Imagination creates. Imagination creates reality. Who cares? Anyone who has come to know Self and follow Heart. Imagination manifests and shapes the Universe. I care. These metaphysical, existential ideas integrate into our everyday reality when we acknowledge core Self, when we hear our own Heart and listen and simply allow — allow Heart to power our minds and souls and bodies, allow Ego to dissolve, allow love to flow. When this occurs, imagination becomes reality. How much time do we spend in imagination, visualizing what could be, what we will reality to be? Do we visualize what life energies we are transmitting and attracting to us? Visualization requires effort, focus, and repetition in order to create, because Ego has been wired so deeply into us and works contrary to Heart. It’s part of the amazing package with which humans are equipped. And while Ego and Heart seem, and are, contradictory, that contradiction works miracles. One of the most enigmatic and talented British Romantic poets is William Blake. During his life, he was not widely known and only regarded as somewhat talented by other artists. His brilliance became more evident as his total collection of work has been studied. Along with his Romantic poetry and prose, he created incredible paintings and prints, all demonstrating the Romantic fascination with youth, nature, and questioning authority and prevailing norms of society. Oh, and imagination. Imagination used to forge new reality. Blake sees that imagination can create reality because Ego and Heart are part of our composition: “Without contraries is no progression. Attraction and repulsion, reason and energy, love and hate, are necessary to human existence.” Understanding Ego impulse and movement in opposition to Heart exposes the limitations of Ego in living a full significant life. This revelation allows us to choose, to peel away Ego, and dissolve it, which allows us to continue to learn core Self and our relationship to every bit of the Universe. Epiphany and process. Without recognizing Ego and shedding it, we would be stagnant, uncreative, and self-absorbed — dull and passionless. Heart gives us the creative spark through our interests and passions. Without recognizing the contraries of Ego and Heart and without nurturing fellowship with our Heart, we would, perhaps worst of all, be unimaginative. Blake says, “Imagination is not a state: it is the human existence itself.” And again, “What is now proved was once only imagined.” The Romantic philosophy has often been criticized as being unrealistic idealism. Romantics helped effect social change by raising sensibilities about human potential and Ego ills in their world. They created solutions. We are creators through our imagination. While it is possible to create without Heart being used as the primary operating system, such creative abilities will not be sustained, extended, or grow without living through Heart. And that is because the spark for this creative imagination is pure Heart. Progress, growth, this propensity to imagine, emerges from Heart desire in us to connect with the Universe. A hundred years after Blake, Albert Einstein said, “Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand.” Did Einstein understand Blake or did Blake reincarnate as Einstein? Listen to another line from Blake: “Imagination is the real and eternal world of which this vegetable universe is but a faint shadow.” Other dimensions. Greater possibilities. Wonderful visions to manifest. Living Heart-truth and creating our own reality is no small potatoes. It’s a joyful occupation, one requiring faith to shed Ego and to grow in Heart-truth. Even as I write these words, I’m creating a reality borne of imagination. It isn’t great or earth-shaking or Blake-ish, but it’s a product of my imagination. Wm. Blake was a multi-talented man, but his talent created because of Heart. He lived his own truth: “I must create a system or be enslaved by another man’s. I will not reason and compare: my business is to create.” And so is mine — if I live through the Heart operating system. And so should it be yours. If you don’t want to feel enslaved to others, if you feel trapped, get in touch with your Heart and start that creative imagination cranking. Just imagine — and create!
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Human beings desire connections, and I do not believe that desire arises from Ego. It arises from our divinity contained in Heart. We have Spirit in this mortal body, that Spirit may experience its own physical creation. Without physicality, Spirit has no sensory organs. I think it’s pretty freakin’ awesome that we provide the vision, smell, tastes, hearing, and touch for Spirit.
Now, it’s not like we are being used, just some sort of pawns. No! Divinity is our essential composition: Spirit. We choose to come here to participate in this wonderful creation of ours. That’s why we desire intimate connections with almost all parts of this creation. This is not a clawing, cloying desire, just a passionate joy in it all. If we operate with Heart, we will have no expectations, resentment, guilt, or blame from or for anyone or anything else. We will know why we came. Simple. Complexity occurs because Ego comes as standard equipment to protect and isolate, features that help young humans survive in a world of others. In bodies that are relatively frail and emotions that allow us to respond to stimuli, we need — especially when younger — these qualities of protection and isolation, fight or flight responses because we come here as a social creature, which means there are a whole helluva lot of us with whom to interact, and when people don’t live Heart, they present threats. Heart speaks to us throughout this physical existence. Because we came here for a purpose, we need to choose Heart as our operating system and dissolve, peel away, layers of Ego protectionism and isolationism that have been built in an infinite variety and array of ways through the years. Either Ego processes and runs these amazing sensory organs of physical bodies or Heart does: mind, soul, and body need some force to make us run, to help us process and respond to our environment and stimuli. Heart tells us to seek, explore, discover, learn, grow — risky business for Ego trying to protect and isolate us. This creates a dynamic tension that allows for epiphany and process, realizations and growth, discoveries and creations as we progress. We each get to decide what that looks like for us. We have different rates, different capacities; we choose to arrive as we do. Each is unique; therefore, each is to be valued and not judged. When I observe life — people or their works, current or contemporary — I especially notice authors and indications of how they believe about the philosophy of life I hold. Metaphysical analysis of literature yields some interesting and encouraging finds. The Romantic poets and writers share at some level my views on life. For instance, the American poet Walt Whitman writes about the types of connections I have been discussing. In “A Noiseless Patient Spider,” Walt observes a spider who tirelessly shoots out its webs of filament and keeps going until useful connections are made. Characteristic of Romanticists, he uses Nature to understand himself, or his narrator: “And you, O my Soul, where you stand, / Surrounded, surrounded, in measureless oceans of space, / Ceaselessly musing, venturing, throwing — seeking the spheres to connect them; / Till the bridge you will need be form’d — till the ductile anchor hole; / Till the gossamer thread you fling catch somewhere, O my Soul.” This beautiful metaphor of the human Soul being like a spider and casting webs to form connections captures the essence of process of Heart-work. Feel the emotional desire to connect and stop at nothing until those are connections are obtained. No matter how long or arduous the road to making bridges to other people and things, Heart does not give. We look for connections not only for and to ourselves but also we make connections, see patterns in the different spheres of knowledge that pertain to us and our pursuit of Happiness. The great British Romantic poet, William Wordsworth, has metaphysical Heart-principles scattered throughout his work — as does Whitman. The first 210 or so lines of his “The Prelude Book Twelfth” offer insight into the importance of discerning the pure Heart desire for connections Whitman writes of, which isn’t always so easy when Ego is nurtured. The subtitle of this section is “Imagination and Taste, How Impaired and Restored.” Wordsworth has taken to a Nature hike to regain perspective. He seeks to make connections to Nature as Whitman did in seeing the Spider. He goes on this journey because he observes “Long time have human ignorance and guilt / Detained us, on what spectacles of woe / Compelled to look, and inwardly oppressed / With sorrow, disappointment, vexing thoughts, / Confusion of the judgment, zeal decayed, / And, lastly, utter loss of hope itself / And things to hope for!” Notice the work of Ego in all these words. Ego and its use of ignorance of Self and the guilt that produces because we are denying Heart and Spirit within us to experience this creation— “Compelled to look, and inwardly oppressed…” — ending up with loss of hope. Why, then, get caught up in the entanglements of the world when they ultimately land us in hopelessness? Because there is this Ego-Heart tension. We know we should not be in “ignorance” of Self, and that core Self desires to know others. How is Ego checked? Did you notice that Ego-work produces hopelessness? How do we work through these challenges? Obviously, I cannot quote 210 lines of poetry, but exposure to Nature, the creation of Spirit who is our essence, brings us to the point of knowing why we came here. How? By thinking on our lives: “There are in our existence spots of time, / That with distinct pre-eminence retain / A renovating virtue, whence — depressed / by false opinion and contentious though, / Or aught of heavier or more deadly weight, In trivial occupations, and the round / Of ordinary intercourse — our minds / Are nourished and invisibly repaired; / A virtue by which pleasure is enhanced…” I can’t go on here, but these “spots of time” are, in a sense not really timeline in nature: they are “scattered everywhere,” spots that we can reflect on and know that they represent the instances of Heart working to “enable us to mount, / When high, more high, and lifts us up when fallen…” Our mind-soul-body complex is set right when we acknowledge and dwell in Heart-truth, personal truth, that we see has been working throughout life. We don’t end up hopeless; we end up fulfilling our chosen purpose, significant, happy, and enriched. Reflect on those times; speak to your Heart anytime you feel hopeless and purposeless. And know that the end of making connections, vital connections of Nature to the events and experiences of our lives, is simply for us to know happiness. Nothing more, nothing less, nothing better. Blessings! This whole concept of Heart-life really isn’t difficult or deep — in and of itself. We come equipped with Heart, we can choose to operate with Heart, and that means eternal Spirit is in us, for us, and is us.
The questions of life, those biggies of Who am I? and Why am I here?, those occur because of Ego. Yep. We come to this life to experience everything we can in all the fulness of every facet of everything we come in contact with. But Ego, ah, Ego. Isolate. Protect. But this is part of our existence — the tension, paradox, conflict. However, when we understand, it isn’t hard except for the shedding, dissolving, and peeling back of Ego. This process maximizes our — and Spirit’s — experience. It’s really pretty awesome. Except — except for when people give up on or reject Heart and buy into Ego. How do people buy into Ego? Ever hear words like impossible or incapable? Or things like I’m right; you’re wrong? Or how one religion is better than another or THE truth? Yeah, all Ego, all inflexible, all isolationist and protectionist, all holding us back from discovery of happiness — true, deep, daily happiness. My ideas of the last few days have been based on our desire for these intimate connections with life organic and inorganic, the wonders and beauties of creatures and of the intricacies of this Universe — because that’s what Spirit wants to enjoy. Along with that was the concept I shared last night of my view of life as being a spot, a drop rather than a time continuum, the implication being time is an illusion and in one sense — Heart sense, spiritual sense — eternity is a reality; time has no claim on eternity. Our journey has no predetermined end but what we give it and how we live it. The whole design involves dissolving Ego and growing into consciousness of our true nature. That’s the intent. That’s the joy and the challenge. And I still plan on dealing with Wordsworth’s beautiful work, but I won’t do that tonight. Blessings in the journey! William Wordsworth’s “The Prelude: Book Twelfth” cannot be adequately discussed in a measly article like this. However, I will pluck a few choice words because of my time in fellowship with my Heart this morning.
It all stems from the ideas of connections, relationships, and intimacy I explored the last few days. As I wrote in my personal morning pages, which is three times longer than my published page, I was thinking about how last night in particular I focused on human relationships when discussing intimacy. Our desire for intimacy, to make connections, and relate to life extends to this whole Universe. And that’s because of our composition. We desire to intimately understand elements of creation and life because it is all creation of Spirit-Word. You and I, are functions of Spirit; Spirit is integral to Us. We are Spirit. We want to grasp all the beauties, complexities, and nuances of the creation. Eternal Spirit in us, exploring and discovering nature in a unique way through us, links us and creates a longing to connect to this organic whole. Yes, a bit of a recap from yesterday, but on to the extensions of it! This morning as I thought of these things, it struck me that my life is not the way I’ve always thought of it. If I put my life on a timeline with the span of years, I would record what happened in each year. Maybe I’ll actually write something that gets into a high school lit book and students would see how my miserable-ass life led to producing this great work. NOT. Not that I can’t produce a great work, but I don’t consider my life as miserable! It occurred to me, though, that because this physical existence is a function of eternal Spirit, I can forget freakin’ timelines. My life is represented by a point, a drop, a spot in history. Points have infinite iotas in them; drops have droplets; spots have what?…spotlets? Our integration with Spirit and desire to know intimacy with all of creation and all of its history makes this theory of each one’s life being a spot a bit more understandable. I don’t simply remember being a boy and pulling my sister on a sled through knee deep snow with a Christmas tree stretched across the back; I am there. It’s all in my existence, a spotlet in my spot of time. And there’s my connection with Wordsworth. And I’ll be honest here. It’s late. I’m sleepy, and I want to treat Wordsworth with more attention than I can give right now. But be thinking about “spots of time.” Until tomorrow, enjoy some thought, memory to the point that you relive it, value it, are intimately reconnected to it. Pretty special but available to us, especially through Heart, in a moment’s notice. Blessings! Humans desire intimacy; in fact, this comprises one of our most basic needs.
If this is so, why does so much disfunction exist over matters of intimacy? Perhaps the better question would be why we experience so little true intimacy. Or perhaps an even better question may be this: If we crave intimacy so deeply yet it is the source of so much pain, why do we bother with it? Let me clue you in to something. There are some things about which we as human beings have no choice in. Allow me to qualify that: there are some things we have no choice in once we are here. Before we arrive in time and space, we have a choice, but to live in a mortal body requires conditions common to each of us. We want intimacy because when we choose birth as a human being, it means we come here with Spirit within us in order to allow pure Spirit energy to experience its own creation, in a sense our own creation. That desire for Spirit to connect through these bodies is exactly the reason why we crave intimacy, why we desire connections and relationships with others. It’s why we hunger and thirst as explorers to know this Universe. It’s ours to make discoveries and connections with all aspects of it we wish to. The paradox of all this enters when we take on this body of flesh and blood. We come equipped with Ego, because Ego serves important functions for physical survival. However, since Ego is our default processing system to deal with physical survival, it ends up acting against any force which would threaten us — like following dreams and passions and risking censure of the others, society at large. Irony. Paradox. Tension. Creation and Growth. Acknowledging Heart, recognizing ourselves as beings of Spirit, affronts Ego. It rationalizes and uses all those survival techniques of blending in, maintaining the status quo, pleasing others — sometimes by excelling, sometimes by self-sabotaging, sometimes by casting ourselves in total dependence at their feet. Yet we still desire connections, intimacy. This often results in confusion of Ego and Heart interactions. Heart seeks relationships, and Ego modifies the desires to establish intimacy. How does this modification occur? Look around and take notes. We try to please others. We don’t express our true feelings. We hide things. We flaunt things. We act in so many antithetical ways that shout “Come close” and then sabotage that intimacy through these Ego actions. We see the results, and most of us have participated and experienced them first-hand. Broken relationships with parents, siblings, other family, friends, lovers, spouses, children. While some of these can be redeemed, the catalyst of discord, the source of destruction is Ego. We don’t have to experience the sorrow of such things. But we do. It’s life as mortals, humans. So, how do we deal with it? Let’s start with a how-not-to-deal with the emotional hurt of loss of intimacy or denial of it. That would be making the decision to never be intimate with anyone. That decision is a direct product of Ego, whose function is to isolate and protect. Is that, then, a viable choice to allow the source that creates the problem to solve the problem? That’s like giving complete control to a dictator to fix the problem of one person rule. Yeah, you get the picture. What does need to happen? We desire intimacy in various aspects, and we should know that in this Ego-steeped, soaked, and misinformed world, problems will occur, which usually means hurt. Our response should be one of offense, not defense. The offense is to get to know core Self, Heart, that integral of Spirit in us, as thoroughly as possible: Who am I? Then, create with that power and reality of Spirit: How do I want to be happy here? The impact of the answers to these questions on individuals will lead to intimate connections we crave. But we still can be hurt, which is why I feel we must persist in fellowship with our Heart — if we want fullness, significance, peace, happiness, and true intimacy. How does fellowship with Heart help? Heart faithfully, at least for me, clues me in to those workings of Ego. I learn to allow Ego to dissolve, peel away layer by layer, leaving my core Self, the true Me, to deal with life and relationships and love. I learn to call on Heart more instantaneously when Ego rears its self-righteous head, and Heart issues the response. Let it go. Expose with light. Laugh. Whatever is necessary to engender core Self and our happiness is given by Heart. I have never in these past years called on Heart when I didn’t hear or sense an immediate response, and that is NEVER tempered by what anyone else might or might not think. I need not worry about that if my motive force is love. If others don’t respond, well, they need to deal with their Ego. What I have discovered is that when I allow this Ego self and not only its facades but also its fortresses to dissolve under the winds of Spirit, so many hurts from the past dissolve, too. Understanding occurs and intimacy with my core Self and eternal Spirit are strengthened. When that happens, I expect my relationships with others will be enriched too, at least with those in the fellowship of the Heart, or however they choose to denominate this spiritual experience. Yes, I crave loving relationships with other Ego-besotted human beings, because I am Spirit and because I understand because I also have Ego. I know not all are where I am. I know I may be misunderstood and actions taken against me to try and hurt me when others process through Ego. It’s okay. I get it. And I will love myself and others anyway. However, the development of intimacy will only occur with those who are growing, releasing Ego self and Ego structures, because healthy intimacy must be grounded, balanced, and mutual. I’m working on it. I hope you are, too. And I look forward to the time when, because we are in time and space, we can share face to face in whatever form of relationship we feel is appropriate. Until then, richest, intimate blessings! |
Questions to consider:How many times have you asked yourself or simply thought about the following questions?
Who am I, really? What is my truth? How do my actions reveal what I really feel and believe? What would I do with my life if I could do anything? What is my passion? Why am I here? How can I discover answers to any of these questions? If you have considered any of these questions, I hope that my experiences and writing will give you some guidance. Please read my blog and comment and share your thoughts. I would love to hear from you! Archives
December 2019
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