An invitation: Let's constellate a new reality

An experiment in the ideascape, 297 words at a time

Joan Miró, “Ciphers and Constellations in Love with a Woman”

Hi, friends,

This is an invitation.

I am planning an experiment, and I’d like you to join.

Let’s draw some new constellations.

Premise 1: Writing is a form of magic. It creates associations, moods, and worlds that can alter material reality.

Premise 2: The ideas that really matter don’t originate in human heads. They are dreamt up by the gods, and they migrate through the imaginal realm before arriving in material reality. We can learn to access the imaginal realm and receive the ideas that really matter.

Premise 3: Many of us are working very hard to receive the ideas that matter.

Premise 4: The imaginal realm does not obey the laws of geography or physics or time. In the imaginal realm, ideas and possibilities and dreams come together and coalesce out of affinity alone.

Premise 5: We can create the reality to come by writing into association, into affinity, the seemingly disparate and far-flung ideas that are tapping each of us on the shoulder, asking to come through from the imaginal realm. We can energize the collective shift by actively creating these associations.

The experiment

• By writing essays that link seemingly disparate ideas floating around our ideascapes right now, can we influence material reality?

• I invite you to send me the ideas, possibilities, fictional characters, and other imaginal entities that are shaping your consciousness. Imaginal entities you believe are essential ingredients of the reality we seek to build. (See below for some examples from me, in case this is unclear.)

• I will collect these imaginal fragments and begin to knit them together into a connected whole.

• I will allow chance itself a guiding hand, by putting each contribution in a hat and drawing three at random for each essay. Three is the number where something new can emerge from synthesis. Three is magic.

• Each mini-essay will be 297 words long. Three ideas. 99 words per idea. 297 words. (Thanks to

  Catherine Lacey
  for the inspiration here. Everyone should be reading her 144-word essays.)

• These essays will not seek to be exhaustive. They will seek to make new connections. To dance in the idea space. To allow new ideas and worlds to be born.

Sample imaginal entities

I’ll start the filling of the imaginal hat myself, with the following ideas/characters/imaginal entities. I’m sharing them here in case they prompt any ideas from you.

Note that the items in the hat don’t have to be fictional. We’re looking for ideas or concepts that keep tapping you on the shoulder right now and telling you that they’re important, whether they’re from the past, present or future.

You can include ideas that are currently private to you; that aren’t yet known in the human collective. Perhaps this is a theory you’re developing, or a character you’re writing. Maybe having those knitted into these essay-spells will help the idea to emerge into material reality. But if you do this, please give me enough information to work with when I write the essay.

Here are some of the ideas I most commonly find knocking around my own ideascape at present, which I’ll be adding to the hat to get us started. (Note that these are mostly rooted in cultural history and mythology, because that’s the kind of nerd I am. But don’t let that restrict you. All topics welcome.)

• The enclosure of the commons

• The mystery of dark matter

• The Romantic sublime

• The Eleusinian mysteries

• Eris

• The statue scene in The Winter’s Tale

• Julian of Norwich’s hazelnut

• Nada brahma

• Blake’s Urizen

• Plato’s forms

• Blake’s Beulah

• Orlando (Woolf’s character)

• The figure of the holy fool

• Mount Qaf

• The story of Parzival

Submit an imaginal entity

Join the effort to constellate the reality to come by submitting your imaginal entities here.

Edit to add: Submit one idea at a time. You can submit as many ideas as you like. I will then pick three ideas at a time from the giant global idea catcher.