14

THE IMAGINAL WORLD

 

Only intuition resting on sympathetic understanding can lead to [these laws] . . . the daily effort comes from no deliberate intention or program, but straight from the heart.

ALBERT EINSTEIN

Stevens and Frost, both geniuses, walk gingerly in this area . . . the area where meeting a mandolin or a moose is meeting consciousness.

ROBERT BLY

The duration of a spark, the individual and the nonindividual have become interchangeable and the terror of the mortal limitation inside me in time and in space appears to be annulled. Nothingness ceases to exist when all that is not the man is added to the man. This is when he seems to be himself.

HANS BELLMER

Using the feeling sense to touch the world brings, as I have said, an intimation of feeling or mood. If you look at something near to you and let your sensory noticing of it take over the whole of your attention, immediately there is a shift from linear thinking into something different. In that moment your sensory perceiving becomes your thinking. It is what you do instead of thinking with the linear mind.

So, if you really look at something in front of you now and begin to notice its shading of colors, its form, its three-dimensionality, the texture of its surface, and then ask yourself, How does it feel? you will immediately experience an intimation of mood or feeling. This marks a shift in cognition, a shift in perception, a shift in the kind of thinking you are doing. And at that moment, in a tiny millisecond of time, your gating channels open more widely.

This particular exercise begins with using the feeling sense to touch something in the human world but something unusual happens if awareness is extended in a somewhat different direction. If that touching leaves the human world entirely and enters the wildness of the world, if this capacity for nonphysical touching is used out there, if the eyes look closely at some part of the natural world and we ask ourselves, How does it feel? something new enters the process, something important.

To understand what that is, go into your yard or take a walk in a park and let yourself wander, just looking at this and that, until something catches your attention—a large tree perhaps. Then stop and let yourself really look at it and, when you are really immersed in seeing it, ask yourself, How does it feel?

In that tiny moment of time a unique feeling tone will emerge into your awareness, just as it did before. But, if you pay close attention, you will notice that there is a difference. There is a livingness to it, which the pen or cup or desk did not have (or perhaps did not have as much). And that livingness itself has a particular feeling to it. There is a secret kinesis to the natural world and it is perhaps the most important secret kinesis of all. Henry David Thoreau was talking about this when he said . . .

It is only when we forget all our learning that we begin to know. I do not get nearer by a hair’s breadth to any natural object so long as I presume that I have an introduction to it from some learned man. To conceive of it with a total apprehension I must for the thousandth time approach it as something totally strange. If you would make acquaintance with the ferns you must forget your botany. You must get rid of what is commonly called knowledge of them. Not a single scientific term or distinction is the least to the purpose, for you would fain perceive something, and you must approach the object totally unprejudiced. You must be aware that no thing is what you have taken it to be. [To perceive something truly] you have got to be in a different state from the common.¹

“A different state than the common.” That is Einstein’s different way of thinking again. It is the dreaming state, the state of analogical, feeling perception and thinking. And in that state sensory gating opens more widely, novelty increases, and you find that the thing you have approached, touched with your feeling sense is not what you have taken it to be. You begin now to encounter the living reality of the plant—something that is very far from scientific descriptions of it.

To make the experience even more distinct it helps to immediately compare the plant you have just felt with something else, so, after the tree, find something else that captures your attention, perhaps a blade of grass or a small flowering plant or even a stone. Focus on it and ask yourself, How does it feel? Again, an intimation of mood or feeling will emerge, one that is different from the tree. Yet, it, too, will possess that livingness, that unique difference, however slight it is, in feeling from the manmade things you perceived earlier.

Now, just stay in that state of perception and let your eyes pan over everything. Simply feel the world around you and let the feeling tones of everything that you see wash over you. Nonphysically touch the world as a general mode of perception just as you do with your eyes when you see and your ears when you hear. There is something much more living about this than when you apply it solely to the human world.

Something new enters our experience when we reach out with that nonphysical part of us and touch the wildness of the world. It is a great deal more complex than what occurs in cities or houses or books. Importantly, hidden within the secret kinesis of the world, within the feeling of any particular wild place or thing, are the deeper dimensions that belong to the world in general and that thing or place in particular. And these deeper dimensions are a great deal older than the human artefacts with which we are usually surrounded. And they are a great deal more alive.

When you travel further along the road of feeling, going from “How does this conversation feel?” to “How does this table feel?” to “How does this river feel?” you begin to find that there is much more to the world than we have been taught. You begin to notice that a complexity of perceptual feeling arises from touching the wildness of the world and that the feeling you receive back possesses dynamics that are more complex than those that come from focusing solely on the human world or any of its elements. There are reasons for this, among which is that what you are touching now has its own aliveness, its own awareness, its own capacity to communicate.

I did not go anyplace that the corn did not first tell me to go

What occurs, sooner or later, is that one day, when you reach out with your sensing and touch some living part of the world, suddenly there is some sort of response. Sooner or later, often when you least expect it, something will touch you in return. And though it’s usually subtle, it doesn’t have to be . . .

You are riding in a small boat and suddenly a whale rises to the surface right beside you, rolls to the side and meets you eye-to-eye. Suddenly you are not looking at an external object but are being seen in turn, suddenly you are seeing each other. Can you get a sense of what I mean here? Can you feel what that might be like? Or perhaps something like this happens . . .

A reporter had been assigned a story by his editor. It was a human interest story, all about dolphins and how intelligent they are and besides they are cute, make interesting sounds, the kids love them. It will be great for the paper. But this reporter . . . he’s pretty jaded. He likes cutting-edge investigative pieces and really resents having to do the story. Intelligence in dolphins? What a joke. And besides, who cares? Nevertheless . . .

The reporter made the long drive to the lab, parked his car, smoked another cigarette, stabbed it out, threw the butt on the ground, and knocked on the door. The scientists introduced themselves, shook his hand, and began to show him around. The reporter followed the scientists to the long glass wall of the lab, the wall that marked the division between lab and dolphin tank, the place where each species could watch the other, could sometimes meet. And as they did every morning, the dolphins had gathered just on their side of the glass, to make their morning hellos.

The reporter watched the scientists go through their morning ritual, watched the dolphin family respond. Made nice noises over the six-week-old baby dolphin, took a longer tour around the lab, went through the desultory question-and-answer-session, drank the obligatory bad coffee that all scientists make, and then spent the rest of the time leaning against the glass wall of the dolphin tank, chain-smoking cigarettes, filling the time until he could go back to the office.

Now for whatever reason the young dolphin was fascinated by the reporter and instead of swimming off with his family, he just kept floating there looking at him in the curious way young children, irrespective of species, have about something new. The man ignored the kid, kept his back to the glass, and kept on smoking. But the young dolphin seemed possessed of inexhaustible patience. He just kept hanging there. Staring. And after awhile the reporter began to get twitchy, then mad. So, he took a deep drag on his cigarette, turned, and blew smoke at the glass, directly in the dolphin’s face. The dolphin back-pedaled in surprise, looked at the man for a moment, then swam rapidly off. The reporter grinned, sighed, then leaned back against the glass again and continued to smoke.

But in a minute or two the young dolphin returned, swam up close to the glass, and just hung there . . . staring. The reporter tried to ignore it but after a while, in irritation, he turned and glared through the glass at the young dolphin. As soon as he did, the young dolphin blew a cloud of smoke directly in his face. And the whole room stopped.

It took awhile for everyone to understand what had happened, for of course dolphins don’t smoke (and anyway, even if they did, it wouldn’t work under water). The dolphin, who was still nursing, had gone to his mother, taken some milk, and come back and puffed it in the man’s face. Not bad for a six week old infant—of a species considered inferior in intelligence to humans.

But the most important thing is . . . something unique happened in that moment, something that captured the awareness of everyone in that room. A communication between two living beings took place. And in that moment, some powerful, deep meaning came reverberating up and out of the background of the world and swept away the statistical mentality. For a moment in time every human in the room swam in deeper waters. They stopped thinking, caught up in feeling the meaning that had entered the room. Time seemed to stop and everyone was caught up in the experience of an invisible thing.

One of the people who was there that day said he had never seen cynicism and skepticism evaporate in a human being so quickly. In that one tiny moment of time, the journalist’s separation from the other life-forms with which he shares this planet ended. He was touched by a living, aware, caring, intelligence from the world and he could not deny it. Some door in him opened and the whole aware universe came flooding in and he was never the same again. For him, the long loneliness of the human species ended.²

During such moments, whether they come from a dolphin or a great tree we have unexpectedly stumbled upon in some ancient forest, we are suddenly caught up in something that has nothing to do with the human world. We feel something coming into us from out there, something that is outside our narrow human perspectives. In that moment, we are pulled out of ourselves into a world that is more ancient than the human—a place where living intelligences can touch each other as kin. We discover then that trees have been doing something more for the past 300 million years than simply pining away for our emergence.

We feel the touch of life, of a nonhuman awareness, upon us. But more . . . we experience something unique to most humans in the West. An intelligence, just as subtle and sophisticated as our own, but very nonhuman, reaches out and communicates with us. Across the species divide, in spite of our isolation, a different kind of language than our own, one filled with meaning and intent, tells us something. And a new world opens up. When that happens we take a long floating leap, land someplace else, and look around with new eyes. We experience in that moment what the ancient Greeks—the Athenians—called aisthesis, the touch of a nonhuman soul upon the deeps of us—and know that ours touches them in turn.

We are not here for ourselves alone

Aisthesis such as this often emerges into our experience at unexpected times. It comes sideways to our normal orientation, grabs the depths of us and drags us unexpectedly into a world we did not suspect existed.

This is almost always how it begins for us in the West

And when that happens, we abandon the view of life that does not allow us to extend interiority to dolphins or trees or stones.

And so break the great injunction of reductionist science

Being unable to extend interiority and consciousness outward, as Robert Bly once said, keeps human beings isolated in their own house and, in extreme cases, we simply look out at a world with which we have no possibility of contact. We are cut off from the metaphysical background of the world and our perceptual capacities are kept in a box.

A box that science teaches us is the whole world

If that box is very tiny, as it is with strict reductionists such as Richard Dawkins, the mind can see very little of the real world that lies outside the box; there is only the human on a ball of resources hurtling around the sun. All things in the universe—from that orientation—center around the human, for there is no exterior consciousness. To such scientists the sun may no longer revolve around the Earth but it most certainly still revolves around human beings.

But . . . once you are touched by a living intelligence from out there, you are changed. It is nearly impossible not to be. The living reality of that experience works on the self, undermining the old paradigm, and you begin to, more and more frequently, step outside the normal habituated boundaries of the Western world. You begin to enter an older, wilder, less-domesticated world, the place barbarians inhabit, where the hair begins to grow long, where wild lights begin to gleam in the eye. You begin to enter the wilderness that still lies underneath the concrete of the civilized world.

This most assuredly extends awareness further than society
wants it to go.
This is what becoming barbarian means.

For some people, this touch of communication and intelligence from the wildness of the nonhuman world marks a phase change in their life. They abandon the human world as the fundamental point of reference and begin to cultivate the experience of aisthesis. They intentionally seek it, deliberately step into the world with their feeling sensing intact, actively seeking the moment of communication, the place where the nonhuman and the human meet and exchange the shapes of their lives. The place where the human sits down at the feet of the nonhuman and learns what is really true about the world out there.

Natural scientists who pursue this approach spend years running their nets through those deeper waters, immersing themselves more and more fully, bringing home, to this world, the things they find, the things they are taught by the wildness of the world. Anyone can do it as Bill Mollison, Masanobu Fukuoka, Viktor Schauberger, Luther Burbank, and so many others have shown.

The linearists, however, never use the things
that are brought back very wisely.
You should keep that in mind
should you have the desire to go to work for them.

You don’t have to be a scientist to do it, or to change the world. In fact, in proportion to their numbers, very few scientists ever do it.

It is through this immersion in the depths of the real world that the solutions to the problems that face us can be found. Not as universals, straightjackets forcing conformity on all in a frantic attempt at control and safety, but rather as local communicatory responses from the deepest regions of the world itself, into the human heart, and into this world, for use at this location and place.

Mollison and Fukuoka, for instance, in their search for a new way to grow food, for Earth-sustainable agriculture, did not create a one-size-fits-all approach but a way of bringing food forth that depended on deep relationship with the place in which it is grown. And that relationship depends on communication between two equal intelligences. It’s a communication, not a technique.

As Annie Le Brun, in her remarkable book The Reality Overload (Inner Traditions, 2008), comments, there is, in these moments of communication, a “charged state of awareness,” where we are opened up to what we are not. And that is when the solutions we need emerge. As she notes . . .

The entire history of analogical thought
gives evidence of these “instants of solution.”³

Analogical thought is the different kind of thinking we need. But that capacity can be taken further yet. It is possible to fully shake off the cultural habituation of years, to shed the clothes to which you have become accustomed and to immerse yourself completely in these waters.

If you fully combine the experience of aisthesis with analogical thinking so that it blends into a unique synaesthesia of perceptual cognition and feeling, the human world can sometimes be left behind entirely. There is no longer me, over here, touching a nonhuman intelligence over there. There is me, inside the world in which the nonhuman lives. The human world is no longer the reference point. The boundary between self and other disappears and you begin to see the world through their eyes.

To Be Called Beloved by the Earth

This kind of experience, when it first occurs, can be considerably unsettling. The normal human markers are lost, everything we thought we knew about ourselves becomes irrelevant. Cultural definitions, the particular view of the world that we have accepted from Western science, historical markers, family stories, our personal biography . . . all the things that we use at a level deeper than conscious awareness to orient ourselves in space and time are gone.

Once we step completely outside that framework the human, and our own personal life, whose story has always been central to us, the normal framework we use to orient ourselves, is gone. Who am I then if I am not Stephen Harrod Buhner who was born in such and such a time and place and who has had, since that time, all those experiences that I did have? I am only one being among many, neither more nor less important than any. Underneath that human experience there is a deeper identity, one that all organisms on this planet share. Such an experience is unsettling when first encountered; it shakes the foundations of self-identity. (See appendix 1, “Sensory Overload and Self-Caretaking”).

Nevertheless, this loss of the human orientation is important. (And ultimately, incredibly interesting.) Once the human orientation is left behind, the world as it is, not as it is pictured from a human orientation, begins to emerge into awareness. There are functional dynamics at work in the Gaian system that cannot be seen until the human framework is left behind. For, as Thoreau once put it . . .

So much of man as there is in your mind, there will be in your eye.

We literally can’t see the deeper dimensions of Earth if we remain in a human-oriented frame. For we then tend to think that the oil in the California hills is, and always has been, there for us. We believe that there is something unique about our intelligence, that we, in our billions, are intrinsically more important than the plants that grow in our yards. Foundationally, the thinning of boundary between self and other is crucial. The complete elimination of it is, at times, a necessity. It is only then that it is possible to experience the other inhabitants of this scenario from inside their own lives. Understanding emerges, only at such moments, that the human world and its concerns are as unimportant to the other life-forms here as the mosquito you just swatted is to you. It changes things. For the first time the arrogance of the human perspective vanishes. It’s possible then to see just how thoroughly it biases nearly every aspect of science . . . and how much it alters nearly every human intervention into the ecological functioning of the planet. We have a place here, yes, but it is not as important as we have been trained to believe. The experience of boundary dissolution, for the first time, lends a realistic perspective to the human orientation. Behavior alters accordingly. It can’t help but do so.

This is why the boundary thinning that is experienced by those labeled schizophrenic and those on hallucinogens is considered to be pathological. It undermines the humancentric worldview. Through the lives of those whose boundaries have thinned, we catch glimpses of the shimmer of infinity in the face of the other, catch glimpses through the doors of perception of the metaphysical background of the world.

Once you come to understand, in your experience, that you are just one life-form among many, that you can meet the other life-forms here in moments of tremendous intimacy, it enables one of the most wondrous of explorations possible. To leave the human world behind, the surface identity of the self, and swim, only one life-form among a multitude, deep into the metaphysical background of the world is to enter a place where we meet there as living beings, identical in nature at the core, similar intelligences, all given birth by Earth, all expressed out of the Ocean of Being into form. And in those moments of touch, we look back at each other with luminous eyes and tell tales of the lives we have lived and the lands we have seen and speak of the commonalities of what it means to be alive on this Earth, kin, all of whom came from common ancestors long ago.

And then . . . sometimes, in unique moments, deep inside the experience, we slide completely out of our frame and totally into the other’s . . . and they into ours. We then look into each other’s eyes—my eyes through your eyes, your eyes through my eyes. Touch with our hearts, your heart, my heart, and mine yours. Here, we experience the deepest possible intimacy that any living being can know. There is a communicatory interblending of soul. Something of the other then resides inside me and something of me inside the other. Like the viral blending of genomes, we become in that moment a part of the other and they a part of us. And when we return to this world, something from the other remains inside us. It makes us truly barbarian, no longer civilized. We are no longer presentable in polite company.

Still . . . it is possible to go even deeper yet. It is possible to move inside the scenario itself, the place from which all life-forms emerged. It is the place where background becomes foreground, the place where environment is the intelligence encountered, the place where communication of a very different sort begins.

The Imaginal Realm

During analogical thinking, we follow an invisible trail that wanders through the world by using a particular capacity of perception. And as we do it more often as a habit of mind we begin to be aware that we do not inhabit a world of disconnected living organisms each isolated in its own house. We find that they reach out from time to time using their own unique form of language and communication. We learn how to communicate with them, allow them to tell us of their own lives in their own words. And sometimes, like lovers, for a brief moment, we change places and know each other from the inside.

But sometimes, sometimes, something different happens. For some reason the point of view shifts. We take our focus off the living organisms that we have thought the most important and for some reason begin to look with these analogical eyes at the field itself. We begin to experience then, at the deepest possible level, that we are immersed in a fluid medium, a living textual field—Fuller’s scenario—throughout which are scattered the condensed meanings—Bateson’s transforms of messages, O’Gorman and Emmerson’s nodes—that we call, and usually perceive, as external objects, as living organisms. These transforms of messages are directly experienced then as condensations of meaning that are expressing, multidimensionally, aspects of the textual field in which they are embedded. We suddenly get a sense of the field itself as foreground, of everything on which we have previously been focused as only condensed expressions of the field. We find suddenly, in our experience, that there is only the field and that the field is alive—is in fact the only life-form.

We touch the Tao

And we, all the life-forms, are only expressions of it in unique shape and time. There is a phase change that happens, from one state to another.

Robert Bly has a way of describing that phase change in his discussion of the marvelous Russian tale “The Maiden King” (in his book of the same name). There is a boy whose father hires a tutor to teach and watch over while the father is working. And because it’s a fairy tale, it is inevitable that odd, even magical, occurrences will occur once the two of them begin their work together. And indeed, one day, they do. The tutor has taken Ivan fishing on a small raft out at sea, and as Bly comments . . .

The father apparently has wisely asked the tutor to teach the boy how to fish. We each need to know how to “fish.” Psychologically, fishing amounts to an inquisitiveness about the “treasures of the deep.” We float in broad daylight, on our well-constructed, rationally engineered raft or boat, looking down into the cloudy waters—inhabited by God knows what—the same waters each dreamer fishes in at night. Teaching people how to fish is a just aim in education. We are fishing right now. Fishing is a kind of daydreaming in daylight, a longing for what is below.⁴

Bly is describing here what it is like, from a somewhat different orientation, what the process of following golden threads is like. We begin in our “rationally engineered” world, the day-to-day state of linear cognition most people think is fundamental, and we begin using our sensory capacity to feel into the world. We are driven in this by “a longing for what is below.” We are fishing in, as Bly notes, the same waters each dreamer fishes in at night. We are feeling the line we have dropped into the water—that is, the feeling sensing that we have sent into the world—in just the same way we feel sensitively with our fingers when we are trying to loosen the nut on a bolt we cannot see. We are letting our consciousness, our entire awareness enter our fingers and nothing else is in our awareness. We are absorbed, immersed in the sensing, only paying attention to what our sensing is telling us. And as we do that, analogical thinking emerges. We stay immersed, our analogical perception deepens.

This is how it works. And as we gain experience with the process we begin to catch fish. We eventually find in our exploration that we have been a bit too self-centered. We catch hold of something and suddenly discover one day that it is not exactly clear which end of the line we are on. Something intelligent reaches out and touches us in turn.

Are the plants fishing, too?
Themselves dropping lines down in the depths?
One day finding an herbalist on the other end of the line?

We experience then that dolphins and corn and barley are intelligent. And once we are over our shock, we approach more carefully, tentatively reach out once more and begin to make relationship with them. And as we show ourselves trustworthy,

as we must in any intimate relationship,

they begin to tell us the stories of their life. And if our love affair deepens enough, one day we, without expecting it, slip outside our frame entirely, find what Masanobu Fukuoka was talking about when he said, “Only to him who stands where the barley stands and listens well will it speak and tell, for his sake, what man is.” Our boundaries thin so much that we become the other.

We travel, always in this process, between the Newtonian, linear world of cause and effect and the deeper world that lies inside and behind it. Back and forth in endless oscillation. Each time we decide to travel again into the metaphysical depths of the world, we must once more initiate a shift in consciousness, change our form of cognition. And even though we know the territory from previous experience, we still begin our immersion floating on the surface of those metaphysical depths, on our rationally engineered raft.

For our rational mind serves a purpose
it is as much a part of us as our hands
and our hearts

Each time we begin by feeling into the depths, encountering golden threads, and following them where they lead us . . .

for only the thread knows where it is going
and that will always be true

we meet then the living intelligences of the world, learn how to travel in their world, see from their point of view. Over the years, we become used to the process, comfortable in the territory. It’s familiar. But suddenly . . . for some reason we will never understand with our rational minds, one day, something different happens. While we are still deep in our dreaming, totally immersed in what has captured our attention, our focus shifts. We suddenly look up and perceive the textual field itself. We are no longer focused on one thing but suddenly are perceiving everything through that state of mind. Background in that moment becomes foreground. Bly describes it like this . . .

The boy and the tutor are looking down into the sea, one might say, for the Presence that swims about in the murky world below the surface of things; and all at once the Presence arrives on the surface of the ocean, coming in from the horizon, seemingly belonging to the sea itself.⁵

Unsuspectingly, we have stepped through what Blake called Heaven’s gate built in Jerusalem’s wall. As Henry Corbin puts it, “One sets out; at a given moment, there is a break with the geographical coordinates that can be located on our maps. But the ‘traveler’ is not conscious of the precise moment; he does not realize it,” does not notice it happening, he just suddenly finds himself arrived.⁶

Corbin remarked that the Persian mystics said that there was a world Aristotle didn’t know of, one where the mythic and the mundane interpenetrated each other. They called it the imaginal world, or as Corbin put it: the Mundus Imaginalis.

And here it has a deeper meaning,
it means the world imagination,
the place where the world dreams form into being

This the place that lies underneath the world of form,

from another perspective
you can think of it as the doorway to the quantum multiverse,
you didn’t think that human beings
never noticed its existence before physicists were invented, did you?

The textual field of Earth has existence simultaneously in both the classical Newtonian universe and the quantum multiverse

the classical universe is just one form that the multiverse can take
and as quantum reality freaks insist, there are an
endless number of them

In older times what is now called the quantum multiverse was known as the mythic world.

The textual field of Earth as it exists in classical space can be perceived, as Richard Lewontin revealed, by seeing its shape through the concentrated nodes of living organisms/physical matter—and the lines that touch and connect them, that weave them all together into one whole event.

It is similar to the visual representation of a gravitational map of space that shows the gravitational lines—gravity’s golden threads—condensing around the gravity wells we call planets. But this kind of “looking” occurs not with the eyes, but through the feeling sense and the exact sensorial imagination. We perceive this similarly to the way viruses perceive cells. They identify cells through a perception in three-dimensional surface chemistry. We perceive the textual field through a perception in three-dimensional feeling space that then emerges on the field of our inner vision as images—the exact sensorial imagination.

The textual field’s form in classical space reveals the moment-to-moment shape that Earth takes in order to maintain self-organization. Gaia generates that ever-changing form continually out of an underlying field of potential—out of the mythic world, the quantum multiverse. Plato called this the realm of the Forms . . . or, as other ancient Greeks might have called it, it is the realm of the Archi, the place from which all form comes.

When you suddenly look up and find yourself immersed in the textual field itself, you enter the place where the mythic and the mundane meet. The place the quantum multiverse and classical space intersect. It is the place Corbin called the imaginal realm, the place where the phenomena that are immanent in the Ocean of Being reside before emerging into our world. It is the place that McFadden describes when he says that there is

a dense series of measurements of a quantum system along a particular path [that] will force the dynamics of the system to evolve along that path.⁷

In other words, the Earth desires the emergence of a particular form out of the multiverse in order to stabilize self-organization. The form is being pulled out of the multiverse but has not yet been measured, only potential measurement has occurred. The system need, a response deep inside Gaia to the gestalt of all inputs, is beginning to be expressed into specific form. As the need emerges more fully into specificity, into exactness, it begins to bring one form more than all others out of the underlying Ocean of Being. Just before it emerges into this world, before it collapses into form into classical Newtonian space, it exists in the imaginal world as archetype.