When I was planning my three Matrix collections, I made this note:
“Civilizations ebb and flow, rise and fall, but the individual remains. He needs, under any and all circumstances, to keep two capacities intact: 1) reasoning, logic, analysis; and 2) imagination. These are the well springs. No matter what situation he finds himself in, he will need these. He should not only preserve these two faculties, but also expand and deepen them. Nothing that could be happening around him is an excuse to desert these cores.”
What is happening around us now, in these times, certainly provides major distractions and diversions. It’s easy to go off on tangents and engineer reasons why we can’t achieve goals and embody our dreams. But that doesn’t help us. It doesn’t serve our interests.
After 30 years of working as a reporter, author, and researcher, I’ve come to understand that an imagined vision of what a person truly wants is his North Star. Working at higher and higher levels to fulfill that vision and make it into fact in the world eventually produces unexpected rewards. And also spills over into benefits for others.
The phrase “truly wants” is a key. When you reach down to that level of desire and see it, you find both peace and energy.
You find leverage. Now circumstances tend to adjust to you, rather than you adjusting to them.
It is as if the status quo has been waiting for a change, a transformation, and it moves toward you for assistance.
At the root of ancient alchemy was the notion that nature, in all its manifestations, was engaged in conflict, and a “quintessence” was needed to work a higher resolution. That quintessence is born out of imagination, the envisioning of new possibilities.
However, if individuals are deploying imagination to achieve what are, in fact, their minor desires and lesser wants, then the status quo remains and is built wider and wider.
As an analogy, think of extending a string of negative numbers, while hoping that somehow they’ll add up to a positive number.
The status quo is surreal. I mean that quite literally. It is constructed to look quite normal. But of course, it isn’t. It’s full of lies and half-truths and obfuscations and planned deceptions—all laid on in a “normal” way.
The status quo is a circular affair. It is presented as “the way things are,” but underneath it is the assumption that millions and millions of people are needed to give their consent to it. Needed? Yes. Otherwise, it will collapse. Well, how can the status quo represent the way things are, if they aren’t that way unless huge numbers of people support it and uphold it?
That’s a monumental gimmick. “I’m here, of course I’m here, but I need you to believe I’m here.” Why? If you’re here, what difference does it make what I believe?
Withdrawing your support from the status quo is one thing, but building and inventing a new reality to take its place is quite another.
The individual can make a contribution, an astonishing contribution, when his ability to reason and deploy logic, and his ability to access his own imagination are present at the forefront of his life.
Education of the young could, if there were the will for it, develop the two cores. It could, at the earliest age possible, teach logic and analysis of information, and it could provide numerous exercises to expand imagination. These things are possible. There isn’t any trick to it.
Generations of children, growing up in this kind of atmosphere, would shift their focus. They would eagerly seek out ways to empower their own minds and imaginations. They would be far less likely to fall into holes of apathy and passivity. They wouldn’t need escapes and endless distractions.
But again, no matter what education looks like, no matter what new lows society’s institutions descend into, you remain. Free, and able to choose. Able to decide. Your mind and your imagination are yours.
As I’ve written before, we are the artists of reality, each one of us. This is a spiritual path. It isn’t just a short narrow road.
It’s the great adventure.
<lead image by Joel Robison>
