One of the best ways I know to get things moving when I’m facing significant change is to engage my imagination. The facts of my situation, and the logic and reason I use to arrange them, will only take me to the edge of what I know. Even using my five senses will only extend as far as the range of my sight, hearing, taste, smell and touch. But imagination has the ability to reach farther by accessing the deeper well of the unconscious and creatively rearranging what I’ve known before. The uniquely human capacity to imagine is a valuable threshold skill that can open a way into and through the unknowns of a future filled with change.

When we cling to what we know, it is easy to forget about the massive storehouse of knowledge hidden within each of us, a vast library filed away behind a door aptly labeled “the unconscious.” It is there, in the back stacks of the mind, that our experiences first get shelved. Cognitive scientists tell us less than one percent of that material gets transferred to our conscious mind. Like a “closed stack” library where patrons submit requests for materials to be retrieved by librarians, our unconscious stores an expansive collection of knowledge entirely out of sight. Some of it is also out of reach of language itself, collected and shelved as pre-verbal feelings, sensory experiences and images that constitute the knowledge we call intuition. Dream worker and author Jeremy Taylor called this knowledge “not-yet-speech-ripe,” using an old Anglo-Saxon term for the unconscious.

Fortunately, accessing the treasures of the unconscious does not require mastering the Dewey decimal system or turning to a librarian. Rather, we can be assisted by the colorful cast of characters appearing in our dreams at night, or by any piece of music, poetry or art that speaks to us. We only need to pay attention to anything flinging open the doors to the unconscious and beckoning us in to wander among the hidden stacks, often without knowing what we are looking for.

Imagination, dreams, ritual and the arts are all tools for accessing this larger pool of consciousness. In dominant culture today, these ways of knowing are often disparaged as less reliable and useful than science and historical fact. But any scientist worth their white coat knows that exploration begins with a dance between curiosity and imagination. We need to access a larger body of knowledge, especially when facing an unknown future. Our imaginations, creativity and dreams all extend our awareness to do just that.

Wang Maohua, a tai chi master in Beijing, once gave me an important lesson that changed my understanding of tai chi and now also guides me on the threshold of change. He began our time together by asking me to show him the tai chi I practiced at home. But soon after I launched through several forms, he stopped me. I was pushing myself through the moves, he observed.

“Try to focus your attention on the space above your head and below your feet,” he advised instead. “Extend your awareness to the space beyond your fingers.” He then led me in a meditative journey through my body, awakening me first to the space within my body and then beyond it. He told me to stop pushing my body. “Instead,” he said, “let your body move by a gentle intention into the space around it, where your awareness is already waiting to meet it.”

We can borrow this practice of “gentle intention” when living on the threshold, casting our awareness across the gap of the unknown. By imagining ourselves on the far side of our threshold, we are actually stretching our attention beyond the limits of our senses. Gentle intention will open our awareness, allowing us to perceive what lies beneath the surface of things. It is a way of open-ended wondering, imagining what we are moving toward. Then, having imagined ourselves on the far side of the threshold we are crossing, we look up to find our own self waiting there, encouraging us on, and welcoming us as we arrive in a place where we have never been before.

excerpted and adapted from Living in the Between: a thresholder’s guide to personal and global change, by Karen Hering, to be published by Skinner House in late 2020.

Attached media: https://web.archive.org/web/20211110172819/https://www.questformeaning.org/podcasts/20_09/01.mp3