The Celtic Otherworld, the Implicate Order and the Imaginal Realm

An Introduction to Adventures in the Otherworld

This audio track is a recording of me reading this post for those who prefer to listen.

Welcome to Adventures in the Otherworld! This post serves as a falcon's wide-eyed view of the landscape we will be traveling together. I offer it as a survey of the topography of the terrain - mountains, valleys and rivers - before we fold our wings back, focus our eyes on a detail, and dive in.

These three concepts - The Otherworld, the Implicate Order and the Imaginal Realm - have been calling to me for a long while. Like three white stags disappearing into the forest ahead they have drawn me deeper and deeper into Soul.

I am birthing this publication in order to explore them each further and to do so in community with other adventurers. I very much appreciate your interest in my work and, if it feels good for you, your company as we plumb the depth of who we are.

The Otherworld

Tales of the Otherworld abound from across the lands of the Celts. This mysterious realm still echos through the folklore of the British and Irish¹ . A place out of time, where the immortals live, where abundance always flows and no one is in pain. A place out of space, under the hills or across the sea, but on no map. Existing outside the space-time of this ordinary world, the Otherworld is always present, and according to the stories, you may stumble across its threshold at any moment.

Us modern folk have been educated to believe that this is all nonsense, "fairy tales", flights of fancy of a more primitive people. We've been indoctrinated into materialism, a world view that demands that the only things that exist are that which we can measure (matter and energy), the rest of it is, "just your imagination". Yet materialism cannot account for the existence of our imaginations - as it cannot be measured in any way and doesn't appear to be made of any type of matter or quantifiable energy.

So what is it, all this other stuff, that is "just our imagination"? Our dreams, hopes, fears, expectations, memories, stories, creative inspirations - what is it and where does it live? Neuroscientists cannot find it in our brains yet parapsychologists find it outside the physical brain or after death. Science rooted in materialism cannot answer this question and has managed to brush it under the rug for a few hundred years. It is becoming harder and harder to ignore as the pile of unexplainable data under there keeps growing. We can no longer pretend the pile is not there, it's time to pull up the rug and take a long, honest, look at it.

The ancient Celts, their medieval European descendants, and most current cultures around the world - except our own - take it as a given that there is a non-material world surrounding and interpenetrating our own mundane world. There are many different names for this realm of spirit. The Brythonic Celtic² word for the Otherworld is Annwfn (An-oo-vn) which translates as something like, the "very deep" world, the "inner world", the "not-world" or the "Under World". Either way, Annwfn is something other than our ordinary, consensus reality world.

The Implicate Order

Much to the embarrassment of materialists, physics, that cornerstone of the "hard sciences", ran up against something that looks an awful lot like the Otherworld almost one hundred years ago. In a series of experiments investigating what is known as the observer effect, physicists have shown that everything we know in this world exists as a probability wave. Only when an intelligent being (i.e. one with consciousness) makes an observation does that probability wave collapse into a discrete particle and enter the three dimensional world. These experiments have been repeated many times by a range of scientists over decades³ , no one disputes the validity of these data - although many would like to, the observer effect cannot be explained by materialism. 

Renowned physicists and mathematician David Bohm showed mathematically that everything in our world is connected in a two dimensional realm where time and space don't exist. He called this the implicate order, a 2D template for our 3D world which he called the explicate order. This has been developed over the last few decades into modern Quantum Theory (including variations of String Theory). Bernado Kastrup who holds PhDs in both Philosophy and Computer Engineering concludes, in an article published by Scientific American,⁴

"Now that the most philosophically controversial predictions of QM [quantum mechanics] have—finally—been experimentally confirmed without remaining loopholes, there are no excuses left for those who want to avoid confronting the implications of QM”

In the same article he goes on to say,

"we must shift the cultural dialogue towards coming to grips with what nature is repeatedly telling us about herself”

The understanding that there is a hidden world surrounding and interpenetrating our own and that this unseen world is fundamental to the existence of our reality is not new. It is, in fact, ancient. It features in every major world religion and ancient cosmology, just as it did for the ancient Celts. It is the domination of the paradigm of scientific materialism that has driven this understanding underground for the last few hundred years. The work of quantum physicists and of parapsychologists⁵ is enabling a new generation of scientists to start imagining what comes after the scientific paradigm of materialism, so far known as post-materialism.

We are at a point in history where the overarching paradigm that determines our thinking, and thus how we see the world, is crumbling before our eyes. We are part of this great turning into a new paradigm that is already emerging from the ashes of materialism. Maybe it's not "just our imagination" after all.

The Imaginal Realm

Poets, mystics, shamans, seers, healers, and artists the world over know that the imagination is not something to be sniffed at. Einstein famously said, "Imagination is more important than knowledge". Henry Corbin, a twentieth century philosopher who translated many esoteric texts from Arabic into French and English, coined the term imaginal to describe the human capacity of imagination that connects us to the reality beyond the 3D. He realized we needed a word that removed the baggage of "it's just your imagination" in order to explore more deeply this innate and unique human capacity.

Corbin speaks of the imaginal realm or the mundus imaginalis, (the "imaginal world" in Latin) as a place, not one in the 3D world with map coordinates, but a strata of reality that lays between the spiritual, 2D template of Bohm's implicate order and the everyday, 3D, reality of the ordinary world. This concept came to him from the esoteric Arabic texts he worked deeply with. The imaginal then is the realm of soul, connecting the physical to the spiritual. Jung envisioned this realm as the Collective Unconscious.

Corbin also described the imaginal as one of the three "organs of knowledge". These three are:

• the senses of the physical body,

• the imagination and

• the intellect.

These three organs can be seen to be related to three spheres of reality: the explicate, 3D world of the body, the imaginal realm and the world of spirit and consciousness.

When we approach the imagination as an organ of perception it takes on a whole new significance. This organ perceives in images, symbols and metaphors, allowing us to mediate between the Otherworld, the world of spirit, and this ordinary, physical world, between the supernatural and the natural, between the unseen and the seen.

There is an old Celtic tale from Ireland about the Fountain (or Well, or Spring) or Knowledge that flows into a pool then into five streams that flow across the land. The pool is surrounded by nine hazel trees and populated by five salmon who eat the fallen hazelnuts (all symbols of knowledge in Celtic cosmology). King Cormac is told that to gain true knowledge one must drink from all five streams (i.e. all five physical senses) and from the fountain (or pool) itself. One way to interpret this tale is that we must be present with each of our five senses to perceive the physical world and we must access the organ of our imagination, the source of all other perceptions.

Adventures in the Otherworld

I hope that this gives you a 40,000 foot overview of the landscape of this publication, Adventures in the Otherworld. These three threads, Celtic mythology, post-materialist science and the imaginal are woven tightly together in me. Journeying along each and spiraling out to where they touch and intertwine is a life-long project of ensoulment for me, of bringing myself fully into this intricate and mysterious world. I invite you to join me.

Future posts in Adventures in the Otherworld will explore:

• Celtic Medicine Stories - a podcast of myth, legend and folklore from the Celtic lands carried in the oral storytelling tradition.   

• Gateways to the Otherworld - explorations in passages from the ordinary to the non-ordinary, and safely back again. Techniques for accessing the Otherworld are embedded in our myths, folklore, wisdom traditions and science, here we explore them mindfully.

• Learning the Language of the Otherworld: the wisdom of the non-ordinary tends to be communicated in code, symbols, metaphors, stories, feelings, memories, knowings. Here we look at various ways to work with the messages we receive so we can implement them in everyday, consensus reality. 

• The Celtic Worldview: explorations of how the ancient Celts saw things and how that might be relevant today.

1. It exists in the mythology of many other cultures that I am less familiar with and so don't write about.

2. The Brythonic Celtic language evolved into modern Welsh, Breton, and Cornish.

3. Look up wave-particle experiments or observer effect for more details

4. https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/coming-to-grips-with-the-implications-of-quantum-mechanics/

5. I will address parapsychology much more deeply in future posts