Card #379 – Liminal Space

Liminality is the state that exists between and betwixt, at the edges of boundaries, at dawn and dusk, in the moments before falling asleep (the hypnagogic state), and the moments of resurfacing from the dreamtime into waking (the hypnopomic state). Liminal zones are less stable, more vulnerable, and more alchemically charged.

Liminal states partake of both sides and are not as fully formed as what’s on either side of them. Therefore, they are ideal states for creating new forms. For example, I created most of the Zap Oracle cards in liminal space. My favorite time to write is in the early hours of the morning before dawn, when I’ve just come out of the dream time and before most of the household and surrounding community have awakened. It’s a time when most people are at the peak of their REM cycle before the glare of daylight begins, before the sounds of garbage trucks backing up, and the thought forms of commuters crowd the psychic space. All “discovery writing” — when one doesn’t know what will emerge from the boiling mass of zeros and ones — is an exciting liminal space.

I love being in airports, which are liminal spaces always in transition, and I used to love living and working at a hostel where people stay transitionally. I’ve also noticed that the days before departing on a significant journey have a heightened intensity that invites strange occurrences. Though still in my home base, I feel impending change, and the proximity to an event horizon alters the familiar world. In the case of liminal space occurring before a major transition, there is likely to be a test or trial involving threshold guardians before one can cross the event horizon into the new place/inner state.

An excellent article on Liminality in Wikipedia states,

“The liminal state is characterized by ambiguity, openness, and indeterminacy. One’s sense of identity dissolves to some extent, bringing about disorientation. Liminality is a period of transition where normal limits to thought, self-understanding, and behavior are relaxed – a situation that can lead to new perspectives.

People, places, or things may not complete a transition, or a transition between two states may not be fully possible. Those who remain in a state between two other states may become permanently liminal.”

Examples of the permanently liminal would include people who naïvely abused hallucinogens and have become “perma-fried.” A theory of schizophrenia developed by my late colleague, Terence McKenna (see The Path of the Numinous for a discussion of this theory) postulates that many schizophrenics were undergoing spontaneous shamanic initiatory experiences without guidance, and interfered with by neuro-pharmaceutical sabotage from modern psychiatry. Hence, they never pass through the initiation but remain permanently liminal. This theory would account for the apparent absence of schizophrenia and many other psychopathologies noted by anthropologists who’ve studied tribal societies. The successful artist, shaman, prophet, mystic, seer, or visionary enters liminal space and emerges from it with a coherent cultural product — words, images, etc. — to share with the collective.

Other liminal beings include the undocumented, as they exist in a place but without established status. Trans folk, nonbinary, bisexuals and others of uncertain/nonstandard and dynamic sexual orientation, people of mixed ethnicity, the accused who have not yet been judged innocent or guilty, hybrids, cyborgs and shape-shifters, etc, all exist in liminality.

A liminal time of anyone’s life is adolescence, where one is no longer a child but not quite an adult and is in a tense, metamorphic state of experimenting with identities, from which one may transform higher or lower. On the other end of the spectrum, transitioning from a full-functioning adult to a person increasingly limited by aging is another liminal state. Being under hospice care while transitioning toward death is a powerful liminal state where remarkable things happen (for example: terminal lucidity). Human incarnation as a whole is a liminal state between birth and death, where one is subject to constant change and transformation. I believe the human species to be in a liminal, adolescent phase of heightened instability occurring in a zone between the possibilities of extinction and quantum evolutionary change. Liminal space is a place of hauntings and visions, like William S. Burrough’s “Interzone” or the TV series The Twilight Zone. As the Wikipedia article points out,

“The name of the television fiction series The Twilight Zone makes reference to this, describing it as ‘the middle ground between light and shadow, between science and superstition’ in one variant of the original series’ opening. The name is from an actual zone observable from space in the place where daylight or shadow advances or retreats about the Earth. Noon and, more often, midnight can be considered liminal, the first transitioning between morning and afternoon, the latter between days.

“Within the year, liminal times include equinoxes when day and night have equal length, and solstices when the increase of day or night shifts over to its decrease. Where the Quarter days are held to mark the change in seasons, they also are liminal times.

“New Year’s Day, whatever its connection or lack of one to the astronomical sky, is a liminal time. Customs such as fortune-telling take advantage of this liminal state. In a number of cultures, actions, and events on the first day of the year can determine the year, leading to such beliefs as First-Foot. Many cultures regard it as a time especially prone to hauntings by ghosts — liminal beings, neither alive nor dead.”

The occurrence of this card indicates an auspicious time to appreciate the value of liminal spaces and beings and the conscious use of liminality as a catalyst for metamorphosis and vision.

See:

Halloween as Liminal Space

introduction to:

A Guide to the Perplexed Interdimensional Traveler and:

An Interdimensional Traveler’s Codex

My two major works in book form (both available free on this site) are directly related to liminality in many ways, especially liminal zones between life and death and extinction and species metamorphosis. See my sci-fi epic on the singularity, Parallel Journeys .

Opening premise:

Does this reality feel fundamentally wrong to you? What if the truths of what lies hidden are exposed in the journal of a survivor of an extinction-level event in our near future? His journals have been sent back in time to warn us about the perilous edge between extinction and evolutionary metamorphosis on which the fate of our species trembles.

The survivor writing to us is an empathic 18-year-old named Tommy. He’s been sealed in a three-acre biosphere with just one other person, and the outside world has been radio-silent for the three years of their enclosure. Tommy is in telepathic contact with someone living during our time who may hold the key to an evolutionary metamorphosis. The journals, entitled Parallel Journeys, have been sent back in time to inspire you to create your own metamorphic butterfly effects to help our species avoid extinction and survive in a new form.