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.

Notes on Desire

I have to address desire – it gets such a bad rap with religion – it causes suffering, etc. But you have to add a dash of Rumi to your Buddha, I believe, to round out your understanding of desire in the context of spiritual awareness:

Let yourself be silently drawn

by the stronger pull of what you really love.

Rumi

For Rumi, love and desire pull us to the Love with a capital L – the rapture of union with the All. When we are following our heart’s arrow of true desire, our path, when we are doing the things we love to do and loving the people we love and embracing the identity that feels right – when we are honoring our deepest self – then we are, simultaneously, honoring and celebrating the whole, the larger truths.

True love, I have found, requires sacrifice of the selfish, ego-driven love.

True faith requires the sacrifice of the illusion of control.

This is not easy stuff to maintain, master. But it is getting to the heart of where the imagination and reality meet. Through our desire we create a vision of true love and faith that changes us and leads us into the experience and presence of truth.

Desire withers the heart.

The Master observes the world

but trusts his inner vision.

He allows things to come and go.

His heart is as open as the sky. [Tao te Ching, 12]

I guess I think that perhaps desire leads to delight or suffering depending upon its root and its object.

If we want only for the happiness of our small egos, no matter the suffering of others, no matter the well-being of the world, then that is when we are full of the desire that ruins us, for we are falsely seeing our Self as separate from the world, and we are placing its importance above that of others. If we desire to control, to go against things as they are, we are setting ourselves up to battle the whole of which we are apart, and we will suffer.

But if our desire includes the happiness and well-being of the world, includes caring for the suffering of others as well as our own, if our sense of compassion and love places our individual selves within the proper context of the whole, then our desire is divinely inspired.

A good example is romantic love. The ego-driven desire wants the beloved to fill the self, to love the self, to complete and satisfy the needs and wants of the self. The self likes the way the beloved’s attention feels.

But true love views the beloved for who he or she is, and desires that person’s happiness, whatever the cost to the self.

See the world as your self.

Have faith in the way things are.

Love the world as your self;

then you can care for all things. [Tao te Ching, 13]

If we love our neighbors as ourselves, then we can find the right balance. If we lose a lover, but he or she is happy, we can accept the reality of the loss and our sadness – but we can also delight in his or her happiness. This happiness can remove the sting of loss and is the way to true peace.

The Secret Imagination: Part I

So, it’s probably no secret that I’m not a fan of The Secret. I never did think Jesus was giving Christians parking spaces, and not because I didn’t think he couldn’t be bothered, but because I don’t think prayer is like a vending machine – you don’t put in the right amount to get the candy you requested. Prayer is more like entering a connection, a holy space. You’re not ordering from a menu.

And the thing about getting prayers answered, or wishes answered, or your intentions fulfilled is that, whether sponsored by an intelligent deity or not, the universe doesn’t work in one-to-one correspondence with our desires.

If Einstein had prayed never to make a mistake during his experiments, he never would have hit upon the revelations that rocked our world.

And if I got everything I ever wanted, would I really get everything I ever wanted?

I personally don’t believe that things happen for a reason, but I do know that things happen or don’t happen, and what matters isn’t that what we wanted to happen didn’t or vice versa but that we learn from the happenings, learn to adapt, adjust, and move.

If God doesn’t grant the parking space we wanted, we might blame ourselves (I didn’t pray hard enough! Not enough faith!) or we might blame God (He just doesn’t care!) or we could also think, Maybe I’m supposed to be parked five miles from the shopping mall entrance. Or Wow, this gives me an opportunity to take a walk and watch the clouds, or breathe, or count cool license plates.

The problem with Prayer by Mail Order and The Secret stuff is that it’s all basically surface-level demands that is essentially self-centered, and not in the good kind of centered in the self way, either.

I prefer to think in the Taoist sense of letting go of both hope and fear and staying grounded in the reality of the present. What is the present presenting to me? And how will I act and respond? It’s much more practical and useful to take the parking space that comes and use it to your advantage than it is to try to psychically force energy or a god to get the parking space you want.

All of that said, I do believe in the power of prayer and of the imagination. But I’ll save that for next time. Stay tuned!

Let Go, Let Taoism

I heard a person say the other day a phrase familiar to me from my Christian past: “Let go and Let God.”

Immediately I thought about the Taoist concept of wu-wei, not-doing, which means that you don’t work against the flow, but move with it. You let go of trying to force things – you let the universe do its thing.

It’s not often I feel like Christianity and Taoism share concepts, but when it comes to Christ admonishing his followers not to worry, because God dresses the flowers in the field and feeds the sparrow,  I think Lao-Tze would nod his head. “God” or “Tao,” here, refers to this mysterious and yet totally natural and mundane aliveness – Dylan Thomas’ green life force – that doesn’t die when one of us dies, that doesn’t stop. We can worry or not worry, but the storm will come, the sun will shine, the ozone layer will diminish, babies will be born, people will die. We can have a temper tantrum about it, or we can accept it, and enjoy it while we’re here. We have that choice. When you see yourself as living within the whole, whether you picture that whole as being the hand of a benevolent deity or not, you see yourself, I believe, in the right perspective. Worry becomes irrelevant. Your relationship to the whole matters more than whether you get your way about a small particular or not.

Which reminds me of this paradoxical quote:

What you do is of little significance, but it is very important that you do it.
-M.K. Gandhi

And I will bow to the flow and let this post go right here.

Grace and Karma: Mix, Match, Mush

I’m a young Unitarian-Universalist.

So I don’t really know a lot about the theology.

I like the idea of not just comparing religions side by side, but of seeing what happens when you intersect them. (Bahai?)

I was thinking about a person I know who really needs some miracles – or grace, I should say – gifts that he doesn’t earn. I believe in the laws of karma, in that I think if you want a friend, for instance, you have to become a friend; if you want gifts, you have to give. But sometimes people just aren’t capable of making those first inputs into the system; they haven’t been trained, they aren’t aware, they’re so low and down they can hardly move.

But grace is a Christian concept. Can it occur within or with the context of karma? What would that look like?

i lack faith and patience
like waiting for a fish
the one time there’s a bite
and i pull it out, wet and frightened and
it’s grace, and i throw it back to
keep the karma going -