https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paracosm

Dramatic television ‘shows’ are paracosms; they are invented ‘as if’ universes that persist. Their purpose is to garner attention, and to sell commercial products. It should be obvious that this comprises a false and parasitic purposive orientation. They must compete for attention, and those that win sell more products. Even ‘reality’ shows are paracosms, because the introduction of surveillance transforms the real into the enfictioned.

I notice to myself how compelling they can be, how I have at times revered or even almost ‘lived for’ them. I know that millions of others are deeply compelled by television, including members of my remaining family. These are fake paracosms that compell them; projections of false worlds or situations, relationships, imperatives, virtues.

Imaginary worlds. Characters. Problems. Battles. Tragedies and triumphs. All made up. As if to somehow remark upon our actual lives and world in ways as frequently lethal as they are enlighteninging.

Why would billions of modern humans learn to consume serial episodes from commercially produced paracosms? Might we not reasonably suspect that we used to have and experience paracosms ourselves, within our own minds, and together? That these were a vital aspect of our experience of having minds and being human? Might not most of what we know of the history of human civilization imply precisely this?

Many children and adults still originate and sustain paracosms, and I must suggest they are the survivors of one of the deadliest assaults on the nature of human intelligence and imagination ever conceived: the television, which simultaneously counterfeited the capacities of active group dreaming and our generally inherent inclination to invent and experience inner paracosms.

Role playing games are another example of the modern ‘representation’ of what was once alive within us in ways our language and modern concepts are incapable of conveying.

In fact, if you examine the ‘world idea’ of most people what you will find is the skeleton of a crude paracosm. Their capacity to assemble and transform these… like yours and my own… was mutilated during the processes of enlanguaging and enculaturation.

With few exceptions, we no longer produce organic paracosms, and are, instead, subject to the results of the commerical replacements, to which we are largely passive converts. Let us admit then, that to be human appears to indicate involvement in paracosms, whether they originate in the person, community or television studios.

It is our nature to invent, sustain and mix paracosms into our experiences and expressions of human reality; they are developmental vehicles that we employed the likenesses of in childhood play, and they have the power to revitalize minds and perspectives that must otherwise perish as they are collapsed into dead descriptions, explanations, and other thin derivatives.

Endowed with this crucial recognitions, we have won the opportunity to engage in the most fascinating and momentous of recovery efforts; to know the faculties and imaginal imperatives that predated our common exposure to streams of commercial replacements… to learn the arts of paracosm and to restore our common personal experience of group dreaming.