We have reached a place where we have been before. We've come full circle and can see that somewhere along the road we've taken the wrong turn. We made a mistake we've made before.

So we want change. We want to move differently. To avoid moving along with the cycle of conditioning that makes us move around in the same circle. To refigure our movement by connecting with new patterns, creating new ways of moving.

Moving differently. How do we do that? Where do we begin when we want to do something that we don't know what is like yet?

A first clue is our mistake: we know where we don't want to go. The wrong turn and the mistake has been identified.

What then? We begin probing the edges of our worn out maps and look for other ways of moving.

We have already made preparations for this exploration: we have found a compass that helps us navigate a world of separation, we are refining our attention to what goes on at the edges of our perception of reality and we hold an attitude which allows us to remain detached from our opinions for a little while.

But a compass needs a North and a South. In which direction do we go?

It is likely that the route towards true North does not lie on a linear trajectory from where we stand. When we journey into unknown territory there is simply no way of knowing what to expect. In fact, our expectations are – more often than not – in the way. But our ability to identify what we are not looking for is a gauge for when we find something that is worth exploring deeper. We find something of interest. We probe its edges. We recognise that it contains the same old pattern we want to leave. So we move on. Or we strike upon something mysterious, something unfamiliar, which keeps us interested. We stay a little longer. Our sense of direction evolves as we move along.

It may help to suspend any hard-nosed notions of individualism for a moment. To see ourselves as part of a large pool of experiences which we can draw on even if they are not our 'own'. This opens up a whole new field of possibilities to do with the faculty of imagination: we can envision a different way of moving on the basis of others' experience – even on the basis of possible experiences! We can imagine where to go, how we could get there and what we would need on the way.

But isn't this just another trap that leads us back to our habitual ways – only this time we fool ourselves by envisaging change?

If we are merely imagining change to be something that happens in the future, this might well be the case. Then we are like dreamers who prefer the dream to waking life. But it is also possible to see dream and wakefulness as part of the same consciousness and to approach change as the only real certainty in life. Then the imagination might be seen as a repository for a part of life which has not yet been birthed. As a space of inspiration and creativity which opens possibilities we didn't know existed but that can manifest in life once we turn towards them.

The imagination as a medium which provides access to other ways of seeing the world.

To take this notion of the imagination seriously it needs to be distinguished from the mundane notion of wishful thinking.

The roots of 'imagination' go back to 'imago' or 'image' – it is an ability to picture oneself within an alternate set of conditions. From our reality-seeking attitude this image can hold more than mere illusion: it can hold clues to what reality is like when we have faced our conditioning. The word 'imagination' shares its roots with 'imitation' and both are integral to what Iain McGilchrist describes as mimesis or the ability to

"escape from the confines of our own experience and enter directly into the experience of another being: this is the way in which, through human consciousness we bridge the gap, share in what another feels and does, in what it is like to be that person. This comes through our ability to transform what we perceive into something we directly experience".

As the imagination also provides access beyond lived experience and present knowledge we need to be able to make the distinction that Alastair McIntosh draws between what is 'imaginary' – or unreal – and what is 'imaginal' and beyond the normal bounds of consciousness (but not any less 'real' for this reason).

How then, can we engage the imagination to help us find our way through a reality which we have become disillusioned with? How do we distinguish helpful clues from the mirage?

It is necessary to clarify what distinction we are trying to make here. Talk of reality quickly gets more or less pointless from within a worldview which sees the world as an objective reality within which people construct subjective viewpoints of the 'really real'. It's a bit like making a distinction between 'online' and 'offline' worlds as if they were separate domains: it distracts us from the issue at hand by diverting our attention towards the (im)possibilities of brains creating accurate representations of the world. In this way of speaking we are already assumed to be separate from the rest of existence and 'reality' is presumed to be best (most accurately) known from a position of distance by actively disengaging from the world.

But we do, of course, need to have a way of speaking about how something we perceive can be more or less (un)real. Here, Alan Watts provides a helpful starting point which takes a view of existence as relationship: knower and known are inseparable and form part of the same flowing whole. From this point of view, reality can be seen as an unbroken 'holomovement' in continual flux and our experience of any particular object, event or phenomena is a momentary outcome of this totality. The task is to then to attend to how something we perceive stand in relation to the rest of the 'holomovement' – let's just call it 'life'.

How reality is perceived depends on the perceptual structure of the experiencing creature. Obviously, a tree will seem different to a bird, a cat and a human. But in this view there is no objective or 'really real' tree which is experienced differently by different kinds of subjects. Rather, the tree is evoked by the structure of the sense organs that perceive it – the tree itself is constituted by its perceivers. Perceiver and perceived make each other possible. Articulated in a more formal or technical way (by Varela, Thompson and Rosch): "[i]nstead of representing an independent world, [minds] enact a world as a domain of distinctions that is inseparable from the structure embodied by the cognitive system".

This will seem odd to those who believe in a reality which exist objectively and independently of birds, cats and humans. But it is no less odd than believing in a realm which is essentially beyond experience (whether this is an 'objective reality' or an eternal garden in 'heaven'). And it correlates both with understandings across the spectrum of contemporary science and wisdom traditions from East and West (I know that's a big claim. So look into it. Take Leroy Little Bear's preface to Bohm's essays 'On Creativity' as a clue).

The view of reality as a field of relations rather than an independent realm of separate objects seems to me to be the most accurate description of something that cannot be described within a system of symbols – just like a finger pointing at the moon is not the moon itself. If this perspective is accepted, a radically different way of relating to the world arises because the idea of a fundamental separation between the knower and the known falls away. And because "we create a world according to our mode of participation", as Bohm says, the prospect of enacting a different kind of reality altogether becomes possible (a topic to be explored in further deail in a future Refiguration).

For now, let's say that there may well be no 'real' tree which is independent or separate from the observer – whether cat or human. So trying to get to know the really real tree is in this sense a pointless exercise. But human animals tend to create signs, symbols and words which can 'stand in' for the tree itself and this is where things can get more or less real: we need to be careful that we don't fool ourselves into thinking that the symbols we use to describe the world are the real thing (although these symbols are obviously also part of reality and contribute to our understanding of it).

This is a touchstone if we want to know about 'realness': how does the representation stand in relation to the represented? There is naturally a gradient here between different levels of abstraction: symbols stand in relation to other signs, which form further analogies, ways of speaking, theories and systems of ideas which become increasingly abstract. It is not so much that abstraction in itself is a bad thing but that abstractions which do not convey the relationships implied by the original symbols lead to a mismatch between the representation and that which is represented. (It's conceivable that such mismatch is exactly what has led to the belief in an independently existing reality in the first place.)

So much for the realness of reality. Can we use this insight as an approach to the imagination? Might there be a realness of the imagination?

This is what David Bohm implies in his essay 'The range of imagination'. Building on Coleridge's distinction between 'primary imagination' as an act of creative perception of original images through the mind and 'fancy' as a reconstruction of separate images from memory, Bohm describes a range between 'imaginative insight' and 'imaginative fancy' and shows how they represent qualitatively different modes of knowing. Applying this range to the development of fundamental scientific theories (by Newton and Einstein), he shows how imaginative insight involves "a fresh and original total perception displayed through a single new kind of image" which can give rise to a whole new way of looking at the world. Imaginative fancy on the other hand concerns the relationship between existing images – reasoning out consequences, testing hypotheses, and so on. These two forms of imagination go on all the time and both are always present in different degrees.

So. How does this help us? How do we know whether to trust the content of our imagination?

Here Bohm's answer as a scientist is perhaps a little surprising and it takes us back to our notion of reality. If reality is a field of relations in continual flux we cannot expect even the deepest of imaginative insights to be relevant indeterminately: reality is always changing. Bohm suggests that new scientific theories are received as imaginative insight and then the consequences are gradually worked out through imaginative fancy. At some point these consequences become unclear – and new insights are needed to reconcile the representation with the representated. This means that our representations of reality can't be said to be true or false, only more or less in correspondence with reality.

Here, it is worth quoting the essay at length:

"This means, of course, that there is no way to prove or disprove a theory (especially if it aims at a universal sort of significance). For even if a particular realization of the theory is disproved, it is generally possible to find an alternative hypothesis allowing the theory to be maintained. Ultimately, we have to decide between such an attempt to save the old theory and the attempt to create a radically new kind of theory. This has to be done with the aid of more general judgements, such as that of whether the net result is clear, simple, beautiful, generally adequate and fruitful, and so forth. These involve a kind of aesthetic perception of harmony or disharmony within the overall structure of the theory, as well as between theory and the total body of fact available, similar to that needed in the visual arts and in music.

… The ability to make this judgement properly is perhaps one of the key qualities which are required for a creative and original step, rather than a continuation or development of an insight that is already available."

The 'aesthetic perception of harmony' is clearly more than a simple judgement as to whether or not something is pleasing to the mind's eye. It is an ability to relate an image, fact or theory to the larger patterns of which they form part. This 'fit' cannot be proved by logic but it can be judged with the help of other sensibilities which give us clues to the (dis)harmony between a new image and our wider sense of the world. Clearly, this is an area of perception where there are no blueprints and we rely on our intuition. Here, intuition literally means "the ability to understand something immediately, without the need for conscious reasoning". That this form of knowledge plays an integral part in the creation of our understanding of the world is neglected when we think of intuition as mere 'gut reaction'.

As a way of knowing, intuition is connected with the deeper recesses of our consciousness – the imaginal realm which McIntosh refers to above. This knowledge underpins the development of new images or theories which lead to a shift in a paradigm or way of seeing. For example, Poincaré, working right on the horizon of chaos, articulated the importance of intuitive knowledge in mathematics and received many of his insights in a flash of 'fresh and total perception' like Bohm describes it.

This gives us important clues to how we can approach the imagination.

If imaginative insights are received intuitively we would do well to avoid a mindset which seeks to prove anything. Here, we can take advice from mythologist and storyteller Martin Shaw: "Listen at the edge of your understanding, and don't try and 'figure out' a damn thing for a long time". It is necessary that we approach the imagination at 'the edge of our understanding' where we have to accept that even the language and ideas we use to describe this territory is in some way inadequate. The aim is to become able to translate what we receive in the imagination into our 'old language' so that it can transform our way of seeing – but before that can happen we need to journey in the imagination without being bent on explanation. First, it will be necessary to allow meaning to arise on its own accord without feeling driven to apply it constructively.

If aesthetic inkling is key to be able to perceive the coherence between new ideas and our old understanding we need to practice our creativity. Whether through words, images, an instrument or body practice we need to find ways to learn to see coherence.

Once we embark on learning a new practice it can be beneficial to let go of our intentions. As Keith Johnstone says: "we struggle against our imaginations, especially when we try to be imaginative".

And here, ritual can help us to “slow down the urgency of desire and expectation”, as Tony Dias writes. Ritual is a way to free the mind and make it possible to immerse ourselves in the present. And when we find others we can engage in ritual with, we open up to a new form of communication which creates a common ground for the kind of journey we are each undertaking.

If we do feel the need to ask something of our imagination – if we arrive with a question that we cannot help but pursue – it is probably better to ask how something would feel if the world were different rather than what the world itself would be like. Asking ourselves how we would like something to feel is often a better guide than anything else as to what we are looking for, as Anthony McCann often reminds us. In this way, we will know intuitively whether we are on the right track or whether we need to pause and consider moving in a new direction.

What I am trying to convey here is not only a suggestion for how we can break with habits and find ways of repeating the same old mistakes by engaging with the imagination. The imagination is generative, it weaves the stories of our lives together and is a force that has the power to transform a life. If we approach the imagination sincerely, we might find new dimensions to what we have so far taken to mean reality.

A word of caution is therefore also appropriate. The imagination is not value free and we need to be clear about our intentions and assumptions when we journey here. As McGilchrist says, the imagination "is not a neutral projection of images on a screen. We need to be careful of our imagination, since what we imagine is in a sense what we are and who we become". In this sense, the world we create is an extension of our imagination and therefore it deserves the kind of respect that we would pay to those we treasure most.

Held lightly but sincerely, our imagination can help us to become aware of other ways of moving. An imagination that is not imposing itself on reality but open to learn from others' experience – by experiencing the other! – can help us strike a movement in a different direction. Moving along in this way we have to accept the unfamiliarity of the territory. Some features we might already know but even they appear new in connection with a whole new topography. We are in a position of having more questions than answers about how and where to move but all along we can draw on a larger pool of experiences than our own.

Now, where do we look?