The Imaginal Cell: The Start of the Story.

Margaret Silf introduces her new book, Hidden Wings, by exploring the potential of the ‘imaginal cell’ …

‘I dwell in possibility’

Emily Dickinson

An innocent question

‘Grandma, do you know what mettyfourmiss means?’

The question insists on clambering aboard my train of thought that was sleepily chugging its way through a leisurely breakfast, as I attempt to decipher what she is trying to say, with her six-year-old linguistic limitations and her Ayrshire accent.

‘I think you might have to run that by me again’, I urge her gently.

By the severalth time of unpacking I get a glimpse of it …

‘Are you trying to say “metamorphosis”?’ I suggest.

Her eyes light up. Finally. Grandma gets it. ‘Met a more fose is’, she repeats, slowly and deliberately. And then with obvious disbelief, ‘Do you know what a “metamorefose” is?’

‘It’s about transformation,’ I respond, trying, without great success, to suppress any suggestion of superior knowledge. ‘Have you been doing caterpillars and butterflies at school?’ I ask. ‘Because that’s a story about metamorphosis, about change and transformation. In fact it’s the best story.’

She beams her infant approval all over me, unable quite to digest the enormity of the fact that her latest discovery might also have penetrated the dense defences of the grandmaternal mind.

‘My teacher doesn’t know how to spell “met a more fose is”’, she announces. ‘She told us so.’

Silencing my inner protest that this person who can’t spell metamorphosis should have been trusted with the education of my grandchild, I leap instinctively to the teacher’s defence:

‘Oh, I think she was probably kidding you.’

‘No’, comes the instant reply. ‘She wasn’t kidding. She had to look it up on her iPad.’

Against such damning evidence what more can be said? Game, set and match to the iPad. Over and Out. And with that she turns her attention to weightier matters, and ‘metamorphosis’ is left hanging, waiting quietly for its time to come.

What is the ‘more’ in metamorphosis?

She had one thing right. There is more to this mystery than we could ever guess. In fact there is a quantum leap right at the heart of it, as one creature changes physically into quite another. What begins as one that crawls becomes one who flies. What begins as an all-consuming grub, destroying the very plant that feeds it, becomes one who touches creation lightly and pollinates the plants on which it alights. The potential death-dealer becomes the life-giver. Some people call that 180 transformation. Religious traditions might call it metanoia, or conversion from a lower to a higher state of being. Spiritual explorers call it the emergence of higher levels of consciousness in the human family through the process of spiritual evolution.

What changes this from mere intellectual speculation into a roadmap for the future of all creation on this planet is that this more is revealing itself precisely in the times when it feels as though everything is falling apart and collapsing in on itself. We are living through such times right now and we have never been more urgently in need of a spiritual roadmap.

The ‘more’ in metamorphosis is nothing less than the human potential for spiritual, as well as physical, evolution. And the secret is already latent deep inside us. It may, however, be willing to reveal itself if we coax it into a conversation. So this is where our story begins. And to get the true inside story, we will invite an imaginal cell to be our narrator.

An extraordinary guide

What, you may well be asking, is an imaginal cell?

Before we embark on our journey of discovery, it’s important to appreciate a bit of biology that stunned me with its significance when, not so long ago, I was introduced to it by a friend in Australia. Some readers will be well aware of the role of the imaginal cell in the caterpillar story. To others it may come as a complete surprise, as it did to me. The biology is relatively simple to grasp. The wider significance of such a phenomenon may direct us to a much bigger story than the drama being played out in our gardens every summer.

Here’s the biology story …

Some cells within the caterpillar, although sharing the same DNA, differ from the majority of the cells in significant ways. Biologists report that they ‘resonate on a different frequency’ from the others, and that they hold the blueprint for what will become the various parts of the future butterfly. These are the imaginal cells. They are called ‘imaginal’ not because they are in any way ‘imaginary’ (they are very real indeed), but because they hold the blueprint of the imago, the Latin term for the mature insect – for that very particular mature insect that will emerge from that particular caterpillar. They are also known as imaginal discs, because of their flat structure.

Initially the imaginal cells operate independently as single cell organisms, but the caterpillar’s immune system regards them as a threat and attacks them, drenching them in juvenile hormone to suppress their activation during the caterpillar stage of the cycle. The imaginal cells persist, however, multiply and begin to connect with each other forming clusters, and start to resonate at the new frequency of the emerging butterfly, sharing information among themselves. In the chrysalis stage, they reach critical mass, and begin to function as a coherent multi-cell organism as, in the fullness of time, they become the butterfly.

This is the biology. The wider implications, however, are very far-reaching indeed, which is why an imaginal cell will be our narrator of this unfolding story. Our imaginal cell carries a deeper wisdom that we need if we are to embrace the invitation to transformation that our times are pressing upon us, and for which most spiritual traditions seek to prepare us.

This imaginal wisdom warns us that the path to transformation will not be an easy one. It will bring us up against serious opposition; just as the prophetic voices all down the ages have been vilified and suppressed. But it also assures us that the call to a transformed life will always prevail over all the odds that are stacked against it. Opposition can kill the dreamer, as history repeatedly reveals, but it can never kill the dream. How urgently we need this reassurance in our present deeply troubled times, but it needs to be an authentic reassurance and no mere morale-boosting rhetoric from either politicians or pulpits. The caterpillar story is as real as it gets, literally growing in our own back yard. What can we learn from it? How might it bring genuine encouragement into our global disillusionment?

The imaginal wisdom also knows that, although we are currently groping our way through threatening, adversarial and deeply divisive situations, the time will come when the forces of such extreme opposition (the ordinary caterpillar cells) will become the very means of nourishing and enabling the new possibility. So profound is the change into which we are being invited that what appear to be its enemies will in time become its enablers.

The imaginal cell knows that the promise of transformation is both true and possible, as it carries the still unborn future deep within it. It also knows that the emergence of the new beginning only happens through the catastrophic meltdown (in the chrysalis) of the old order. It knows that this new order also depends on a change of attitude away from ‘I can do this on my own’ in favour of ‘To make this a reality we need to work together’. It trusts what it knows deep inside itself, all through that breakdown, even when everything seems to shout the opposite message. It trusts the hidden wings it already contains but that it cannot, as yet, even imagine. Doesn’t that sound rather like ‘faith’?

Finally, the imaginal cell knows, against all the evidence to the contrary, that there is more to the caterpillar than even the caterpillar can guess. It will come as no surprise, therefore, to learn that the term imaginal cell is also sometimes applied to visionary leaders who imagine a better future for life on our planet and strive, with others, to make this future a reality. You may well think there is a conspicuous absence of such leaders in our world today; in fact they could probably be counted on the fingers of one hand. But consider these possibilities:

What if each of us is potentially an imaginal cell, carrying the still hidden seed of the best possible version of who we can become?

What if each one of us carries within us a fragment of a bigger story – the best possible version of humanity we can become, on this beautiful fragile planet we call home?

What if the ‘extra-ordinary’ is always present and striving to emerge from our own very ordinary lives?

What if, as the opening quotation suggests, we too ‘dwell in possibility’? What might such possibility become? How might we birth it into being?

An invitation to evolve

If we didn’t have caterpillars we would have to invent them, because they provide a perfect metaphor – more than that, a model – of our own spiritual journey from all we are now to all we can become. This humble creature transforms, through metamorphosis, from a potentially destructive, all-consuming pest, to a beautiful and life-giving butterfly, taking flight, spreading life to all the flowers it pollinates and joy to all who see it. The metamorphosis of the caterpillar sounds incredible, and yet we see the evidence of it all around us every summer. It’s rather harder to believe that we too are in process of transformation, but unlike the caterpillar we have choices. We can work with the dynamic of transformation, or against it. The way we make our choices will determine the future of human life on planet Earth.

The miracle of metamorphosis in one species is just one facet of a much bigger story. All creation is in process of transformation. We call that process evolution. I once saw a sign in the Evolution section of the Paris Science Museum that stopped me in my tracks. It read: ‘The process of hominization is probably still ongoing, but the process of humanisation has barely begun, and is still very fragile.’ ‘Hominization’ describes the course of physical evolution. Humanisation is something else. It is not unreasonable to call it spiritual evolution. My new book, Hidden Wings, is about that process of humanisation – the challenge to become more and more fully human, ultimately transcending everything we think we are.

The bad news is that such transformation, such evolution, happens mainly through periods of apparent total breakdown. This is the pattern that the natural sciences clearly reveal. It is also the dynamic of change and growth that runs through our ancient spiritual traditions. What we have known, and grown used to, is no longer. Where we are going is not yet. There is no way to make the journey from no longer to not yet without going through chaotic breakdown.

Never has this process been more clearly in evidence than right now in our own times, when even the most phlegmatic and conservative citizens are becoming increasingly and disturbingly aware that enormous changes are happening that will affect us all in ways we are quite unable to predict. The climate has become seriously unstable. The planet is threatened. Our economic systems are failing. Brutal conflicts are precipitating mass migrations. Our politics are turning the world upside down in ways that may terrify and dismay us.

Recent electoral decisions in the UK and the US in particular have sent shock waves through the ordinary citizens of those countries and the wider world. There may be many more aftershocks to follow, because these developments are symptoms of a widespread reaction against the way things are in our world today. Protest votes may well lead to results that were neither intended nor desired, but their consequences remain the same: they blow apart existing certainties and leave us gasping for the fresh air that we both desire and dread.

It is in this state of extreme and potentially very dangerous uncertainty that Hidden Wings  was conceived. My hope is that it may, with the help of the caterpillar, and particularly the imaginal cell who will be our guide, give us a reason to trust the way ahead, to risk, however grudgingly, the chaos that engulfs us, and to make choices that prepare us to make the quantum leap beyond the impasse to a new stage of human life on this planet that at present we cannot even imagine.

Our human egg has fallen off the wall, like Humpty Dumpty. Nothing is going to put it back together again. The world is changing beyond recognition.

This would be an ending – if the egg simply fell to disaster. But if the egg broke because it was hatching, then it’s a new beginning.

If these thoughts resonate with you, just observe the disorder and confusion through which you – and all of us – are trying so hard to wade. Feel the broken shells crunch beneath your fretful feet. Let the regrets, the reproaches, the remorse be there. There is good reason to feel angry when your applecart has been tumbled. There may be every reason to resist and oppose the waves of destruction that the storm has unleashed. But keep in mind that all this turbulence may be both the aftermath of your shattered certainties and at the same time the afterbirth of new life hatching. Let our imaginal cell be your midwife during this arduous labour through which our nations, our world and we ourselves are struggling. She alone knows the miracle that is still hidden deep within us, and the new life that is straining to emerge out of all the pain.

This is the introduction from the opening part of Margaret Silf’s new book, Hidden Wings: Emerging from Troubled  Times with New Hope and Deeper Wisdom. It is available now in paperback, priced £12.99.