Communal Reverie: Toward a Formulation of Imaginal Aperspectivity and the Integral Participatory Imagination

Abstract

Poet, mystic, and cultural philosopher Jean Gebser (1985) presciently described our era as “Janus-faced,” a time of radical transformation marked by civilizational decline and potential renewal. Contemporary writer Zak Stein (2019), keenly aware of the meta-crisis enfolding our planet, similarly declared that we are in a “time between worlds.” Cultural innovators are expressing the need for new forms of collective intelligence and collective wisdom for navigating the cultural and ecological ferment of our time-in-transition, which some thinkers are characterizing as a second axial age (Steininger & Debold, 2016). This study presents a theoretical exploration of Communal Reverie, a “we-space” practice that interanimates principles drawn from Collective Presencing and various imaginal practices, exploring intersubjective and transsubjective approaches to imaginal attunement in search of new forms of collective intelligence and collective wisdom (Baeck, 2018). Gebser’s conception of a presently unfolding mutation of consciousness, whereby the currently dominant mental-rational (perspectival) consciousness is being superseded by an emerging integral (aperspectival) consciousness, provides the overarching theoretical framework. Supported by Gebser in dialogue with a variety of traditions (including Romanticism, Sufism, and Jungian psychology), various experiences afforded through Communal Reverie practice are elaborated as features of imaginal aperspectivity. In consonance with Gebser’s conviction that our current condition of planetary crisis is at once engendering and necessitating the integral mutation, I introduce a speculative account of what I have called the integral participatory imagination as a subtle perceptual faculty enabling collective and creative responsivity to our planetary predicament, what Baeck (2018) described as “an emerging human capacity.”