The Secret Imagination: Part II

In the recent edition of Yoga Journal, Sally Kempton writes:

Imagination – our ability to create images not available to the sensory system – is arguably our greatest faculty for evolving human consciousness. In order to transform ourselves and our world, we need to be able to leap out of the familiar and into the unknown. … the imagination can help us begin to replace our internal patterns, especially the ones that keep us limited and stuck. If we can reimagine our sense of who we are, we can change our experience of life. If you can imagine yourself, say, free of suffering, you’ve taken the first step toward that freedom.

Later in the article she connects our internal imagination with external acts, pointing out that:

If you’re spending time during your day imagining yourself as filled with compassion, it doesn’t take you long to notice that you speak to people differently and even treat yourself with much more subtlety and kindness.

So yesterday, for “shits and giggles” as a favorite person used to say – (I won’t go into the images that comes into my head when I hear that phrase – don’t want to sully your imagine and bring about the wrong kind of transformation!) – I “tried” “The Secret.” Caveat – I have avoided the book and movie or any other description of this completely – I only followed the vague idea I heard from my therapist – who was also skeptical, but did wonder what would happen if I tried it.

Item #567 you can do when you don’t have a job: Experiment with New Agey psycho- hijinks (next week, Tarot cards and a colonic cleansing).

I performed a kind of meditative visualization exercise and wrote down five things I wanted to happen that day. They were:

1. To be told “I love you” by a certain someone

2. For someone to offer a job or job interview

3. For sandalwood perfume oil to reappear in my life

4. To have a stranger flirt with me (reassure my ego!)

5. For someone from my past to warmly contact me and inquire as to how I am doing

The Results

Now, here’s the funny thing. Basically, all of these items “came true” or came to fruition – but before you get excited about the possibility of a magic recipe, let’s recall the insights from Kempton, summarized above – the act of the imagination in the mind can have force and expression in the body, transferring from the world of ideas to the world of actuality a wish, a possibility, a desire.

Example: The basketball player envisions the perfect slam dunk before the game, and her chances of actually performing that slam dunk “in real life” go up immensely.

So here’s basically how it went down.

1. I arranged coffee with the certain someone and though I had no expectations, the love was indeed reciprocated.

2. From the networking I’ve been doing through Facebook, a person I hardly know connected me to others I don’t know, and it looks like at least one of them will need me for work.

3. I went online and ordered the sandalwood.

4. I went out to a social gathering; someone flirted with me.

5. I spent a large part of the day beefing up my Linked In profile by writing recommendations for past colleagues, and indeed, someone from my past did warmly email me, as a result.

So, we’re not talking about mystical alchemy here. We’re talking about how writing down the things I wanted from the day in a positive manner – as in, I wasn’t thinking “here’s my goals to accomplish,” which would have pressured me with onerous tasks, but rather “here’s what I want, deep down inside, but who knows” – provoked me to take steps that made the things I desired occur. I wasn’t really focused on the outcomes I had listed. I just acted out of desire – to connect, to be near a loved one, to smell better.

This isn’t magic or rocket science. It’s kind of the principle of the book Do What You Love, the Money Will Follow – ridiculous, but really when you engage in what you love and desire, when you – yes, here I go again! Joseph Campbell alert! – follow that stinkin’ bliss, but not for the accomplishment or the reward but for the love of the thing in itself – then you truly enter into the kind of fruitful relationship with yourself and your work/art/relationships that allows you to be fully present and ultimately fully satisfied.

One of those paradoxical laws that is so simple and hard, it must be true.

So, no: I’m not a “The Secret” convert. But this experiment did underscore for me

• the importance of giving so that you can receive – without expectations;
• doing what you love out of love;
• and sometimes, when you want something – well, you can go online and order it.

A Short, Bright Life

My grandmother, in her upper 80s, having strokes, has now been struck with anxiety. Her mother died of strokes. She is now on the precipice of her own demise.

When I imagine what it’s like to be my grandmother, in her body, in one of her 99 pairs of shoes, I feel her panic as young as my own, the hot volcanic fear of that door being shut, your mind buried and blacked out.

I learned about fireflies this summer – that they live underground until they appear in June, rising with the heat, and then live for maybe two weeks, tops, a short, bright life during which they signal to possible mates, urgently blinking on and off, Let’s procreate!

It’s a two-week long orgy of reproductive sex. And then the light goes out.

This makes me think several things:

1. No matter when we die, whether after two weeks or 88 years, our lifespan may feel like it was too short. It is never enough. So while I might conclude that Gee, at least I live longer than two weeks! it’s really not that much of a helpful contrast.

2. I’m so glad that a human life is more than a speedy rev of mating lust.

3. Is a human life more than a speedy rev of mating lust?

4. Why do I have an internal reaction of disdain that the pretty luminous flickerings of fireflies is nothing more than a dance for reproduction? Why do I find that kind of vulgar? Why do I want the patterened pulses to be discussions of flower art? Why do I resist the idea that biologically, Life wants to reproduce as its main mission, and to acknowledge that force within myself as well?

I guess I would like for us to have ‘higher’ goals at the core of existence – spiritual evolution, not just physical reproduction. I’m reading Mother Nature right now, and so many male primate behaviors are explained by the desire to promote and protect the passing on of one’s own genes. That kind of disgusts me. I want human beings to transcend genetic transference. I want us to practice agape and compassion for others of our species, whether or not we share genetic material. I want there to be an inherent generosity of spirit in the human DNA…

But then I run into a conflict with myself -the part of me that balks at any notions of the abstract/spiritual layer of a person as rising “above” the physical realm. Instead, I believe the physical and spiritual (mental, emotional) parts of a human are interlaced, and you can’t untangle one from the other. And one is not better than another…

Thinking this way butts against centuries of gnostic and Christian dualism, however, that are deeply imbedded in our language and thinking.

5. Is it ‘firefly’ or ‘lightning bug’?

6. Whatever our goals in life, whether we manage to mate or not, reproduce or not, live for a week or a year, our lives blink with radiance and beauty. There is, for us human beings, no real set amount of time that we are ’supposed’ to live. There is only the time that we do live. And for me, there is no external comfort to offer my grandmother regarding her death. There is no invisible god waiting to catch her when she jumps off the cliff of her life. There is only the joy that comes from what is, the time that we have at this very moment, which is special precisely because it is not eternal.

7. Sometimes the meaning of our lives, the beauty in them, is found, not in our own limited perspective, but in our part within the whole. I don’t care so much whether firefly X manages to sire a next generation. But the light of his bulb delights me, makes an evening magical – another instance of nature’s effervescence that kindles a flame in my heart.

How lovely my grandmother is to me, for she is similarly bright.

Of course, I am a product of her successful reproductive efforts – so I am grateful – but more so, happy to have been around her, witness to her smile, the way she eats off other people’s plates in a way that’s charming and not annoying…

Returning and Re-turning

Dog in the Receding Snow

On my circuitous route to the park today, (isn’t circuitous the best word!), I passed by a sobbing car – rather, a woman burying herself into the carseats, weeping and wailing in misery. I had turned to look – she drove away – hurriedly -her cries echoing on the quiet side street – and me, full of questions, and memories – how many times I’ve been on the side of the road, alone in my car with my devastation, glassed in but somewhat on display -

Ah, suffering.

She drove away -

Suffering, so easy to itemize and analyze on either side of it – so easy to shrug it off when it’s just a memory you can hang in the closet. But when you’re in it, it feels as irreversible, as inescapable as your own skin.

Suffering or love – so easy to forget what they feel like when you’ve moved out of their grip. A similar forgetfulness that attends my sense of the seasons – when winter cold starts slapping me down, I am always stung with shock, even though it happens every year. And then the warmth that creeps over me, the hot pressing feet of the summer cat – again, the thrill of my first real sweat feels tremendous and new – though I felt it, the same heat, just the year before.

I feel somewhat like an idiot when this happens – again and again and again – except for the fact that there’s something resuscitating to my spirit and body to go through, yearly, these processes, as if I am – for I am! – a living thing.

There’s a paradox I keep getting pointed to about experience and living that has to do with being fully alive in the present moment and its feeling, whether it’s suffering or love, while at the same time holding the awareness that all things change and pass away.

This is, I believe, part of what Thomas More is alluding to in his book Care of the Soul, when he talks about love:

It isn’t necessary to make strong efforts to avoid past mistakes or to learn how to be clever about love. The advance we make after we have been devastated by love may be to be able simply to enter it freely once again, in spite of our suspicions, to draw ever closer to the darkness and hollowness that are mysteriously necessary in love.

Red Buds

Of course, it’s nicer to think about re-entering love freely – not suffering so much. Last night I was out late in the cold and complained aloud, “This is one of the moments when I feel like I should be Buddhistically just noticing how damn freezing I am, but instead all I really want to do is to shut my mind down, to not be aware of it, so I can survive.”

Shutting down certainly feels easier and more expedient, more practical and possible, than staying open and exposed, when one is experiencing suffering, physically or emotionally. The problem is that when we shut down, we don’t notice or learn anything from our experience. And there’s a difference between experiencing recurring seasons or situations with a full fresh presence and going through the cycling treadmill of the same thing over and over because we keep our eyes shut so tightly we don’t look and see that we are going nowhere…Not to mention, when we don’t fully experience our suffering at the time it occurs, it comes up later, surfacing from the lidded depths.

Watching that woman drive off in her car, I felt like I could have been witnessing myself four years ago, four months ago, fourteen years ago, driving off in my Ford, my white K-car…

And I have a feeling, I will find myself there again. The thing is, can I practice entering these moments now, openly, enough so that the next time I am there in that cold place of despair I won’t be shut off, doors locked to the experience? So that I don’t drive away from myself, trying to escape what can’t be avoided? And will I remind myself, will I look out the window and see a woman walking on the side of the road, and know that that was me, is me again, that all things change, and to let that vision – that deeply knitted knowledge of the whole – allow me the comforting sense of the larger turning and returning of the world?

Tree

To love fully, to feel fully, to suffer fully – to step out of my enclosures, my habits of being closed to the senses – to walk to the park, watch the snow returning into the earth, and make my footprints there, as if for the first time – for it is the first time this foot has touched this piece of snow, and it is an old stepping, and the new buds coming are themselves only themselves, though their coming is eternal -

Let me return to the same place that is never the same, and to know it.

Doing Nothing

I call them commercials. It’s PBS, sure, but when the Chuck E. Cheese underwriting “announcement” comes on, it’s a darn commercial.

And I’m offended by the slogan for this “message” – as asserted by the PBS-Pure-Middle-American-Broadcast-Voice-Woman: Because doing something is better than doing nothing.

Excuse me?

an abandoned chair

I know, I can guess, that what that venerable institution of pizza and second-rate mechanical animals means to suggest is that children should be active to avoid obesity (because that’s what every eatery in the land is meaning to suggest, at the same time as pushing their greasy food in our faces) so that instead of passively eating pizza at some other establishment or at home in front of, well, PBS or other TV, kids would be better off gulping pizza while watching large rats play banjos and then play a video game and finish the night off by throwing up in the ball pit. To keep insurance rates down, you know.

However, that phrase lingered in my head as I walked over to the park on a rare morning when it was just me – no kids, no dog – and I was able to sit down and gorgeously, indulgently, do the wonderful act of nothing.

In your face, Chucky!

I don’t want my children to grow up feeling they must be constantly engaged. I don’t want them to need to be entertained or to be producing something or downing something or always something something to be living a meaningful existence. So, no, I disagree with your assertion, Chuck E. Cheese, oh Subsidizer of Sesame Street: it’s not always better to do something better than nothing; sometimes doing nothing is exactly what must be done.

(Or maybe it’s a political statement? As in, do something about poverty or discrimination; maybe the rat is trying to start a revolution?)

Eventually, as I sat there on the rounded nub of the hill, the something vs. nothing debate unseethed itself and I was able to breathe and be. I’m not great at meditating. It’s one of those things I probably will always struggle with, because I’m so mentally frolicking and questioning and reflexive, and I want to do it so well I get caught up in tstriving instead of just relaxing into the moment. But sitting outside in the park, the burdens of my own self-consciousness have less weight. The earth is capacious. I am small. Even my own breath goes on and on without my controlling it. My body and the trees interact with no need of my sanction. We are deeply intimate.

Logically, there is no such thing as doing nothing. But sticking with Lao-Tse’s wu wei concept of doing nothing – the Taoist approach of not-doing or not-interfering, going with the flow – it is still an attentive, active kind of being one might try; it does not look for outcomes, for fulfillment, not because outcomes and fulfillment are not to be had, but because forcing them, trying to make them happen, doesn’t work.

Kind of like taking your oversized kid to a “fun” pizza parlor.

Though, if you do end up at a Chuck E. Cheese, do it wu wei style – do nothing – and have a good time!

The slogan for the park – any park – should be: Come, do nothing. Rest.