Moral Imaginations: an invitation
The core of the work of Moral Imaginations is about coming together to access collective imaginations for moral futures. It is a practice and series of living methodologies that can be used to cultivate #MoralImaginations. It is a community of people who are committed to working with our moral imaginations to access new vistas, new ways of being, and new ways of seeing, and who create new portals to adjacent possibilities.
Moral Imaginations is about de-numbing our perceptions and senses to perceive what was always already there, but we do not usually include in our understanding of value, perspective or understanding.
It is about using imagination in a completely different way, but imagining new possibility comes from first throwing off the solely rational, linear and reductionist categorisation.
The moral imagination as a concept has been alive since the time of Plato, Virgil and Dante. Over the centuries it has been periodically re-expressed, for example by Edmund Burke in 1790, and then others in more recent years. Moral Imaginations works to develop a practice and community to bring it alive in a way that is relevant for this current moment and generation.
A Manifesto for Moral Imaginations
If you’ve read the story Flatland, you’ll know about the notion that we are limited to perceiving the world with the senses we have. The actual reality is multi-dimensional. We know other organisms can perceive things we cannot; the bee perceives UV light, the platypus perceives magnetic fields.
We live in a world where we have stopped perceiving the full spectrum of who we are, what a good human life is made of, and the magic and possibility of a human life and the world that surrounds us. Most people are living a life that is a shadow of the life they could be.
Futures are stolen when our current education system and economy funnels people into lives they hate to make money they don’t have to buy things they don’t need to impress people they don’t like. Futures are stolen when leaders make decisions that continue to lead to the destruction of our planet, ecosystems and diverse ecologies. Futures are stolen when systems of oppression force entire cultures and communities of people to bend to hegemonic powers.
There is so much that is wrong with our world, and to grow up and thrive within it, we numb ourselves and our perception to what is wrong. We tell ourselves that this is normal, that we need to grow up, that we’re naive, stupid, wrong, and that the world and lives we yearn for are impossible and implausible.
RIGOROUS IMAGINING FOR MORAL FUTURES.
Moral Imaginations is an invitation to an experiential taste of a different future. The space beyond default perception, beyond our understanding of time, beyond the rational rules of who can speak on behalf of what - we call this the “liminal space”, and the muscle we grow in Moral Imaginations is the muscle to inhabit, navigate, and create from, that liminal space.
Moral Imaginations is a lucid dreaming practice into a better future. The world we are working to manifest into reality doesn’t exist yet. We must inhabit that space with our imagination, feel it, dream it, and then bring it down to reality.
The practice is to be able to find our way into these other-worlds, and practice perception through new eyes that we wouldn’t normally have access to. Just like in a lucid dream, there are methodologies that allow you to trigger your entry into a lucid dreaming state. Just like in a lucid dream, maintaining that state takes rigour, focus and practice, and doesn’t always work. Unlike a lucid dream, we go into that space together.
Moral Imaginations is a portal.
It is an emergent space, a space where the end goal is possibility. We entertain that if our current perception and ways of thinking about the world are fundamentally dead-end, and create realities we do not want, we need to find ways to throw off the psychic machinery that keeps us in a dead reality. The portal is into new vistas within ourselves, and into a community that supports further development.
Moral Imaginations is vital.
Moral Imaginations is an invitation to speak up on behalf of all Life. It’s a moral responsibility that we do so in a time when the future of our planet and species is endangered. It is a vital practice that allows us to connect with the more than human world, our own ecologies, lineages, identity, and expanded ecological identity, to shift perception, and from that action, on behalf of all Life.
Moral Imaginations is felt.
We have to feel the future into being, it is not something that can only be thought. Moral Imaginations invites full-body intelligence, embodied perception and heart and gut-based knowing to join the powers of the intellect to imagine better futures. We believe that your microbiomes must be welcome too, and all of the other organisms, nerves and neurons in your body must be invited into full-scale Moral Imaginations.
Join us
We invite in the weird, wyrd, strange and liminal.
What comes out of these sessions is beyond what we can rationally understand and capture and quantify. We create shared portals into other dimensions of being.
It belongs to everyone. Join us.
Moral Imaginations is a growing community and practice of rigorous imagining for moral futures.
Visit our website: www.moralimaginations.com.
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