Your body is a space suit; your mind is the universe; and you are a nomad. No hope of survival lies out of touch from your body’s biological airlock, but your mind is another story. The moment your brain bloomed its first coherent thought, aware, your mind broke free from its mechanisms, escaped a life of vehicular computation, and became you: an opened portal. You are a particle collider but made of thoughts and dreams; you are a deep space telescope that curves imagination into a lens, at will. You are a peculiar force of freedom calculating towards infinity, trying to find a limit as imagination multiplies. Home and world are packed into greymatter sacks, and your mind wanders, literally, through its self-created door: the glittering potential of being you. On your journeys, the less you carry insofar as facts, the better. Nomads make do in every circumstance imagined with few hard truths, improvising solutions anew as if creating its tools from loss and hope, vacuum and pressure. So you are free; you may go wherever your creativity conjures as no mission was ever issued alongside your life. Simply persist and make camp with meaning. Make meals with meaning. Make meaning from hardship, make meaning from triumph. Make meaning in any way you can, lest you grow weary of exploring the wild beauty of all you are, and close that door forever.
Tag: imagination
Imagination’s Wormholes
Science and Shamanism
“Everything you can imagine is real.” – Pablo Picasso
Quantum physics, and modern theoretical physics, comes to some pretty odd conclusions. You hear of scientists happily admitting that an infinite universe, or infinite parallel universe, necessarily means that everything possible must exist. Yet when we look at these conclusions from a spiritual point of view, they can be used to understand reality in a very complete way. I’ve often joked that there should be a metaphysics expert at CERN (nominating myself, of course), but the truth is that science and shamanism can blend seamlessly together.
It is known that light exists both as a particle and as a wave. The waveform includes all possible paths the particle may take, and the wave is described as being “everywhere at once”. When forced into physical reality by being tested and observed, the waveform “collapses” and its reality manifests (in this plane of existence, anyway) as one of the potential particles, taking a single path. It is also said that this is not unique to light – that everything exists as both particle and wave. Even you.
I believe that the waveform, which is potential, is what we have been calling “spirit” all this time. It exists as a real thing but we can only ever observe the singular manifestations of physical particles in this plane of existence. You have a spirit, which is all your possibilities – and to me that equates to your higher self. Yet you can only physically observe the one manifestation of it out of an infinite set: your physical being as you know it.
Now, if potential is spirit, existing infinitely everywhere at once, how do we get to know it? I have another belief that answers this in a surprising way.
Our imagination is a direct sense of potential. How else can we know what is possible in an infinite universe? Well, everything we imagine is possible – somehow, somewhere. Thus, our imagination is a real sense, just like vision and hearing, but of spiritual things.
People don’t like to think that spirituality is made up or “all in our head”, and that’s not what I’m saying at all. What I’m saying is that through disciplined use of our imagination, we can see everything that is possible, which is the spirit realm.
Shamanism provides one such disciplined use of the imagination. You will hear great shamanic teachers saying things like, “Of course we’re imagining everything. That’s how we create reality.” The oft-used phrase “dreaming the world into being” speaks to this. What shamans do is to go into altered states of consciousness where they can get answers and see potential while feeling like they’re not making it up – the messages seem to come from outside our own heads.
As Pablo Picasso says, “Everything you can imagine is real.” Shamans use the shamanic journey to see reality in a different way – to see the full power of potential and possibility, which is spirit. And every time a spirit comes to speak to us, it is scientifically true that there must be a real being (somehow, somewhere) that exists who would say this to us. So it’s real and imaginary all at once, and the real trick is just learning to navigate this infinite universe.
Connecting with Spirit and the Fear Self
Spirit works with the imagination, not against it. Our imagination is actually a direct sense of potential, which is the realm of spirit.
We waste a lot of time when we worry if we are “merely imagining” spirit messages. When we actually get in the way of spirit, it is usually our fear self who perpetuates or manifests something false. Learning to recognize our fear self is a crucial aspect of getting closer to spirit.
You can ask to meet your fear self directly to help understand it and also heal it. Offer the fear self love and comfort. Getting to know the fear self is ultimately one of the most powerful tools in your spiritual growth, so spend time with it!
Spirit as Imagination
Spirit is pure wave, potential, the dream of a child: all of which, I argue, is imagination.
Few who wish to connect with spirit would be comfortable equating it with imagination. I want to make it clear that I am not downplaying the reality of spirit in any way. For it is also true, as Schrodinger might tell us, that all unobserved things exist solely as waves, solely within potential, solely within the imagination. Yet unobserved things are generally maintained to be as real as observed things. Your partner remains real when she is not in view, as does the rest of the world.
All fiction is merely a reality removed from our sight, but alive some world away.
All that is possible in imagination becomes material, somewhere, somehow. My metaphysics of creation speaks of a great love affair between potential and actualization. Nothingness abounds with absolute potential. Nothingness is a cauldron of roiling imagination. Meanwhile Everything roils with being. Everything and nothing are lovers whose passion bears both being and imagination, the world of Something.
We are children of Everything and Nothing. Our five physical senses tell us of the world of Being, and our imagination is our sensory apparatus of Potential. We live with a foot in both worlds, though many choose not to recognize it.
And when your own being passes from this world, rest assured that the imagination of you – your spirit – returns to the womb of potential until it passes into being again, somewhere, somehow.
Of course this is all my own fancy, and my aim is not to convince but to suggest, to spark someone else’s own ideas. Naturally, I believe that spirit lives in all forms we imagine it.
Flyers
When did we stop running
off benches, believing
we could fly?
I know a child who glides
even as he falls,
because it happens
in his dreams.
Maybe this time, he thinks.
He gallops to the edge, jumps,
and knows
imagination is somehow key.
Reality and the Brain
We think that we create our realities by our brain connections — our neural nets, which we imagine to be built over years of experience. But get this — toddlers have more brain connections than adults, maybe ten times more.
I think experience limits our realities like the statue that lies hidden within the stone. Perhaps babies are born out of the Nothing with an image of the Everything in their minds.