Communal Reverie: A Wisdom Technology for Collective Imaginal Attunement

Abstract

Communal Reverie, a group practice designed to facilitate the cultivation of collective imaginal attunement, has been framed a “collective wisdom technology.” It draws significant influence from the philosophy and practical protocols informing Collective Presencing, a modality of “we-space” practice developed by Ria Baeck. It is further informed by philosophical, mystical, and psychological traditions that advance various conceptions concerning the autonomous imagination’s value, both as a source of knowledge and a crucial element in transformative practice. Communal Reverie, to my present knowledge, is a distinctive practice modality insofar as it applies the technique of sourcing in service of a collective modality of imaginal encounter. The aspirations guiding the continual refinement of Communal Reverie’s theoretical and practical foundations are informed, most fundamentally, by thought traditions emphasizing engagement with the imaginal as a means toward advancing the evolutionary emergence of a modality of consciousness capable of assuming a co-creative and participatory role in relationship with transrational influences of a spiritual nature. The achievement of such participation may, furthermore, entail fundamental transformations in the phenomenal experience of both selfhood and time.

1. Introduction

Since the advent of modernity, particularly given the influence of rationalist and empiricist philosophy in shaping dominant trends underlying the contemporary scientific outlook, there has been a tremendous diminution in the degree of value accorded to the imagination both as a means toward genuine forms of knowledge and as an element in transformative practice (Segall 2023). Notwithstanding, cultural trends countervailing against the epistemic demotion of imagination have persisted ever since the rise of the Enlightenment (Berman 1981; Ellenberger 1970; Tarnas 1991). Among the streams of tradition that have entered explicit dialectic with Enlightenment conceptions concerning the imagination, the Romantic movement of the late 18th and early 19th centuries, the depth psychological traditions that grew out of Romanticism, and Henry Corbin’s interpretation of Sufistic Neoplatonic cosmology have had particularly prominent and enduring influence (Hinds 2023).

Corbin’s (1999) coinage of imaginal, as distinct from “imaginary,” likely marks his most pervasive and lasting contribution to contemporary culture. Whereas Corbin’s (1969, 1977) precise definition of “imaginal” harbors decidedly Neoplatonic metaphysical implications, the term has taken on a life of its own, accumulating a penumbra of meanings and associations that often exceed or diverge from its original theological and cosmological connotations. In what follows, my own framing of imaginal follows suit with this historical trend toward definitory generalization. I will advance a multiplicity of claims concerning the imaginal that, while certainly drawing inspiration from Corbin’s interpretation of Persian Neoplatonic “psycho-cosmology,” nonetheless unmoor the term from many of the specificities implicit in his intended meaning (Cheetham 2012). These claims are adequately flexible to accommodate a variety of worldviews that affirm the ontological independence of phenomena that modern epistemology generally regards as mental fabrications lacking any independent existence.

The first claim is that imaginal contents arise as self-portrayals of factors with an ontological status that cannot be simply reduced to mental fabrications originating with the individual who encounters them. The second claim is that imaginal phenomena frequently arise in dynamic correspondence with the phenomenology of a “subtle energy body” which, while having a direct experiential basis, has been formulated in diverging ways across various traditions and is ultimately mysterious, apparently malleable, and thus amenable to alternative conceptualizations.1 Third, imaginal phenomena express intelligence, communicating a complex nexus of meanings—often bearing relevance to the existential concerns of those who encounter them. Fourth, imaginal factors are autonomous, expressing an agency exceeding the individual’s conscious intentions. Fifth, imaginal phenomena often demonstrate reciprocal responsiveness to the intentional engagement of the waking ego, which is to say that in any situation where imaginal factors are involved, there is always relationship at play. Sixth, skillful participation with imaginal factors can play an essential role in service to the enactive realization of latent potential.

There are a variety of contemporary imaginal practices making use of the autonomous productions of the imagination, many drawing from and variously innovating upon ancient traditions. In setting the stage for elucidating features of Communal Reverie practice, I will first offer a brief survey of some contemporary imaginal practices, limiting myself to a very small selection originating amid the 20th and present centuries, largely rooted in the contributions of two figures whose work has arguably exerted the foremost impact upon the field: Jung and Corbin.

2. Recent History of Imaginal Practices: A Very Brief Survey

Jung’s degree of influence on various cultural trends revalorizing the imagination since the 20th century remains unparalleled. The very foundations of his psychology have their origins in his direct encounter with imaginal contents via a method of engagement he later came to call active imagination (Jung 1989). As Jung (1969) described it, active imagination proceeds through “systematic exercises for eliminating critical attention” (p. 110). Deliberate suspension of critical-rational mental faculties marked by what he called directed thinking enables an “intense concentration on the background of consciousness” where fantasy thinking remains predominant (Jung 1966, p. 222). Stated otherwise, active imagination proceeds through deliberate restraint of the wakeful ego’s deliberate mental activity such that the autonomous archetypal contents characteristic of the dreaming mind, otherwise obscured by the mind’s waking operations, may pass over the threshold of consciousness. Jung, following the influential French psychiatrist Pierre Janet, referred to this relaxation of waking psychic operations as an abiassement du niveau mental.2

According to Jung (1966), practicing active imagination generally proceeds by one of two inroads. The first is through deliberate re-engagement with imagery initially encountered by the nocturnal mind in the dream state. This begins with calling a dream to mind and choosing some starting point, whether that be a specific scene to re-enter or a particular dream figure to engage with. Then, deliberately relaxing the mind to induce an abaissement du niveau mental, one allows the dream imagery to arise while staying close to the dream contents, granting them their autonomy. One discovers along the way how the dream content can reanimate itself: previously dreamt scenes may avail new details or spontaneously unfold in novel directions, and dream figures may behave autonomously. The second entry point Jung suggested begins with bringing attention to an emotion or affective state and then similarly relaxing the mind while remaining receptive to the spontaneous emergence of imagery. Whatever the chosen method, Jung emphasized the value of moving toward active engagement with dream contents—whether spurring action in the unfolding of an imaginal scene or engaging a figure in dialog.

While Corbin’s (1969, 1977) writings remain opaque regarding precise details for how imaginal practice may be approached, the impact of his theoretical contributions on the current field of imaginal practice continues to grow. Bosnak (2007), for example, has drawn heavily upon Corbin in his formulation of embodied imagination—primarily through Corbin’s explication of the Islamic conception of the alam-al-mithal.3 Taking Corbin’s cue, Bosnak (2007) has emphasized the “quasi-physical” character of imaginal phenomena, composed of a kind of “primal matter” that is more subtle than physical phenomena yet more substantial than abstract thought.4 Linking this conception with q’i, the Chinese notion of subtle energy, Bosnak has explicitly linked imaginal phenomena with manifestations of a “subtle body” that, however we may conceive its ontological status,5 can be experienced directly during imaginal practice in the form of subtle quasi-sensory feelings that fluctuate in concert with shifting engagement with imaginal phenomena. Working dyadically with others as a facilitating guide, Bosnak has discovered that diverse contents of imaginal space frequently correspond with bodily loci of q’i arranged in reciprocally influencing constellations, giving rise to what he has called felt sense systems.6 His hypothesis is that the manifold contents pervading these felt sense systems and their corresponding imaginal manifestations, when attended to with skill, can foster conditions for emergent psychospiritual transformations, resulting in both physical and emotional healing as well as increased integration of the personality.

Finally, Burbea’s (2015, 2016, 2017) Soulmaking Dharma7 stands out as another instance where Corbin’s transmission of Sufistic thought has influenced the development of a deeply sophisticated path of imaginal practice. The Soulmaking Dharma is a highly original development of the Buddha Dharma that richly incorporates and innovates upon occidental imaginal traditions. Along similar lines as Bosnak, Burbea (2015) has emphasized the skillful cultivation of energy body awareness as an essential foundation for imaginal practice. He has further delineated a provisional framework of 27 distinct elements comprising imaginal perception, open to further refinement and development, which he has called the lattice8 (Burbea 2017). The lattice includes “energy body awareness” as one of its elements, in addition to “eros,” “autonomy,” “eternality,” “meaningfulness,” “duty,” “values,” and “participation.”

The lattice element of participation warrants particular attention for its far-reaching implications concerning the imaginal as such. On one level, Burbea’s lattice may simply be read as a list of adjectives describing inherent features of the imaginal. On a deeper and more crucial level, however, the lattice describes acts of imaginal perception. This point is essential because approaching the elements of the lattice as mere descriptions of the imaginal, independent of any participating consciousness, reifies the imaginal as a static and passive “object” understood as distinct from an observing “subject.” This is an example, par excellence, of what Ferrer (2017) has critiqued as “subtle Cartesianism,” a bias that pre-reflectively interprets psychospiritual experience in terms of the subject-object dualism characteristic of the modern worldview (p. 28). The “imaginal realm” may better be conceptualized not so much as a “place” or “thing,” but as a numinous field of dynamic relata, imbued with psychological depths (“interiority”), available for mutual unfoldment through co-responsive participation.

How does this understanding of the lattice bear out in practice? Let’s take, as a starting point, the lattice element described as “twoness.” Twoness implies that imaginal experience entails a direct sense of the alterity, the otherness, of any imagery encountered amid the course of practice. Again, this could be read as a purely descriptive designation: where there is a sense of twoness, there is imaginal experience; where there is no sense of twoness, there is not. The true value of the lattice for imaginal practice, however, can be discovered when it is approached as a prescriptive suggestion for ways of participating in soulful perception.9 What happens if I intentionally perceive this image as if it were an other with whom I am in relationship? How do I discover that the imagery spontaneously responds when I bring this way of looking to bear? Does the image respond more readily when, approaching it as other, I expressly grant it autonomy, while also maintaining a strong sense of connection with my own? Do I notice that the way the image responds naturally sparks a feeling of eros, a loving desire to know this mysterious other more fully? Can I discover the way this felt current of eros corresponds with subtle sensations, directly sensed through energy body awareness?10 Closely attending to this felt sense of eros, what happens now when I ask this image what demands it has of me? Do I discover a sense of duty that the image now calls forth from me, revealing underlying values toward which this desirous eros reaches, expressing my own longings to serve something greater than myself, mediated and symbolized through this imaginal encounter?

My intention here in raising these rhetorical questions—to which I have answered “yes,” during moments of deep and sustained imaginal practice11—is to impart a clearer sense for how the lattice can be taken up not merely as description, but prescription, in tandem with a view of the imaginal not as a static and separate object but as a numinous field of unfolding relationality, dynamically responsive to participatory gestures. I additionally intend to convey how the various elements of the lattice, while distinct, are also mutually implicating and reinforcing in the context of imaginal practice (e.g., the element of duty often co-arises with value, eros with energy body awareness, and both pairs with one another). Burbea’s soulmaking dharma is, in my view, among the most sophisticated and intricate contemporary pathways for cultivating imaginal agility, presenting subtle techniques supporting the gradual refinement of skillful participation with the imaginal. The lattice, then, can be approached as a perceptual instrument to be played and mastered through ongoing practice as much as a conceptual framework to be grasped intellectually.

As a final example,12 Lewis’s (n.d.) shared imaginal practice marks another rich practice that, like Communal Reverie, is turning imaginal attunement toward more collective forms of emphasis. One of Lewis’s great contributions to contemporary imaginal practice is found in her practical demonstration of the imaginal sphere’s responsiveness to intentional prompting. It further appears that she has discovered a process whereby a range of concepts can be deliberately approached as effective doorways to encounters with the occluded mythopoetic roots and subtle energetic felt sense that, should we follow certain conceptions of the evolution of consciousness, ontologically precede their corresponding ideas (Barfield 1988; Bellah 2011; Gebser 1985). While generally designed in a way that upholds a distinction between the roles of “explorer,” “guide,” and “witness,” shared imaginal practice has also been approached as a mutualistic and symmetrical process of imaginal co-sensing (Lewis 2024).

Whereas the frameworks from Bosnak, Burbea, and Lewis offer vivid and effective practical guidelines for varying approaches toward conscious participation with imaginal phenomena, a number of other thinkers have philosophically outlined the significance of the historical emergence of such capacities as situated against the backdrop of the evolution of consciousness. It is to this broader historical and evolutionary perspective that we now turn.

3. Core Imaginal Themes: Participation and Individuation

Before moving on to an exploration of Communal Reverie, it will be valuable to consider two core themes pervading the leading strands of theory concerning the imaginal: individuation and participation. While Jung and Corbin displayed notable divergences in their conceptions regarding the nature of the imaginal, they strongly converged upon the conclusion that the drive toward individuation constitutes one of its most essential features as it relates to the human soul—both at the ontological level, as exemplified by its endemic operations, and at the level of practice, as seen through the fruits of ongoing conscious engagement. Amid the conceptual specificities differentiating their respective visions, which are many, both have maintained that the imaginal tends to spontaneously generate tautegorical13 representations of the active processes at work behind the differentiation and development of the singular personality that every individual harbors in potentia. Furthermore, they both maintained that active participation in these processes, via skillful imaginal practice, catalyzes advancement in the unfoldment of the individuation process.

Another group of thinkers, amid their differences, converge upon analogous conceptions regarding the place of participation in the evolution of consciousness (Barfield 1988; Bernstein 2005; Gebser 1985; Tarnas 1991). Barfield (1988), to give one example, has described an evolutionary arc that unfolds from a state original participation to one of final participation. Drawing upon Lévy-Bruhl’s notion of participation mystique, Barfield described original participation as a primordial condition wherein human beings experienced the world as a numinous matrix saturated with archetypal meanings, devoid of any apparent dualism between subject and object. Consciousness and world were, rather, experienced as a continuous whole. A gradual loss of original participation corresponded with the emergence of the modern ego and its starkly dualistic mode perception. As the intensified experience of individuality and agency characterizing the modern mind grew toward its maturity, the archetypal numinosity originally pervading the world correspondingly went into eclipse as an increasing sense of distance and separation from both spirit and nature took hold.

Barfield’s conception of final participation anticipates the emergence of a consciousness that recovers the original sensitivity to the archetypal dimension of existence, superseding the modern subject–object dichotomy while retaining the individuated autonomy realized in and through the emergence of the modern mind. Final participation situates the human being in a consciously co-creative relationship with the numinous dimension of existence and, by extension, with the transrational influences14 that generate the tautegorical phenomena detectable through imaginal modes of perception.

Barfield (2013), following the Romantic poets, employed the image of the aeolian harp—a stringed instrument sounded by the unseen motions of the wind—as a metaphor for elucidating the dynamics of final participation:

It is rather as if a musical instrument, which was being played on… an Aeolian harp perhaps, played on by nature herself… fell silent for awhile. And then, after an interval, when it began to sound again, it was no longer merely an instrument, but had become aware of itself as such… and could itself take part in the playing of itself.

(p. 302)

Wind, having longstanding connotations in numerous languages suggestive of spiritual influences (e.g., pneuma, ruach, spiritus, anima, psyche, rīḥ/rūḥ, atum, prana, shen, nilch’i), makes for an ample metaphor. The “silent interval” corresponds to the loss of the immediate experience of spirit characteristic of original participation. The shift from a condition of being passively played by the wind to one of becoming an instrument capable of actively participating in cooperation with unseen animating influences corresponds to the distinction between original and final participation.

Burbea’s vision and teachings, while irreducible to Barfield’s conception of final participation, is to a significant extent amenable to interpretation as an impressive realization of what Barfield had intimated and attempted to articulate philosophically.15 The Soulmaking Dharma’s resonance with Barfield is recognizable in the emphasis on deliberate and skillful cultivation of conscious participation in the mythopoetic roots of perception itself. Burbea’s lattice may be likened to Barfield’s aeolian harp in the context of imaginal practice, gesturing to our own body–mind systems as instruments that we may master, with practice, in participation with the primordial influences by which we are animated. In effect, to master working with the lattice elements, consciously tuning perception in a way that evokes autonomous responses from imaginal phenomena in a continuously unfolding interchange, would be akin to playing the aeolian harp with one’s own fingers in partnership with gusts of wind, also vibrating its strings.

4. Introducing Communal Reverie

Communal Reverie advances an explicitly imaginal inflection of “presencing” practice. Presencing, a portmanteau introduced16 by Scharmer (2009) that compounds the words presence and sensing, gestures to a practice of “listening from the emerging field of the future” as a “means to connect with the Source of the highest future possibility and to bring it into the now” (pp. 13, 163). According to Steininger and Debold (2016), such capacities for connecting with a felt sense of latent potential rely on a mode of “intelligence that becomes apparent through… transrational sensing” (p. 284). Such transrational ways of knowing are applied in Baeck’s (2018) Collective Presencing,17 Communal Reverie’s primary predecessor in the field of presencing practices.

Drawing significant influence from Scharmer’s work on Theory U in addition to the spiritual and evolutionary transmissions of both Sri Aurobindo and Jean Gebser, Collective Presencing is a group practice that focuses on developing capacities described as subtle sensing and sourcing. These capacities, as Baeck (2018) has described them, focus on the presence, in any group, of “subtle energies present that we can learn to detect, to trust, amplify and nurture” (p. 95).18 The initial phases of Collective Presencing practice entails learning to speak to and from the middle, understood as “the inner dimension, the inner collective, the inner plane of a group—for lack of a better word, the group’s field” (Baeck 2018, pp. 108–9). As groups develop their capacities for sourcing, the increasing coherence of the group field—often experienced as a subtle energy laden with implicit meaning—becomes a source of spontaneous insight and inspiration (Baeck 2018, p. 211). Baeck refers to the origin of these transrational insights as Source, conceived as a nonphysical plenum of generative potential with which we may develop and strengthen our capacities for sensitive participation. Scharmer (2009), along similar lines, has emphasized that embodying Source connection can facilitate direct participation in the process of emergence. Here, emergence can be understood as cooperative enactment toward manifesting latent possibilities neither solely derived from, nor strictly ordained by, ego consciousness.

It should be noted here that spontaneous encounters with imaginal phenomena are not an infrequent occurrence amongst individuals engaged in presencing practices. Reports of imagery arising spontaneously through mutual attunement to the group field occurs with some regularity. Communal Reverie, however, explicitly aims to focus the practice of sourcing toward a shared experience of imaginal disclosure through a process and technique that I have called collective imaginal attunement.

5. Collective Imaginal Attunement

In nearly every case explored in the above survey on imaginal practices, the individual is foregrounded as the necessary locus of imaginal experience. Corbin (1969, 1977), faithful to his interpretation of Sufi mystical theology, goes so far as to insist upon the ontological necessity of the individual person as the sole site of imaginal revelation. In typical contemporary approaches, the individual engaged in imaginal practice may at most be accompanied by a skilled facilitator or guide, be they a Jungian analyst or teacher of imaginal, who assists the process by prompting moves intended to propel the unfolding of the imaginal encounter. None of the examples explored thus far explicitly involve groupings of individuals holding symmetrical roles while attuning, simultaneously, to a common source of imaginal phenomena.

Communal Reverie proceeds from the assumption that the group field can be approached as a source of imaginal phenomena to be sensed and disclosed collectively (Hinds 2023). The technique of collective imaginal attunement begins with members of a group simultaneously turning their subtle sensing capacities toward attunement to the group field while adopting “a stance of hospitality19 and receptivity toward imaginal reality, comprised of the mutually implicated and intermingling awareness of bodily sensations, subtle body sensing, and quasi-sensory20 psychic imagery” (Hinds 2023, p. 221). Inspired by Collective Presencing’s basic protocol, Communal Reverie modulates the shared attention of the group by limiting the field to one speaker at any given time. The intended aim behind this protocol is to generate a heightened degree of collective attentional coherence conducive to shared imaginal sensing.

When the shared space opens for practice, the first person for whom spontaneously arising imagery reaches the point of feeling “ripe” to share then verbalizes whatever is emerging. When the first speaker indicates they are finished, the floor opens again for the next person who feels ready to verbalize a description of the imaginal content arising for them. When practicing collective imaginal attunement, imagery encountered and verbalized by one person is often vividly transmitted to others imaginally, at which point it frequently assumes its own animate autonomy, changing and unfolding in new directions spontaneously. In this way, Communal Reverie presents an invitation to directly experience the imaginal as a transindivdual field wherein individual’s imaginal encounters remain porous to those of others, demonstrating a tendency toward emergent coherence and thematic continuity.

Indeed, in many cases, Communal Reverie sessions progress as a relatively continuous and coherent unfolding of autonomous imagery. However, there is no insistence that any subsequent imaginal content must always demonstrate obvious or direct connection with previously sourced imagery. It often happens that divergent imagery is concurrently experienced by different individuals in the group. In most cases, however, seemingly disjointed imagery trends toward coherence as the session unfolds, as images either coalesce through the spontaneous disclosure of an overarching shared imaginal context shared or otherwise begin intuitively resonating with mutual metaphorical or symbolic sympathy. Even so, some imagery remains relatively disjointed from the overall gestalt of a given session. The felt degree of coherence in the field, seemingly reflective of the depth of subtle sensing capacity being exercised by the group at any given moment, does appear to play a role in the level of sympathetic resonance and imaginal coherence experienced during the session.

6. Translucent Knowing

Baeck (2018) has emphasized that the realization of a group capable of harkening to a shared plenum of relevant potential through the practice of sourcing, requiring what she has described as “a transition from a Circle of Presence to a Circle of Creation,” necessarily entails a fundamental transformation in consciousness.

There is a world of difference between learning to be present in a circle of people (the practice in a Circle of Presence, with all that it entails in terms of clarity on emotional issues and the like) and becoming truly co-creative and generative in and with life itself. The difference is not superficial—indeed, there is a chasm to cross: to transition from a Circle of Presence to a Circle of Creation is to make the very paradigm shift that is currently embroiling humanity at this time… As we learn to experience ourselves as embedded in the continuous process of creation rather than separate from it, and as we step away from our mental models and into direct relationship with what is and what is unfolding, we open up to a wholeness of knowing that weaves mental and conceptual clarity with subtle sensing and, above all, with the implicit, tacit understanding—our felt sense—that comes to us through the body before we can access it with the intellect.

(Baeck 2018, pp. 212–13)

Baeck (2018) has explicitly linked this transformation to Gebser’s conception of the integral structure of consciousness—the mutative emergence of which our era is presumably witnessing.

Of crucial note here is the recognition that Gebser’s integral consciousness entails a radical reconfiguration of the relationship between what is presently distinguished as “ego” and “the unconscious” (Hinds 2023). Jung’s (1969, 1979, 1980) conception of consciousness and psyche ultimately situated waking (rational) and dreaming (imaginal) processes in a polar relationship, such that the coming to awareness of one requires either a diminution or submersion of the other. Fleeting experiences I have encountered directly through both Collective Presencing and Communal Reverie, supported by foregoing articulations advanced by other thinkers and practitioners, have led me to consider an alternative possibility (Baeck 2018; Barfield 1988; Bernstein 2005; Gebser 1985, 2024; Hinds 2023). Amid the original cycles of Communal Reverie practice,21 I and my fellow practitioners encountered an experience we came to call “the corridor.”22 The following elaboration of the corridor is based upon my interpretation of the firsthand experiences I have associated with the term.

The primary signal announcing the emergent qualitative shift in consciousness corresponding with the corridor was an intensification in the felt sense of energy associated with the group field. This was experienced directly at the bodily level and initially required a stabilization of expanded awareness in order to maintain steady attention. This intensification effected shifts in the experience of imaginal attunement, seemingly supporting a notably continuous and lucid awareness of imaginal phenomena even with eyes open and amidst an interspersion of directive cognitive functions. In other words, directed thinking and fantasy thinking, waking activity and dreaming activity, increasingly began to coincide in non-exclusive harmony.

The perceptual qualities associated with the corridor bore some resemblance to the “ontological breakthrough” into a diaphanous or transparent mode of awareness that Gebser (2024) ascribed to the integral structure of consciousness (para. 8). Grasping the implications of Gebser’s (2024) description of the integral structure as predicated on an “intensification of consciousness” that “awakens not from dream into wakefulness, but from wakefulness itself into a waking-beyond-wakefulness [Überwachheit]” requires that we situate this statement within the broader frame of his understanding of the unfolding of consciousness (Bewußtwerdungsprozess) (para. 13). To wake beyond wakefulness, for Gebser (1985), is to realize a suprawakeful consciousness for which waking processes may coincide with awareness of contents associated with modes of consciousness more primordial than wakefulness—namely, dreaming and dreamless sleep.23

The fruits of this intensification, for Gebser (1985), are realized in an emerging mode of perception described as synairesis,24 characterized by “a gradually maturing equilibrium of all the inherent components and consciousness structures predisposed in ourselves, in order that we may prepare the basis for the leap into the new mutation” (p. 300). The mutually enriching interplay between somatic–energetic felt sense, imaginal phenomena, and conceptual cognition experienced in association with the corridor closely resembled this “synairetic” oscillation and intermingling between contents that Gebser (1985), respectively, associates with the magic, mythic, and mental structures of consciousness25 which achieve dynamic equilibrium as the integral structure is realized.

I have offered a more detailed account of the emergent phenomenology of the corridor experience:

During the early Corridor sessions in Communal Reverie practice, imaginal attunement to subtle imagery seemed to arise as an intermediary element, standing between the energetic felt sense and its elaboration into thought. The sharpening clarification made possible through conceptual reflection could be directly experienced as a focusing reduction of the implicit plentitude known directly to the body, harbored within the intimate immediacy of subtle felt sense. Stated otherwise, the implicit knowing of the body supporting the emergence of mythic imagery is always felt directly to exceed what can be satisfactorily captured and represented by any conceptual insights that spontaneously blossom forth in connection with the images. Conceptual knowing, by contrast, partakes of a sharpness and clarity that bodily felt sense cannot provide. Although quasi-sensory imagery mediates between these two levels, all three modes remain distinct.

(Hinds 2023, pp. 225–26)

This energetically supported capacity for a lucidly simultaneous and reciprocally enhancing awareness between both conceptual and imaginal modes of cognition runs counter to the abaissement du niveau mental (“lowering of the threshold of consciousness”), ordinarily understood as a necessary condition for enabling apprehension of imaginal phenomena. I have therefore, inspired by Gebser’s (1985) characterization of the transparency of the integral consciousness, posited an alternative conception: translucing the threshold of consciousness. “In this case, the imaginal contents usually residing below the threshold of egoic consciousness shine through into the purview of attention without a requisite diminution in mental-rational wakefulness” (Hinds 2023, p. 222). I initially introduced the term synairetic imaginal attunement to describe this perceptual mode and its enhanced capacity for simultaneous attunement to somatic-energetic, imaginal, and conceptual phenomena. Here, I will opt for a simpler term: translucent knowing.

It is important to note that the phenomenological shifts into translucent knowing associated with the corridor have, in my experience, remained comparatively rare in the context of Communal Reverie practice. Approaching Gebser’s (1985) work as an interpretive frame for these “corridor” experiences suggests that they may have been fleeting glimpses of the “diaphanous” mode of perception that he attributed to the integral structure of consciousness. This raises crucial questions as to whether the initially context-specific nature of these phenomenological shifts may eventually be stabilized into an abiding mode of being. Baeck’s (2018) intuition of an explicit connection between Gebser’s integral consciousness and her formulation of the Circle of Creation prompts further inquiry into the relationship between translucent knowing, the group field, and creative potential.

7. Superseding Individuation

What is the role of collective coherence toward enabling certain presencing capacities, specifically with respect to collective imaginal attunement and its deeper potentials? Is the mutual attunement of a group in service of sourcing necessarily a sine-qua-non element in the emergence of translucent knowing? Barfield makes no suggestion that the realization of final participation will involve a revitalization of the collective consciousness characteristic of original participation. However, Gebser’s (1985) corresponding conception of the emerging integral structure of consciousness does posit the supersession of the ego, and of individuation, as dimensions of the evolutionary leap that humanity must make if the integral mutation of consciousness is to be realized:

Is there another world in wait, accessible only through individuation and its supersession, just as individuation was brought about by surpassing the clan? What if behind man humanity, behind god divinity, behind spirit spirituality, were to become ‘attainable’ to man, or more exactly, become transparent to him to the degree that he could divest himself of individuality and cancel his exclusive and patriarchal ego-confinement by freedom from the ego, just as mythical man abandoned the secure enclosure of the maternal, magic man the unity of the mere clan world?

(p. 198)

On the one hand, Gebser’s (1985) account of ego supersession appears to be of a fundamentally spiritual character, gesturing to a consciousness that reaches beyond centration in and identification with the waking ego by rooting the newly emerging self-sense in the fundamentally transpersonal ground of pure awareness. However, taken within the context of Gebser’s understanding of transparency, we may justifiably anticipate that this supersession will further entail newly emerging equilibrium between the individuating emphasis of the modern mind and the collectively dispersed consciousness of participation mystique.

Part of the deeper evolutionary purpose of individuation as such may be found in this possibility for realizing an emergent group field of consciousness, expressed through highly individuated loci, attaining a heightened state of coherence that sustains, and even intensifies, individual differentiation while simultaneously intensifying intimate communion (Baeck 2018; Martineau and Martineau 2016).

This newly emerging equilibrium has been nicely described by Steininger and Debold (2016), who have introduced the notion of transindividuation. Transindividuation drives toward the emergence of an intensified coherence amidst the group field, announced through the arising of an intimately shared dimension of interiority that does not annul the individuated interiority of each participant but rather supports, intensifies, and draws upon the individuated psychic reality of each constituent member. Sovereignty and communion are drawn into a state of intensified dynamic equipoise.

Ultimately, Aurobindo (2005) offered one of the earliest, and most vivid, accounts of the intensified ingression of transpersonal and transrational influences into the sphere of individuated ego consciousness. This ingression produces manifold results: a general widening of perspective; an overcoming of the modern mind’s dualistic mode of perception; a phenomenological extension of the bounds of selfhood that retrains the ego as a unique expression of a collective body arising in differentiated interbeing; an intensifying recognition of the agency of spiritual and evolutionary processes working in and through the supposedly personal volition of the waking ego.

In the conscient the ego becomes the superficial point at which the awareness of unity can emerge; but it applies its perception of unity to the form and surface of action and, failing to take account of all that operates behind, fails also to realise that it is not only one in itself but one with others. This limitation of the universal “I” in the divided ego-sense constitutes our imperfect individualized personality. But when the ego transcends personal consciousness, it begins to include and be overpowered by that which is to us superconscious; it becomes aware of the cosmic unity and enters into the Transcendent Self where here cosmos expresses by a multiple oneness.

(Aurobindo 2005, p. 45)

I consider that the leading edge of imaginal practice, and the numinous ground with which such practice participates, partakes of this supersession of individuation. Realizing this impulse to become more-than-individual would, I believe, require a significant cultivation of capacity for skillful, conscious participation in transrational modes of experience, including a heightened capacity for intentional engagement with phenomena appropriately described as imaginal. Indeed, the very possibility of realizing such participation in transrational factors may express another, complimentary dimension of the cosmological purpose of psychological individuation.26 Just as the ontological background behind the individuation process generates imaginal self-representations of its unfolding processes, so we may expect that the creative impulse toward transindividuation will likely find expression in the imaginal background. In such cases, phenomena disclosed through collective imaginal attunement would likely include tautegorical representations of mutual erotic lures drawing toward potentials that both exceed and require the individuated capacities of every individual participating in the group field.

I borrow reference to “erotic lures” from Segall’s (2023) reading of A.N. Whitehead’s process-relational philosophy. Elsewhere, I have placed process philosophy in dialog with Corbin’s understanding of angelology, which construes imaginal practice as a means of connecting with a subtle channel of eros linking the individual with the originating archetype of their own personality (Hinds 2023). The angel is construed, on one level, as an originary archetypal factor serving as the timeless basis of the individuating personality, while also functioning on another level as an alluring factor impelling the unfoldment of the developing personality across time (Corbin 1969). The angel announces itself in the imaginal realm, taking the precise form appropriate to convey the latent individuality that each person, insofar as they are in unobstructed contact with their own depths, desires to realize.

Insofar as both imply the allurement of latent potential, there is a strong analogy between the concept of the angel in Corbin’s Sufistic spiritual metaphysics and the notion of latent future potential in Baeck’s conception collective presencing. The transindividual lure toward collectively relevant latent potential, what Baeck (2018) describes as a “collective form of a soul’s calling” corresponding with the Circle of Creation, might therefore be construed as an “angel in the middle.” The Circle of Creation is realized through co-creative processes that act in service of realizing such potentials. To the extent that collective imaginal attunement is welcomed into co-creative process, openings upon alternate modes of temporal phenomenology—a common consequence of dedicated imaginal practice—are prone to occur as an essential element of the process.

8. Opening to Imaginal Causality and Temporality

Cumulative experiences of translucent knowing, inclusive of autonomous imaginal phenomena cohering around recurring themes, may open upon modes of time and causality quite distinct from the temporal linearity and efficient causality according to which the modern mind generally interprets and experiences the world. We may interpret these alternate temporal modes as varied configurations of temporal intercourse with the timeless.

Imaginal practice, as such, tends to confound the modern mind’s linear temporal phenomenology. To take one example, Bourgeault (2020) has introduced the conception of imaginal causality. Imaginal causality can be recognized wherever assemblages of both psychic and physical events dispersed in time express coherent archetypal meanings, and is therefore closely associated the phenomenon of synchronicity, first elucidated by Jung. Bourgeault (2020), to this effect, has described experiences whereby the world appears as a “tapestry of meaning” (p. 112). Inner and outer phenomena, arrayed separately across space-time, begin to “speak to each other, calling each other into resonance” as they are drawn, autonomously, into intuitive and mnemonically mediated networks of association (Bourgeault 2020, p. 112). The felt presence of numinous influences characterizing encounters with imaginal causality imbue such experiences with a quality of simultaneity rather than one of distribution across a plane of space-time organized linearly.

Bourgeault’s account of imaginal causality demonstrates correspondences with Gebser’s (1985) notion of the vital nexus, characterized by a “tapestry-like interweaving” between humanity and the whole of nature, with differentiated elements bound and ordered into coherent patterns as if by a numinous energy acting as a subtle connective tissue (p. 52). Gebser’s (1985) understanding of the originary27 nature of archetypal influences, drawing on Jung’s later formulation of “archetypical structures” as “power centers and power fields of the unconscious,” suggests that the archetypally patterned temporal entanglement of imaginal causality points to something like a refraction of pre-temporal factors out into a temporally differentiated and coherently ordered distribution (p. 401).28 Observing the ontological itineracy of archetypal motifs, Gebser (1985) has surmised that they must exist “‘behind’ or (temporally) ‘before’ whatever they circumscribe… based on the pre-temporal and pre-spatial ‘state’ which is not rationally comprehensible or imaginable, but which they make evident” (p. 401).

Considering these ideas in light of recurring experiences disclosed through ongoing imaginal practice, including Communal Reverie, I have suggested that imaginal practice can disclose a rhiziconic29 temporal–causal structure. Rhiziconic time appears through “an apparent entanglement of time and images whereby disparate moments are drawn into mutual resonance via common archetypal patterns” (Hinds 2023, p. 223). Following Gebser, it may be alternatively imagined as “a process whereby clusters of discrete moments are revealed as a dispersal of time-events refracted from a common point of origin and evincing an analogous Kairos-patterning30” (Hinds 2023, p. 223). We may assume that human beings in a state of original participation were pervasively attuned to the radically entangled space-time phenomenology corresponding with imaginal causality and the vital nexus, along with the nonlinear interconnections it manifests. While this mode of temporal attunement would have been submerged into unconsciousness with the emergence of the modern mind, we may consider that the influences of imaginal causality would nonetheless remain pervasive, albeit persisting beneath the threshold of modern waking consciousness.

We might consider, then, that “imaginal practice constitutes a means of opening to a more deeply participatory relationship with the effectuality of origin as it richly echoes and reverberates through archetypal images and patterns” (Hinds 2021). Phenomenologically, this participation involves the recurring emergence of archetypal motifs across time—whether through deliberate engagement in imaginal practice, autonomous irruptions of imaginal phenomena into conscious awareness, or other forms synchronistic occurrence expressing isomorphic meanings. At times, these archetypal motifs may be involved with accumulating intuitions connected with relevant potential, expressed through deepening insight and creative inspiration related to what is seeking to emerge. This adds a third potential cosmological purpose behind the drive toward individuation: the achievement of an unprecedented capacity for conscious recognition of, and active participation in, the expression of imaginal causality.

Along these lines, on the basis of cumulative experience, I posit that the imaginal background is often autonomously responsive, as if dialogically, to intentions or inclinations consciously established by groups immediately prior to engaging in the practice of collective imaginal attunement. Appropriate to collective practices, Bourgeault (2020) has ultimately suggested that the “Wisdom Group” presently constitutes the locus for participation in the archetypal and transrational influences relevant to our time. On this basis, I consider that Wisdom Groups with sufficiently developed capacities for collective imaginal agility may be capable of intentionally sourcing imaginal phenomena connected with latent regenerative futures that our shared context of intensifying planetary crisis is presently calling forth. This brings us to an additional transformation, beyond the fundamental shifts we have already explored involving perception, individuation, and temporal phenomenology. This final transformation involves a paradoxical reorientation concerning the place of conscious volition in creative action.

9. Originary Presence, Primordial Trust, and the Transformation of the Creative Inceptual Basis

When approached from the modern mind’s rationalistic perspective, one of the most confounding features of the “ontological breakthrough” into Gebser’s diaphanous consciousness concerns the role of conscious deliberation. While vitally necessary and indispensable in its right measure, conscious deliberation is not only insufficient but potentially counterproductive. Cheak (2021), interpreting Gebser, has referred to the volition appropriate to the integral mutation as the will that cannot be willed.

Any deliberate purpose, direction, or effort, even if they have the best of intentions, are obstacles. This does not mean that one should simply abandon oneself. On the contrary, it demands character: that is, vital-emotional, psychological, and intellectual discipline and sovereignty; it requires tireless and persistent work on oneself to further the process of purgation [Entschlackung] and refinement [Läuterung] which, to a large extent, are the prerequisites for entering into transparency. The intention must not be aimed at transparency itself. There should be no intention whatsoever at play… To try to ‘grasp’ it by means of the forces of consciousness that are currently available to us, but which do not extend to it, is a futile endeavour.

(Gebser 2024, para. 11)

Along these lines, practitioners of processes akin to presencing have expressly noted that major breakthroughs into collective coherence depend on factors originating beyond the ken of egoic volition, thus often having the character of grace (Martineau and Martineau 2016; Ramirez et al. 2013).

As a refinement upon Gebser’s repudiation of intention alongside effort, direction, and purpose, I would introduce Vivian Dittmar’s distinction between goal and intention and affirm her inclusion of the latter as a valid element of transrational modes of functioning (Monk 2021). Whereas goal-oriented action attempts to produce a pre-defined resulting from conscious deliberation, intention orients to a future potential while maintaining a posture of surrendered humility as to how this potential ought to be defined and realized. Intention maintains an availability for conscious effort in service to this potential while remaining prepared to yield toward alignment with factors originating beyond conscious effort—particularly spiritual influences. In my experience, the emergence of the corridor during Communal Reverie rested upon surrendered intentionality, free of goal-driven action. The intention would be set and the conditions established, but it could not ultimately be made to happen.

Gebser’s notion of Urvertrauen, or “primordial trust,” reflects a stabilizing confidence in originary presence as a condition for the grace of emergence. Originary presence marks the point where present moment awareness, at the level of the individual or of the group, is rendered indistinguishable from the effectual presence of origin. Abiding in such presence, even amid turbulent relational dynamics and chaotic events, may support a ripening unfolding of numinous coherence. The strengthening capacity for maintaining presence amid such processes of emergence ultimately expresses “the strengths of origin and our own strength in bringing this origin to effectivity” (Gebser 1985, p. 278).

It is rather that [our] being present is in itself sufficient to effect new exfoliations and new crystallizations which could be nowhere manifest without [our] presence. It is the coming-to-manifestation itself which is effectual. With the manifestation, with the presence, the effect is always indirectly evident.

(Gebser 1985, p. 300)

Where the practice of collective imaginal attunement is concerned, the group field often appears to yield imaginal phenomena aligned with the intentions set prior to engaging in practice. From the perspective of our embeddedness in time, therefore, transrational forces can appear responsive to our deliberate action. Imagined from the view of origin’s pretemporality, the strengths of origin appear already causally implicated in our apparently self-willed intentions even during the sustained intervals where we remain distanced from any conscious recognition of imaginal causality’s ever-present influence, and what is already latent in origin unfolds through any turbulence we confront, fluctuating through intervals of chaos and harmony. “What is pre-given from origin is being effected: origin is luminescing in the present, disarraying, transforming, and liberating it” (Gebser 1985, p. 314).

Gebser suggests that any sincere striving toward consciously realizing participation in transrational influences—including, I would venture, those expressed through imaginal phenomena—opens the possibility for realizing an integral modality of creativity, quite distinct from creativity as understood and experienced by the modern mind. “There is today a change in man’s creative relationship to the ‘primordial energy’ which is pressing toward consciousness, a change with respect to creativity itself which corresponds to the changing and mutating consciousness” (Gebser 1985, p. 330). The “shining through” of translucent knowing accompanies this fundamental reorientation, which Gebser (1985) described as “the transformation of the creative inceptual basis” (p. 392).

In creativity, origin is present. Creativity is not bound to space and time, and its truest effect can be found in mutation, the course of which is not continuous in time but rather spontaneous, acausal, and discontinuous. Creativity is a visibly emerging impulse of origin which “is” in turn timeless, or more accurately, before or “above” time and timelessness. And creativity is something that “happens” to us, that fully effects or fulfills itself in us.

(Gebser 1985, p. 313)

This dawning integral mode of creativity is intractably challenging to imagine or think about—because neither thinking nor imagination are in themselves adequate for apprehending it. It is easier to say what it is not, than to say what it is. It is not the egoless possession state by creative powers as evident in participation mystique. Nor is it the seeming result of wakeful egoic volition, as experienced by the rational consciousness structure. To say the integral creativity arises in the interplay between originary “call” (i.e., erotic lure) and participatory response (choiceful alignment with the lure), while much more closely on track, also remains lacking insofar as the very distinction between originary call and participatory response is at once upheld and superseded. As Johnson (2019) has stated,

It is through only openness and spaciousness that we can become present to these things latent in presence, and capable of co-enacting the infinite and creative powers of origin… mutations as leaps of consciousness are done when we have moved with that which moves us into new realizations of being.

(p. 156)

Where this co-enactment with the numinous creative powers of origin is concerned, Gebser assigned paramount importance upon refining our discernment regarding when to abide in letting-be, and when to shift into making-happen.

One of the preparations for this integration is that we withstand the power of the numinosum without rationalizing it. By this we do not intend to foster any kind of hubris; we have emphasized again and again that everything depends on “knowing” when to respond actively and when passively, when to let things happen and when to make them happen.31

(Gebser 1985, p. 205)

The leap into suprawakeful creative participation with the numinous also corresponds with Baeck’s (2018) Circles of Creation. Through the patient cultivation of wisdom skills, paired with capacity for releasing into originary presence, the grace of co-creative emergence may be realized in the interplay between volition and surrender, revealed as two facets of an unfolding spiritual whole. The way this is often experienced, phenomenologically, is as a sudden ripening of aligned clarity in the group field, often following prolonged periods of uncertainty. The next creative step naturally comes into focus and the egoic will naturally magnetizes toward it with a deeply felt sense of “rightness.” Eros and delight are felt indicators, as is the sense of ambiguity and confusion suddenly giving way to order and unforced directionality. Baeck (2018), reflecting on the practice of sourcing, described the process as follows:

So, faithful to our practice, we refrained from planning and waited… We tried to stay in the not-knowing-yet and moved from one edge to the next. We had no desire to make something happen, learning to trust the flow on ever deeper levels. And this practice brought us to new discoveries of exactly that: how to ride the wave as a collective. We were ready to move from being present to generating something new.

(p. 227)

While the moment of clarity arises in the form of “personal” psychological contents seemingly belonging to “me,” the origin of these “self-contents,” and the “self-actions” that follow, remain mysterious. In such moments, the inaccessibility of the egoic will’s beginnings is rendered uncommonly clear. This kind of action closely matches Hinton’s (2020) account of wu-wei:

… it is action at origins—for the wu in wu-wei is 無 with its philosophically revealing double meaning: “not/Absence.” So, in addition to “not-acting,” wu-wei means “Absence-acting,” or perhaps “enacting Absence.” Here, wu-wei action is action directly from, or indeed, as the generative ontological source: as Absence burgeoning forth into Presence. To borrow Kuo Hsiang’s terms: in wu-wei our “movements range free” because we move at the “hinge of Tao.” And in the blurring of concepts at these cosmological/ontological depths, action as Absence is action as Tao, ch’i, Buddha, dharma, inner-pattern, and all the rest. Or in contemporary terms, it is to act as the Cosmos itself moving with selfless spontaneity.

(p. 60)

This creative relationship with irrupting primordial energies thus opens into harmony with the cosmological expression of imaginal causality in its temporally entangled arrayment of events bound by common meanings. Creative action appears to “begin,” as if simultaneously, across plurality of places and times, while at the same gesturing to origin’s pretemporal placelessness.32 Viewed from within perspectival time, any flashes of insight, inspiration, and existential orientation that imaginal phenomena can potentially catalyze tends to unfold in fleeting intuitive glimpses taking place in discrete times and places. Experiences of translucent knowing, however, frequently arise as time-integrating crescendos, wherein the living memory of temporally dispersed imaginal encounters subsisting beneath the threshold of conscious “shine through” to awareness, numinously gathered and woven into thematically coherent constellations. The elements appear conjoined in a timeless present laden with intuitive, mythopoetic, somatic, subtle energetic, and conceptual sources of insight, all overlayed against the backdrop of the timeless archetypal themes around which they cohere, imparting origin’s atemporal influence. “During the consciousness mutations this originary potency becomes visibly manifest within the human domain. Although it is not origin, it renders origin perceptible. And as the potent ‘duration in and beyond time’ it is the element which is today pressing to full conscious realization” (Gebser 1985, p. 316).

Crucially, Gebser (1985) asserted that our renewed capacity for creative participation in the originary and spiritual dimension of existence, realized through our mutation into the aperspectival integral consciousness, will be a necessity if are to succeed in turning the widespread systems collapse our era is witnessing toward civilizational metamorphosis. Again, this is an “overcoming” of egoic dualism in service to a time-free, and ego-free creative contiguity with origin. As Johnson (2019) has elaborated, “Whatever is needed in response to a particular crisis or challenge is capable of springing forth in creative participation with origin” (p. 164). There is a strong analogy here with what Ramirez et al. (2013) have deemed causal leadership, whereby opening to “primal awareness” engenders “a creative spark, from and through spacious awareness, aligning multiple visions, delivering creative resolution to ‘unsolvable’ problems, and providing spontaneous intuitive direction beyond imagination” (p. 3). In the years to come, contexts conducive to this mode of collective originary creativity will have an increasingly vital role to play amid intensifying crises.

10. Concluding Summary

Communal Reverie, framed as a “wisdom technology,” distinctly turns presencing capacities toward collective imaginal practice, engaging presencing discourse and extant imaginal traditions while leading both in novel directions (Hinds 2021, 2023; Hsu 2025b). While the emphases on individuation and participation that have long characterized philosophical discourses surrounding the imaginal are retained, Communal Reverie opens to novel explorations in collective imaginal attunement potentially superseding the drive toward individuation in service of collective creative potentials, an aspiration analogous to what Baeck (2018) has called the Circle of Creation. Ideally, such collective creative synergy can be placed in service of metamodern cultural experiments across a variety of contexts ranging from artistic movements to regenerative organizations and beyond (Barbier 2024; Cooper 2020; Dember 2020; Hsu 2022; Johnson 2020; Paul 2023).

While collective imaginal attunement, as such, has been thoroughly practiced and explored, a wide array of potential directions remains for further refinement in skill and capacity. Developing agility for skillful conscious participation in imaginal attunement, even on an individual basis (through such teachings as Rob Burbea’s Soulmaking Dharma), requires considerable time and devotion in itself. Skillfully synergizing these imaginal participatory capacities between individuals, in concert with the sourcing capacities described by Baeck, adds considerable additional complexity. I therefore hold Bourgealt’s “Wisdom Group” as an archetypal image for the highest realization of wisely employed collective imaginal agility toward which Communal Reverie aspires—an ideal not to be concretely identified with, but continuously oriented toward. This ideal establishes the proper meaning of “wisdom technology” in accordance with the root word techne, meaning “practical knowledge.”

From one perspective, it could conceivably require decades, if not centuries, for lineages of dedicated practice to achieve truly advanced stages of collective imaginal agility. Given the sense of urgency that is often, and understandably, provoked by our time of profound crisis and opportunity, this timeline may appear unreasonably long to justify the aspiration for Communal Reverie—as one instance among what, I hope, will be many approaches toward collective imaginal attunement and related capacities—to be of generative service to the world’s need. As Gebser (1985) poignantly stated: “if we do not overcome the crisis it will overcome us; and only someone who has overcome himself is truly able to overcome. Either we will be disintegrated and dispersed, or we must resolve and effect integrality” (xxvii). Drawing from the wisdom of multiple streams of philosophical mysticism, however, I consider the possibility that the emergence of collective imaginal agility may take root and blossom across the broader culture at a faster rate than would otherwise be rationally expected (Aurobindo 2005; Barfield 1988; Gebser 1985; Tarnas 1991). This perspective rests on a number of paradoxes endemic to the “coalescence of the spiritual with our consciousness” that is presumably accelerating amid our era of intertwining metacrisis and consciousness mutation (Gebser 1985, p. 542).

So it may be that successfully rerouting widespread systems collapse toward planetary metamorphosis will ultimately require cultivation of an originary presence that surrenders all temptation to goal-oriented action motivated and driven by urgency and primordial anxiety. Seen from this perspective, the impulse toward cultivating spiritual discipline and technical capacity, while in one sense vitally necessary, ultimately relies upon transegoic processes. From this perspective, any deliberate efforts to cultivate technical capacity may find rooting in a deeper ground of primordial trust supporting and enabling an integral creativity whereby origin effects its mutation in, through, and as the co-creative activity of Wisdom Groups. Should a sufficient constellation of such groups succeed in co-realizing originary creativity, they may ultimately realize themselves as expressions of origin’s own dynamic unfolding: out from primordial unity, through a condition of dualistic alienation and psychospiritual crisis, and toward creative resolution in and through the flowering of a participating integral consciousness.