying unfoldment as a collective praxis can move us from our solipsistic ways to becoming a Sympoietic Society instead –one capable of an ongoing making of new worlds, opening up unknown spaces of possibility and realms of experience.
Sympoiesis is a logic of creative making-with, systems and ecologies driving each other’s unfolding in open and adaptive ways, not afraid to outgrow familiar ways of being.
Given our predicament, this is no time to be shy. Life has taught me that there are imaginative ways of coming unstuck and to develop the trust and courage needed to enter into collective unfolding. This is what I would like to explore in this essay, and in my design for course work for Perspectiva over the next few years.
This essay is about ways of finding a different world collectively, and how my personal life turned out to speak to universal themes.
Finding a different world seems like a good idea. The world we have, the one I call the Solipsistic Society (SoSo for short) is increasingly entranced by a technological imagination and its shiny new products, but ensnared in a frantic inertia of its own making. Living in the SoSo bubble is nice and cozy for many in the developed world, but the Really Real is pulling the warm blanket called modernity off our snoozing bodies. Our society, despite featuring some real progress over the centuries, also induced a slow dulling of our grasp of causality.
Seeing the need to get out of bed before the blanket gets pulled off, and imagining better ways of being is broadly what binds the people I collaborate with –the collective of thinkers, artists, recovering academics, activists and seekers called Perspectiva. Many are self-taught mavericks who can perhaps be called post-progressive; those who no longer believe that traditional academia, politics or activism will create the change we need. Together, we try to make better sense of the relationship between our systems, souls and society. My background, steeped in spiritual practice means I mostly come from soul, but I’ve always been into systems and I even tried society.
The three are related, or more precisely –entangled. It’s a bit of a buzz word in some circles these days, but a necessary one, because we can start to think about change and our agency in more imaginative ways. Once we said: if you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem. Entanglement says: if you’re not part of the problem, you can’t be part of the solution.
We know change is needed on a large, systems scale, but we seem unable to use the tools of adaptation or we’re entrained into accepting the way things are…that we can’t imagine being different or being able to change as society and individuals. We’re taking the trees for granted and we’re only able to imagine turning them into plywood to make a profit.
This invisible barrier and our inertia are what I am taking aim at in the hope of getting us to change direction. We don’t want this, but change just seems so hard. Why?
What follows are some pointers, intuitions and insights serving as grounding for development of practices, focusing on three interrelated domains of inquiry:
the Social Imaginary and its history, anatomy, dynamics and ontology and how it produces our particular modern subjectivity, constraining our imagination and cognition with its social structures, narratives and other sticky cultural content.
Temporics concerns our experience of time, its ontology and how one mode, linear time, has come to dominate and keeps us trapped in a narrow affordance space of possibility.
Logos and Deep Continuity; terms originating from the world of spirituality that I want to repurpose as domains of inquiry to explore how perceived reality comes into being and what its potential and possibility are. The practice, Logoics, is also the knowledge of participating in the dynamic unfolding of reality by discovering its patterns and designing new action protocols that can produce different outcomes
Together, these three can help us break with Solipsism and enter a process of collective unfolding into imaginaries that are in Right Relationship with Reality and supportive of the flourishing of human and nonhuman worlds alike -through the praxis of embodied, reflexive inquiry.
The Machine is Us
As I proposed above…
Our society is avoiding reality…
by keeping our awareness mostly fixed on ourselves…
as part of a Social Imaginary that is no longer taking cues from the Real.
It has become a collection of memetic bubbles; a mix of comforting stories, misinfo, cognitive dissonance, bias, magical-tribal thinking, confusion, habits of mind, social conventions, constructed illusions and ideology. It recycles tons of bullshit thrown at us, primarily by politicians, pr-companies and advertising. It’s not hard to imagine that this symbolic load on our minds has only increased with the advent of the internet, the appearance of the smartphone and our cultural shift online. Our lives are increasingly mediated by screens and algorithmic governance.
Today, data being produced and consumed worldwide. is 50-fold of what it was in 2010 and is set to almost double again between 2022 and 2025. A large portion of that data is behavioral and used to train bots that send us targeted, personalized advertising to turn us into perfect consumers or the right kind of voter, if the goal is to swing an election. The Social Imaginary, powered by invasive technology, using insights into our behavior and a convergence with capitalism, has become a powerful teacher of desire.
Some commentators have called this total system, in which culture, technology and capitalism have merged, The Machine.
This name captures it quite well if we realize that the invasive nature of the system has turned our own bodies and minds not only into machine parts, but also into its fuel and product. Our minds and imagination, and therefore our approaches to change and visions for the future are its products too.
To free ourselves, it seems like we’ll have to dismantle our inner machine –the internalized version of the imaginary of late-capitalist modernity that commodifies our attention, steers our behavior and constrains our imagination.
Why do I keep dropping the term
Social Imaginary?
Why not just say culture?
Because culture is still kind of in your face, whereby the imaginary is more in the background and out of view, but it has real causal impact. It’s the difference between weather and climate, or emotion and mood. The imaginary is more temporally extended and colors our lives with a diffuse sense of meaning, helping us to make sense of and to ‘feel’ situated in our lifetime. It employs grand narratives such as ‘progress’, and allows for a host of social practices that uphold these narratives and our faith in them. Before moving on it’s helpful to ground the notion of the social imaginary, using some quotes from influential thinkers who developed the term in various ways.
The German sociologist Jurgen Habermas wrote of:
The Social Imaginary is a massive background consensus of an intersubjectively shared lifeworld.
It is the reason why we walk through life thinking we know what the world is and how we should act in it. It’s energy efficient and makes belonging easier too.
But our paradigm has changed while the world remained the same.
We are in another world and are failing to change the paradigm.
With the material world
reasserting its existence, the denial of the Real by our solipsistic imaginary is now an existential threat.
The idea that we can have infinite growth on a finite planet is perhaps the best illustration of our solipsism –an imaginary divorced from the reality and truths of matter. But we’re failing to install the Anthropocene upgrade because our Wi-Fi connection is busy downloading TikTok marshmallows.
Losing the Real
We believe the world is the way it is because we experience it that way. And we experience the world that way because we believe it is that way. That’s textbook Solipsism.
Historians of philosophy usually point to Descartes as the culprit, as he is seen as the father of the mind–body split, the one who collapsed ontology and epistemology with his I think therefore I am. In his sincere efforts to arrive at objective knowledge, thinking became equated with Being, but the former became phenomenologically primary from then on and was picked up by the empiricists Locke and Hume, who added that only what we experience with the senses should be considered true, and onwards via Kant, to the phenomenologists and postmodern linguists. Of these, Wittgenstein sums it up when he commands us to not talk about the world, but to talk about talk of the world. The view that we cannot know reality but only its representations came to underpin much theory in other social disciplines.
The Body
Solipsism is not just of our own making, but we are also in a sense hardwired for it as a result of our biological evolution according to Paul Marshall, quoting the neuroanthropologist Merlin Donald:
‘The human brain has co-evolved alongside its cognizing cultures for two million years and has reached a point where it cannot realize its design potential outside of culture.
The apparatus of mind itself is a result of enculturation.
Thus the human mind evolves along with the evolution of culture. But this co-evolutionary process has increasingly shifted from cultural evolution being dependent on brain evolution (the early emergence of mimetic culture) to cognitive evolution being ever more dependent on cultural evolution.’
The matter seems to be that we have increasingly started to self-simulate and taken our evolutionary cues from an attentionally demanding cultural reality of our own making, less and less from the Material World.’
This is a good place to continue integrative efforts by including the body and by complementing our understanding of the relationship between the Real, our Individual Subjectivity and the Social Imaginary with recent developments in neuroscience; particularly Predictive Processing (PP) and the Free Energy Principle (FEP), the latter formulated by British neuroscientist Karl Friston, who posits that:
‘The brain is in the game of optimizing its connectivity and dynamics to maximize the evidence for ITs model of the world.’
A working assumption of many schools active in the field of PP is that we are carriers of a Mental Model of the World and that in some sense we even are this dynamic model that seeks to constantly optimize itself. The Social Imaginary and the World (as representation) are then not merely ‘out there’, but also can be seen to exist as Mental Constructs, including that of a Self that is brought into relationship with this ‘internalized’ Mental Model of the ‘outside’ World and other people, seeking evidence for its fittedness and the need for upgrades if there are mismatches between it and reality –so called ‘prediction errors’ which are experienced as surprise.
Bridging first and third person perspectives, the neuroscientist Thomas Metzinger offers an insight into how the Imaginary can be seen as an individual and collectively generated dream in this neurophenomenological account:
‘[A] fruitful way of looking at the human brain is as a system which, even in ordinary waking states, constantly hallucinates at the World, as a system that constantly lets its internal autonomous simulational dynamics collide with the ongoing flow of sensory input, vigorously dreaming at the World and thereby generating the content of Phenomenal Experience.’
This is still fairly abstract, although we all know the garden variety of some of the processes in play when we see a face in a cloud. There is no face, just water vapor and a play of light in a particular configuration that lends itself to our anthropomorphising projections. The mechanism is that a primary percept is augmented by a concept and seemingly instantly generates a certain meaning or a different perception, just as you see my words as words and not as ink blots or pixels on a screen.
If we use the language of neuroscience to reframe the issue of the mismatch of our imaginary with the Real World, we could say that we are living a collective prediction error.
Copium for the masses: pseudo-agency
Merlin Donald’s observation that we’re no longer primarily in dialogue with the Real World, but mostly with Cultural Memes of our own making, strongly applies here.
Silicon Valley start-up culture, a global phenomenon with set codes-rules for success, models success by ‘moving fast and breaking things’. This success is modelled by ‘self-made’ tech billionaires who are cheerleaders of the grind culture. Not so you can become successful like them, but so you will continue to slave away, keeping their unicorns afloat.
In their analysis of the production of this kind of subjectivity in the neoliberal world order, the scholars David Chandler and Julian Reid sketch out how…a logic of constant upgrading to stay fitted to a context of rapid change…forces us to live reactive lives, asked to accept the shrinking arena in which our agency still translates into a sense of freedom. The only place in which we can imagine preserving our agency, they suggest, is in our minds and by controlling our bodies.
It’s fair to say that this version of agency can only survive in a highly solipsistic environment at the expense of interpersonal relationships as we retreat deeper into ourselves. We see this logic of upgrading of self in the proliferation of what I term the ‘coping industry’. Dumbed-down mindfulness practices promise to take care of your stress; an app on your phone to tell you how to breathe, eat and sleep; there’s narcissistic pop-sci spirituality that says you create your own reality and thus you can manifest anything you desire. There’s your ‘friend’ on Instagram signaling from a beach in Bali with their hard body that they are fully in control and have mastered the coping game. (You can too, if you do their 10wk program).
Many people in the developed world now treat their life as a problem to be solved, focused on self-control, always optimizing, strategizing, upgrading.
The coping industry has spawned a whole new social class –the Yoga Bourgeoisie– influencers in cahoots with the exploitative disciplines of marketing-advertising, which can now be considered an existential threat. As their function is to keep the dysfunctional show on the road to extinction while helping us feel like the best version of our quantified selves.
It’s no sign of health to be well-adjusted to a sick society, Jidda Krishnamurti once observed. We all know in our bones that this kind of winning is clearly part of a losing game but we continue playing anyway –if we have the money.
Those who can’t afford a tight yoga butt or a trip to the jungle to guzzle some ayahuasca are found in the statistics of the opioid epidemic. In the end it is unbearable to live like that, always shapeshifting, adapting and upgrading in reaction to an imaginary in accelerated breakdown mode.
Thus, the counterculture to the Yoga Bourgeoisie is here. Goblin mode was elected Oxford word of the year for 2022. Goblin mode embraces ‘the comforts of depravity’ –the opposite of the Yoga Bourgeoisie’s optimizing game.
Personally, I like ‘vibe-shift’, which made Harper Collins’s longlist for word of 2022 and captures the feeling of Unheimlichkeit brought about by the winning word: Permacrisis. Vibe-shift reflects the dissonance of living in a world that on the surface never had it so good while everything seems to break down.
Life for moderns was once underpinned by a feeling of going somewhere. Some sense of direction called progress, that we could harness individually through personal development or building a career. Today, progress is increasingly replaced by a feeling of directionless acceleration and cultural stasis. Mark Fisher declared this phenomenon ‘The slow cancellation of the future.’
Time (between Worlds)
Tibetan-trained lama Tarthang Tulku describes how the ‘momentum of time’ and ‘the mechanism’ makes it impossible to envision alternatives to modernity.
Believing the source of the malaise on the surface, are not the items in our Imaginary, but our inability to gain access to the process. To use a physics metaphor: what happens when a volume shrinks or more stuff is crammed in? What’s inside heats up, pressure builds, things start to move faster and what is solid melts. Physics also teaches us that closed systems move toward entropy, so decay, death and transformation are perfectly natural phenomena.
Before exploring how to gain access to the process, it’s helpful to first situate us in a bigger picture of where we are, where we may be headed and what we may be participating in. Some cultural commentators state, each in their own terms, that we are in a ‘Time between Worlds’ –moving from one way of being, organizing our societies and our relationship to reality, to a new one.
Scholars of cultural history and consciousness: William Irving Thompson, Ken Wilber, Jean Gebser, David Graeber and David Wengrow, have tried to make sense of the subjectivity of earlier cultural-historical periods, including their qualitative changes to a civilization’s structure, like cooperation, practices and sense of selfhood.
Gebser speaks to our time and about time itself using the term ‘Temporics’, which he sees as endeavors to ‘concretize time.’ He describes our current historical period as the Mental-Rational, which followed on the Archaic, the Magic and the Mythic. Besides being historical epochs, they also co-arose with, or were the result of, specific ‘structures of consciousness’ (SoC). His clarification of these structures in his prescient work The Ever-Present Origin, is a careful analysis of how social and cultural artefacts are the manifestations of these structures.
I see Gebser’s concept of SoC as deeper than the Social Imaginary. Computer metaphors are often considered problematic, but the:
Social Imaginary can perhaps be seen as the implicit knowing of the existence of an office suite of modernity’s social systems software (spreadsheets for finance-economics, word processing for media, graphics for art-advertising, etc).
Culture is the collective experience of the user interfaces for these apps and what artifacts and practices we produce by using them.
Structure of Consciousness/SoC then is the operating system that holds the deep code of how the totality of software packages are organiZed and work together coherently.
Obviously, all this functioning relies on a substrate of physical matter, the hardware, and a functional, modern user interface requires hardware that is more than a mere heap of atoms and molecules. We need matter that is configured into microchips. Our problem is that our solipsistic software is trying to fix its bugs by rewriting code itself. We’re ‘trying to think our way out’, when what is really needed is a new operating system and a different architecture, which I think needs to be built on new forms of matter that can’t be found within, nor uncovered by, the current imaginary and structure of consciousness.
Gebser says that the Mental-Rational in its current stage is in a ‘deficient form’ and that we’re currently ‘mutating’ our structure of consciousness into is the Integral, which he calls a ‘qualitative change’ and a ‘discontinuous leap’, producing an entirely novel perception of the World and Subjectivity. It is beyond the scope of this piece to describe the Integral Structure in depth. But for our purposes it’s important to know that, according to Gebser, we also reconnect to ‘Origin’ through the Integral Structure, as in the Absolute, the Source, the Unmanifest, Brahman, Ein Sof, nondual ground –or God. A more contemporary spin would be to call it the ‘non-emergent’, as it doesn’t arise out of anything. It just is, which includes non-being.
In the Mental-Rational structure of consciousness, in which we relate to reality primarily through perspective, abstraction, symbols and representations comes with a specific organization of Self, Other and World, that sets these three apart at a maximal ‘distance’. It has ‘created’ space, as it were.
Bring to mind the flat, two-dimensional, Egyptian hieroglyphs and depictions of bodies and life. Now contrast that with the perspective and depth that appeared in Renaissance paintings where painters saw the world in 3D, space had entered awareness and objects became separate. Gebser says humanity’s consciousness ‘mastered space’ with the Mental-Rational mode.
I argue that we haven’t mastered that other ingredient of reality –time– in the same way as space. The mastery of which I see as discovering time in its fullness.
Like space, we’ll see that spacetime is not fundamental as it is currently conceived of, but is a construct and an enacted outcome of our way of interacting with reality. A brief history of time follows, using Gebser’s description of how each structure comes with its own time expression.
Adapted from Jeremy Johnson’s Seeing through the World
Modernity and the Mental-Rational (perspectival) SoC can be said to be characterized by the dominance of a Linear Way of viewing time –the tripartite structure we seem to live our entire lives through; that of past–present–future.
Our experience of ‘now’ flows along it, terminating at death (if you do not believe in an afterlife or reincarnation.) Our way of thinking about change and the future is strongly structured and constrained by this linear temporal order. It has embedded itself deeply in our (collective) psyche, functioning, together with space as the bedrock and limits of our experience.
But time is, in its deeper nature, also an alive force that can’t be constrained. According to Gebser, time is ‘irrupting’ and destabilizing our imaginary. The effects of which can be currently felt. The Gebser scholar Jeremy Johnson writes:
‘Gebser points out three phases in which time enters and destabilises the perspectival world:
the breaking forth of time, time irruption, and time concretion.
The breaking forth of time occurs to us when we are not yet aware of what the phenomenon is; it appears to be happening to us. Time irruption is experienced as the increasing consciousness of time as it irrupts in our cultural phenomenology; the concept of time, clock time and anxiety, time as a force that is speeding up and out of control. Lastly, time concretion is the manifestation of time as an acute phenomenon in our lives, freed –at least partially– from the spatial abstractions of the mental and expressed as a tangible presence and reality.’
The Integral Age is further characterized by Gebser as ‘Aperspectival’ –freedom from perspective– the spatial representation of reality that entered mainstream Western consciousness and is found in Renaissance art. The emergent Integral Structure also affords an expanded view of time, which Gebser termed the ‘Achronon’, time-freedom (‘A’ meaning freedom from, not absence of):
‘To the perception of the aperspectival world time appears to be the very fundamental function, and to be of a most complex nature. It manifests itself in accordance with a given consciousness structure and the appropriate possibility of manifestation in its various aspects as clock time, natural time, cosmic or sidereal time; as biological duration, rhythm, meter; as mutation, discontinuity, relativity; as vital dynamics, psychic energy (and thus in a certain sense in the form we call “soul” and the “unconscious”), and as mental dividing. It manifests itself as the unity of past, present, and future; as the creative principle, the power of imagination, as work, and even as “motoricity.” And along with the vital, psychic, biological, cosmic, rational, creative, sociological, and technical aspects of time, we must include-last but not least-physical-geometrical time which is designated as the “fourth dimension.”
I believe time is how Gebser describes it –a fully alive and creative force that cannot be contained within the narrow sector of space we have carved out for ourselves in our perspectival consciousness. I believe we are currently living through Gebser’s second phase of time’s irruption. Time is starting to ‘happen to us’, and also foregrounding itself with all kinds of disruptive effects.
And that we do not need more neoliberal ‘levelling up’ – growing a mind so complex or a consciousness so big, that it can embrace and handle all the complexity of our systems and map all the chains of causality of the Metacrisis so we can fix it, but more a higher level of consciousness to resolve them.
Ontological insurgency
What then, oh Ivo, wise one? Tell us what we should do!
That attitude of giving up power to experts or gurus (whether Buddha or Boris Johnson) to save us, is more modern malware.
True, this age is screaming out for wisdom and it is there, but wisdom schools are often insular, generally unconcerned with social issues and often stuck in tradition. And teachings and practices are primarily focused on the individual’s suffering and realization, which is limited and excludes deep inquiry into other realms, the Ontology of Social Reality for example. On the other side, the social sciences generally lack this deeper ontology being either materialist or constructivist, and mostly reasons through linear-causal views of reality, seeing issues through Modern Mental-Rational Frameworks.
The change-the-individual-to-change-society-approach leaves out both the elephant in the room and much of the room itself –the Social Imaginary and its causal powers. When it comes to changing, we’re generally no match for it. The Imaginary ‘has us’.
Retreat spaces and monasteries are set up for this reason, so you are out of the Social Imaginary with its pressures of entrainment. It works, but it’s analogous to doing science in a box. As soon as we leave the closed retreat system and enter the open one of society, the blissful results of our spiritual experiments prove unsustainable.
So alternative approaches are needed to step into the practice gap of Social Ontology and to inquire into the structures of our agency, its effect of our culture’s narratives. I do not see that work as spiritual, it merely relies on methods and insights that are found in spiritual traditions. Nor is the aim individual realization, but merely to become a better perceiver of the real.
Thus, it demands we drop our self-obsessed neoliberal work-on-ourselves stance, or our spiritual trophy hunting. We must, instead, go straight into:
The Messh –the entangled, extended, enacted, embedded, embodied, nondual and nonlinear dynamic totality.
This may sound overwhelming but, says the independent scholar Bonnitta Roy:
‘We are not so much working for greater systemic reach or to identify all the links in an enormous causal chain; rather we need to closely examine the metaphysical operating system of our minds, and participate in the creative emergence of a new structure of consciousness.’
She adds that the metamorphosis needed is driven by pressures that run counter to the modern mind’s ‘upward path’ and argues that:
‘It operates through what David Chandler calls “counter systemic approaches” which destabilize the modern imaginaries of “progress”, “civilization” and “development” while challenging our “fixed-empty framework of time-space with ourselves at the centre”.’
Roy brings much together here. Just as we can’t work purely ‘on’ ourselves, we also can no longer continue to work ‘on’ the world… which effectively requires us to further widen the infamous subject–object divide, placing humans further away from others, as well as matter and nature. It means fueling the mechanisms that are driving the Metacrisis. This imagining cannot be done rationally. It must be done experientially, reflexively and iteratively; and without self-concern. As Octavia Butler said:
‘All that you touch, you change.
All that you change, changes you.’
Imaginal Qualia
The key is to identify-design counter systemic practices that help to free us from stuckness plus afford collective unfolding.
One approach is by focusing on what I call Imaginal Qualia -the elements we think are fundamental to our human world and how it must function. These are social axioms or big, implicit collective commitments that come as a package deal with a host of social action protocols that we can use, like the start-up entrepreneur. So they can be seen as the Attractors and Modulators through which we enact the Social Imaginary and keep it cathected with our life energy.
Now we can start touching parts of the Machine.
Just as the Ego-Self can be explored as an Ecology of Psychological Parts, so can we approach Modernity and its Imaginal Qualia: notions such as:
progress, the separate individual, our linear sense of time.
Below a non-exhaustive list of some of our darlings.
Some Imaginal Qualia
They don’t form a neat taxonomy, but contain a mix of truths, useful symbolism and nonsense we’re all committed to.
For instance: they are either neurophenomenologicallly grounded experiences such as the subject–object divide; cultural myths, now part of our personal striving or collective identity, such as success and equality.
Some, like Acceleration, are epiphenomena, intrinsic and unavoidable outcomes of processes that we set in motion by historic design decisions, such as the investment-debt-growth cycle which means that the need for growth is inescapably baked into our current economic system. Or debt, lending on interest means having to print money exponentially to repay it all.
Materialism is an assumption about the nature of reality on which we base practices and many other ideas about the world. They can be social-economic action protocols, like prediction and competition to guide our seeking.
Reductionism compels the heuristics and methods for sensemaking via scientific inquiry.
All serving progress and development as giving meaning to our collective imagination.
The critical realist philosopher Roy Bhaskar might say much of this list belongs to the realm of the ‘Demi-Real’ –useful, but ultimately human constructs, like money and laws.
But the Demi-Real also contains superstitions and is full of cognitive errors. We call it sunrise and is something we witness as Real, but it is the earth turning. Unfortunately, it can’t be simply ignored because, even if things are complete fabrications (like a stolen election), they still have the power to get people to storm a capitol building.
Dualism is a big one. We know from quantum science that nothing is separate, not an object, but this is what we see and base many of our actions on.
The main thing to grasp is that we are actually enacting Metaphysics through our Imaginal Qualia; thereby, cocreating the World with our misguidedness of what is Real.
Lastly, the Imaginal Qualia also form an end point, the horizon of our Social Imagination. Who would we be if all these don’t exist? So sincere inquiry comes at a risk of losing our comforting illusions, but we may find new truths. Evan Thompson succinctly describes what we might encounter: ‘all illusions are constructions, but not all constructions are illusions.’
Changing the Subjectmatter
Where do we start? Always right where we are now, because there is no alternative.
As I reflect on my work and the slow progress I’m making on this essay, I become curious about the ever-lurking feelings of guilt around work, and how my self-esteem and productivity seem strongly correlated. Upon further reflection, I realize that my inner critic, culturally Protestant–Calvinist, prods my productivity and warns of idleness losing us our ticket to heaven. I never consciously accepted this narrative, but how did this come to be? A memory emerges from when I was about ten years old of me playing with my brother, having fun and forgetting all about time, while we were tasked with some chores. All of a sudden, my parents come home, yank us out of our playful state of innocence, replace it all by guilt, followed by their verbal and silent energetic disapproval of our nonproductive bodies.
Through many hours of practicing spiritual inquiry, I know how to work with constellations of parts -how not to focus on just the emotional content between images of Self, Other or World, but to ‘hold’ the totality of its constituent parts. Let’s call them the ‘Judging God’ and the ‘Lazy Self in this case.
I sense how identification with the Lazy Self and being judged impacts me emotionally and somatically. Especially seeing the core message that love is conditional (dependent on productivity) triggers mildly painful contractions in the heart and solar plexus region. The inquiry leads me to deeper questions around personal will and power. Where is (my) will? With the Judging God, or the deficient self-image of the one who should be productive? Sensing into this confusion and seeing the interplay of the two images, their roles, and feeling the emotional-energetic charge needed to uphold the constellation, I feel the parts dissolve and myself becoming more centered and whole and there is less inner conflict around the ownership of will.
With sustained inquiry, seeing through our historical conditioning, disentangling ourselves from the imaginary and metabolizing the social-mental constructs, we can land in a deeper state of presence with a real-time awareness of the pressures of the imaginary.
Take the following verbal account from Shayla Wright, a fellow traveler in Bonnitta Roy’s Pop-Up School:
‘When I was reading The Dawn of Everything, all of a sudden I experienced a full-bodied experience of how conditioned my subjectivity has been by all the historical notions infused into us. It was the background of my whole sense of who we are as humans and what is possible. I could feel how the text of that book started to deconstruct it all. And there was this incredible sense of liberation and movement. I had no idea how conditioned my subjectivity was.’
This account is beyond what an author seeking to change minds can hope for. The book Shayla refers to, The Dawn of Everything, is an alternative (pre)history of humanity. It tells the story of how creative ancient humans were and that alternative imaginaries and cultures were living alongside each other, with very different world views and social practices. It is not the standard version of history that says we were basically savages and then, voila, reason and science came along and a few millennia of cultural evolution gave birth to Steven Pinker to tell us how amazing we modern Westerners are and that everything is going to get better all the time.
This dropping away of
the Social Imaginary’s deep conditioning is,
at best, a side effect of most kinds of spiritual work and usually not its aim.
Recall Shayla’s surprise: ‘I had no idea how conditioned my subjectivity was.’ That’s because most inner work focuses on the personality and goes ‘inward’ rather than ‘out’ to include our imaginary as a domain of causality and practice. The squeaky wheel of ego-suffering continues to get all the grease. Most do not heed the insights of 4E cognitive science and predictive processing, that we’re extended and embedded, that we enact not just an ego self-construct, but a total configuration of Self-Other-World.
And, as in Zen, hardly any intersubjective practices are found in traditional wisdom schools –a critical design omission that needs to be addressed if we want spiritual work to be truly in service of social change.
The tech world uses the term ‘technical debt’, which means a legacy system has grown so large and dysfunctional over time that it no longer pays to keep patching it up. At some point it is better to build something completely new. The same principle applies to our imaginary and structure of consciousness as its operating system. We don’t need another quick fix upgrade, or ‘a new story’ as many insist, but a new architecture that is built out of a different matter altogether.
We are still largely living in a materialist imaginary –yet to culturally integrate the insights of quantum sciences and what it tells us about the reality of matter. Our quest to discover new matter from which to crystallize our new imaginaries must avoid falling back into the solipsism that arises from our sense of separation from the real. I propose to call it the ‘Subjectmatter’. I see it as a pragmatic imaginal move in service of deepening care for our inner states, heeding the truths of entanglement and co-enactment of reality we engage in as conscious agents.
Enacting new imaginaries can’t be limited to work ‘on’ ‘ourselves’ as we have.
We’ll need to expand our focus; not just go ‘in’ to work on our personalities, but get real and look ‘out’ at our entanglements with matter, beyond the surface and include the ‘in-between’ of our interpersonal relations, including interspecies ones.
Then identify which constructions turn out to be mere Demi-real illusions (such as colonialist white supremacy, patriarchy, anthropocentrism etc.), rid ourselves of them and finally perform the alchemy on the material of our social structures.
Practicing in this reflexive way means forging a bodymind capable of accessing the deeper processes of reality, all the way from the surface of our fixed egoic, mental-rational perspective to Origin, including different kinds of nonduality. Only from deeper places, like the imaginal, will you be able to participate in its unfolding so it can manifest in new ways.
In my opinion, it is the only way we can be truly novel and start from scratch to build Planet A, a Parallel Polis, or a new system that replaces the old, as Buckminster Fuller instructed.
Cynthia Bourgeault points to the attitude it requires to enter into the liminal and not immediately run the familiar modern malware of control when things feel a little uncertain and shaky:
‘The first step is the hardest. Lean into the emptiness!
Don’t immediately rush to fill up all the available space. Lean into the darkness and let your eyes adjust. Little by little you’ll discover that you’re actually seeing a new landscape, seeing in a slightly different way. The deeper clues of connectedness begin to fill in for you, announcing their presence in small and often surprising ways.
As your imaginal vision gains strength, that strength flows back into the web, and the web itself gains strength and presence enough, eventually, to begin to hold healing and even prophetic force within its collective atmosphere.’
‘Trust the pattern.’ –Cynthia Bourgeault
Logoics as participating with the Deep Continuity
Another big task in sourcing our new subjectmatter and to let it take new shape, I believe, requires the capacity of practicing a New Logos into being as a community.
As consciously as possible, so we can weave the web Bourgeault speaks of. Historically, a Logos formed around a charismatic figure, like a Jesus or Buddha, who could breach their imaginaries and give people the teaching based on a Lew Logos to rework its subjectmatter.
But I believe a practice of ‘Logoics’ should primarily be a collective effort from the start this time, given the context, complexity, geography and temporal nature of our challenges.
One observation, having practiced deeply in two wisdom traditions, is that the way reality shows up in our experience, depends on the logos and transmission of that teaching, not just the surface concepts our mind rejects or entertains. As a Buddhist I had spot-on Buddhist experiences; while practicing in the Diamond Approach reality manifested in ways that would never arise in a Buddhist context.
The teachings, concepts and practices we engage in at various depths of reality determine how it unfolds and is what I term Dispositional Realism –how we engage reality determines how it shows up.
That’s why we must take great care when using and developing our psychoactive theories, models, methods, images, metaphors and other concepts. That mastery is where I believe true agency can be developed, in dialogue with the Real and its constraints. We may find that we’re not passive subjects to any bottom-up emergence, but that the influence of our sincere inquiry actually shows that reality is responsive.
Just as reason made itself available to humanity at a moment in history and was spun into the collective atmosphere, so can other qualities of being and guidance be discovered.
Much can be learned by moving in and out of the existing logoi of wisdom traditions or indigenous ones while not forgetting the logos of technology and its imagination that now increasingly shapes our lives. Each of these logoi offers a view on reality’s deep continuity, a participatory potential to work the subjectmatter and an expressive potential that holds a piece of the puzzle, but when taken alone leads to more solipsisms.
Collective unfolding requires drawing energy and information from many sources, consciously cultivating openness, working with constraints, permeability and diversity. The latter may serve to be a good preventative of dogma and partial views of reality that risk being mistaken as the only truth, turning into another version of Capitalist Realism.
The logoi that animate all wisdom traditions originate from the deep continuity of Origin and are expressions of the dynamic intelligence unfolding within/out Reality itself.
A Sympoietic Society is always participating in this creative dynamism.
As this entire essay already illuminates, a Solipsistic Society places little value in its Origin’s Deep Continuity nor its Reality’s unfolding in a dynamically intelligent way.
A journey of discovery is not about doing and controlling things according to an outcome-focused strategy or an ideology, but about cultivating our inner states, developing perceptual potential and getting out of our own way.
A journey of discovery is about working the evolutionary potential of the present moment.
This is implicitly building with the subjectmatter of trust and courage, living into new imaginaries that are in harmony with all life and in support of our collective unfolding through the mystery that we share.