Imaginal Agreements for the Soul Circle
These Imaginal Agreements for the “Soul Circle” were sourced out a Confirmation Quest through the Church of the Intimate Web. The Church of the Intimate Web was a two-year religious art project, sourced by my friend Daniel Thorson and co-created by a small group of spiritual friends.
During a gathering at Bonnitta Roy’s farm in November 2023, I entered a six-month alchemical vessel of soulmaking, to cook and clarify the desires that live in this body. I confessed hidden pathologies of love – these secret creatures of karmic knotting that live in the subterranean depths of inheritance and wounding in the cultural body. Through a relentless commitment to revelation and willing disclosure, a 30,000 word ritual artifact was produced and shared with my spiritual friends, titled: Reconciliation of (W)holes (and the Three Gates of Intimacy) on April 2024. The act of writing can be a process of alchemical purification – allowing one to gently unspool and untangle the red threads of clinging that pinches psyche too tightly together. The release and loosening of what feels embarrassing to the ego begins to relaxes the wisdom body, revealing something still and empty at the heart of the Yin temple. A white-black (w)hole. The Middle.
Sourced from this Middle – expanding and contracting in the erotic pulsations of aliveness – were the “Imaginal Agreements of the Soul Circle” . A set of agreements for Collective Soulmaking – dutifully scribed. The blueprint less like a map and more like the improvisational protocols or “scores” of rhythm and synchronicity, that move souls and cells into intimate harmonization. These protocols nudge us towards the wise and creative binding of soul-bodies into intersubjective fields that cohere into living Collective Lifeworks – egregores or group-souls with purpose and telos. These group-souls are wild, sensuous and alive, yet also need alignment and clarity. These group-souls are not proxies for God(s) or the Divine – they are creative field-constructions of soul, by soul. They are living temples, churches, schools that we birth into being – devotional artworks that exalt the sacredness of our incarnate aliveness, the sacredness of our fiery longing for the Transcendent and the Absolute, the Good, the True, the Beautiful.
I share these agreements into the commons, to bow to our Collective Lifework that was the Church of the Intimate Web [April 2023 - September 2025] . I feel so proud of us, so thankful. Our project was unapologetically spiritual and gorgeously ambitious as a metamodern and tantric expression of re-ligio – of yoking a group of spiritual friends into the devotional tending and sourcekeeping of the Lineage-from-the-Future. This Lineage is a living root bridge – breathing and pulsing. Latent and already-here. An umbilical cord rooted in body and planet, growing towards our evolutionary and birthright becoming – Intimacy with the Infinite.*
Soul Circle of the “Intimate Web”
This “Soul Circle”(1) is a vessel of soulmakers — a team of artists, researchers and mystics. Together, we enter into a Soul Game, if you will, called together to “co-source the Imaginal theology (study, logos) theurgy (work, technique or process) of the Intimate Web.”(2) We will meet regularly for a period of time, cultivating an intersubjective field of Soul-Making.
The content and process of the “Imaginal Theology” will be collectively discovered and created together. We will identify protocols and patterns that can democratise mystical participation – from “Source In the Middle.” At first, the “Imaginal Theology” may be a loose carrier bag of ritual artifacts – stories, patterns, postures, music, dance and image — created in devotion to Truth, Beauty and Goodness. These artifacts can be shared into commons of the Intimate Web: we sing our songs in Mass, we share stories around the fire, we dance by the river. Eventually, we might cohere an ecology of symbols, rituals, ceremonies, and practices of “Divine Theurgy”. We might unleash the Miracles of Intimacy that ignite 10,000 souls in this time between worlds.
The “Soul Circle” is guided by an inquiry and three action protocols of intimate disclosure:
“How is the Soul Circle called to Source the Imaginal Theology of the Intimate Web?”
Following Eros in Right Relationship
Finding Source in True Collaboration
Making Space in Divine Community
The Soul Circle will be bound in through space-and-time constrained commitments. Below is the early sketch of the Imaginal Agreements of the Soul Circle (4). It aspires to honour and support the authorship of each Soulmaker, and contribute to the Wisdom Commons.
You will notice that the ineffable current that is the Collective Lifework (5), in contrast to an individual’s lifework, is cloaked with a plurality of resonance in song, water and streams, threads and patterns. Please consider the words of these agreements in Good Faith (6) as a work-in-process, but stated with conviction, gesturing towards the sacred territory of that which is non-negotiable.
We agree to Source the “Imaginal Theology” as a Collective Lifework.
To enter the True Collaboration of “Co-Sourcing”(8) is to acknowledge that what we are discovering and creating together is a Collective Lifework(9) and vision that is too big for one person/body to source and hold. We honour that each Soulmaker (10) invited has a particular and unique thread of the Whole Pattern of the Collective Lifework that must be intentionally weaved as individuals in Right Relationship. This Collective Lifework is uniquely sourced in relationship with the “Church of the Intimate Web.”
Inquiry: How do we find and attract the Others who feel called to collaborate in this Collective Lifework?
We agree that this Collective Lifework is created in devotion to Truth, Beauty, Goodness – and Mystery.
We attune and harmonise our relational field to become an Organ of Resonance (11) for Truth, Beauty and Goodness. We practise and train this Instrument of Perception to guide the Creative Eros (the energy generated in the relational field of potential) to be in alignment with the Collective Lifework that wants to be created. We weave the relational harmony from which the Collective Lifework arises, and recognize its Song in our bodies. We make space for Mystery, the Source from which all energy arises and all energy returns.
Inquiry: How/when do we know what alignment with “Truth, Beauty, Goodness” looks and feels like for this Lifework?
We agree to honour the Lineages that flow into our Collective, that this Lifework draws from and alchemizes.
We enter the Soul Circle as a Collective Vessel, a porous reservoir that receives the unique soul streams of lineages, contexts and histories of each person – both unconsciously and consciously held. We honour the sanctity of our different lineages, and we also honour our responsibility to clarify and acknowledge these streams. We embrace the interpenetration of our lineages, including the tensions that will arise, trusting that they will be alchemized in the Deepest Current of our Lifework.
Inquiry: How do we cultivate a reservoir that can receive and metabolise the flows of our lineages?
We agree that the Unique Artifacts created by Soulmakers belong to them. Each Unique Artifact is a portal to another Lifework in the Imaginal Commons.
Each Soulmaker may draw from the Collective Lifework to source and create their own Unique Artifacts – whether it is a picture, a song, the seeding of another Good Work. Each Unique Artifacts belongs to their Creator (12). We recognize that the Collective Lifework is not rivalrous with or discontinuous with these Unique Artifacts – they are mutually co-arising. Each Unique Artifact is a nodal portal to another Lifework, connecting and actualizing the rhizomatic relations of the Sacred Network.
Inquiry: How do we enable the flourishing of many Unique artifacts that will be created and inspired by the Current of our Collective Lifework?
We agree that this Collective Lifework is not owned by anyone. It arises from and returns to Origin.
We recognize that the Collective Lifework – the “Imaginal Theology” – is not owned by any individual, the Soul Circle or the Church. The Collective Lifework that we source together comes from the groundless ground of our interbeing, the Ever-Present Origin (13). The Unique Artifacts created from its Current may be shared into an Imaginal Commons for more to partake in its transmission. As all living things enfold their lifecycles of birth and death, this Lifework will eventually be released back to Origin.
*Inquiry: How does this Collective Lifework want to be shared and released into the Imaginal Commons?
Footnotes:
(1) The “Soul Circle” is initiated by Cheryl Hsu as “sourcekeeper”, and held by “the Church” as a Sanctuary of Space.
(2) The Church of the Intimate Web” initiated by Daniel Thorsen as it’s “source”, with the mission to: “open the Eye of Value and actualize The Intimate Web.” You can learn more about it here.
(3) The container details are in the process of co-design, but they will most likely be prototyped as a 6-months of 12-sessions, primarily held virtually, with the potential of an in-person gathering.**
(4) The Soul Circle is a collective vessel (a compound entity) made through bodies and souls called into relational space, dedicated to the arts of Collective Soulmaking.
(5) A Collective Lifework is a Current (that prefigures and leaves traces through Unique artifacts or Pattern that co-dependently arises from meaning in the space between Unique artifacts. Like constellations in stars, the perspectival agent produces Reality through drawing and making relationships between nodes.
(6) These Imaginal Agreements were written in the ritual container of the Initiation Quest that Cheryl undertook as her Act of Confirmation into the “Church of the Intimate Web.” and also arise out of an on-going research inquiry into intersubjective creativity.
(7) Imaginal Theology is the “treasure”, the “X” on the map of the shared inquiry that we hold together – it is a Mystery that we are discovering and creating in our Game.
(8) “Co-Sourcing” an emergent potential is inspired from Ria Baeck’s “Collective Presencing”: “In its shortest definition, sourcing is a way to access information straight from source or from the unmanifest potential and articulate it right away. Collective sourcing, then, means that all the participants in the group do this, in a shared inquiry with the same guiding question.”
(9) The term Lifework is also a term borrowed from our friend Peter Limberg, which feels like a good “third” between the Church’s Good Work and the Temple’s Artwork. In his article, “Deathworks to Lifeworks: Disclosing the New Artistic Genre”, Peter writes: “If there are deathworks, works of art that undermine the sacred, then there have to be lifeworks, works of art that elicit the sacred.”
(10) A Soulmaker is a creative person who is skillful in Imaginal(composing/creation) and Emptiness(decomposing/decreation) practice, sincere in their devotion to Truth, Beauty and Goodness, and committed to True Collaboration. The practice capacities of a Soulmaker is informed by Rob Burbea’s Soulmaking Dharma.
(11) The Organ of Resonance (or Instrument of Perception) is an embodied apparatus of subtle sensing; imagine it like a musical instrument that can be intentionally tuned to the frequencies of Truth, Beauty and Goodness, through resonant feedback loops of clarified information.
(12) The Unique Artifact may “belong to” her Creator but is not “owned by” the Creator. A relationship of belonging arises from the flows of love and care. There are considerations of creative licence and copyright that are relevant here, but the intention is to have these temporal protocols flow in right relationship from/with these Imaginal Agreements.
(13) This is a term from Jean Gebser, a philosopher of consciousness who wrote in his book The Ever-Present Origin: “In creativity, origin is present.”
