Identifying and rejecting the illusions of the Imaginary is necessary for the creation of a psycho-political subject capable of transcending the biopolitical.

The tech world uses the term ‘technical debt’, which means that 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. Julian Reid is onto this: ‘How to navigate the relation between the imaginary and the real? A politics of resistance to liberalism, today, requires more than ever a psychopolitical subject capable of transcending the biopolitical horizons of liberal modernity; one that will free us from its biologisms, and enable us to dream and imagine in ways that are proper to the human psyche. But in order for an imaginary to continue with enough persistence such that it produces a revolutionary manifesto with a new literary constitution, for it to be more than the vacuous pastime of poets, the imaginary must find its matter, its reality. A material element must give the imaginary its own substance. Note it is not the question of which material precedes the imaginary, but how the imaginary finds its material, such that it is able to realise itself.’[xliii] I think his insight is profound and is pointing in the direction we need to be headed. 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. There is the obvious kind of physical matter, whose depleting resources and resulting constraints will play a leading role in shaping our new subjectivity.[xliv] Then there’s our quest to discover new matter from which to crystallise our new imaginaries. To avoid falling back into the solipsism that arises from our sense of separation from the real, whatever its qualities or symbolic interface we use, I propose to call the material Reid speaks of ‘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 saw. 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 , a , 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.’