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Imagination Freed
The incredible mind of Joanna Harcourt-Smith shares this call to coherency.
Date: 8/22/2005 2:04:03 AM ( 19 y ) ... viewed 2139 times More Spiritual/Consciousness Articles
Imagination Freed
The Landscape of the Inner Life
This morning, after I got up four things happened:
I had an egg and toast for breakfast, then I read an article by Michael Mannion about Wilhelm Reich’s work, describing the boundless resources and applications of the “Life Energy” that Reich called orgone. Then I took a bath, and the next thing that happened is that I became aware of an opening in my inner field of vision. In front of my bath tub there is a window, and as I opened the window and watched the elegant, cloud-like evaporation of the hot water, I understood something I have been thinking about for twenty years, maybe more.
I have often asked myself: What is intuition? What is it to be clairvoyant or psychic? How is it that our relationships with others can alter our lives so completely?
The Field
The way we are “educated” as children, narrows down our inner telescope. We are manipulated into narrower and narrower fields of vision. This is done by various forms of interdiction like “Stop day-dreaming,” “Stop imagining things," and "You are making things up.” Then come the long and tedious school years, when the child is taught to become bored with her own mind. Hence she shuts down the cries of her heart that tell her that what most adults say and do is crazy. In many cases, the fate of the intelligence from the gut undergoes the cruelest denial. In school cafeterias and in many homes, children are fed addictive foods, controlled and drugged by vast intakes of mind altering, sugary “treats.” This kind of nutrition works against the body intelligence.
I remember that as a child I had recurring “tummy’ aches, natural signs from my body telling me that something in my environment was wrong.
What happens is that we learn to mistrust the information given to us by the life force. We shut down to the information coming to us from our immediate surroundings while paradoxically we become completely otherated: doing our best to adapt, trying constantly read other peoples thoughts, feelings and actions as “emergency” survival information. By the time a child reaches her teen years, in most cases the access to her inner life, her rich field of genetic mythological and co-creating information has been annihilated.
This process of acculturation is brilliantly presented by Joseph Chilton Pearce’s in his book The Biology of Transcendence. Pearce explanation of the concept of "field" was a revelation to me, for it showed me what I had always suspected.
As living organisms, we are deeply woven into a field of vital currents (which Pearce depicts in the model of the torus centered on the heart). As a speices, we are interconnected by a field of intuition. If we knew this, we could be creating our immediate reality out of the rich information material stored in our innate interspecies memory bank. I would call this, Gaia’s living memory bank, because the field is grounded in Gaia, the ground on which we literally stand.
The tragedy is, by the time we become adults our intuitive memory bank is almost bankrupt. We have learned to close our inner eyes to the vast landscape of information interpreted by the imagination.
Intuitive Knowing
I was a victim of 20th century human dressage, the conditioning that wipes out inner intuition and denies us access to the field. I am sad to say that until the age of forty I had never dared look inside myself. I had been beaten down into considering that my imagination and intuitive thoughts were forbidden by some sort of "thought police," hidden, societal enforcers who would punish me for what I knew inside.To cope with this intolerable sensation, I afflicted myself with several addictions that served me by overriding the desperate signals from my body—amongst these little helpers were, of course, television and idle chat.
But in the dark, moist confines of my inner being however, mushrooms spores of genetic material were refusing to die. Eventually I shed my masks of addiction, one by one, dreading the moment where the veil between my outer and inner life would lift.
Was there really such thing as an inner life, and why was it so scary?
The answer is, I think, that it is frightening because the first revelation we are given when we turn to the vastness inside ourselves is that we are not alone, everything is alive. Did I see that during my first L.S.D trips and then forget it? Yes, but it was obscured by the heavy unexplored pain I carried in my heart. If we are not alone but all together, and together we form a tapestry of meaning, a field in which everything matters. There is no place to hide but there is also nothing to hide from.
In the past I had been sentenced to fear—not only fear of the web of life, but fear of the life force itself. (I now realize that the work of Wilhelm Reich is important to our survival, because it exposes fear of the life force and describes the consequences of this fear.) For a long time, I felt a little bit like a flashlight that would have learned to fear the batteries inside herself. And, just imagine, I thought fear and mistrust gave me an edge, a fierce logical edge. But the edge is only the edge, and I found out that sooner or later, in one life or another, you will fall of the edge because someone who does not agree with your logic is going to push you into the precipice.
At moments you may feel, as I did, that rivers of grief are waiting to run through your heart, but it won’t kill you—if you can bear it, slowly, with your eyes turned inward with compassion, warm up your soul, isolated for too long, and your creative and playful imagination will feed you once again with the amazing, ecstatic memories of what it means to be human, a shining node in the web of all species.
The more the man-made manipulative feelings of fear and guilt recede, the more abundant and descriptive the inner information landscape will become. Not only long boats will appear, but ships and space ships and even time-travel highways that run along DNA spirals...
What I understood this morning in my bath is that to be intuitive is simply to be open to effortlessly synthesize more and more stories along the heart-gut-brain circuit without imposing upon them cultural, religious or parental censorship. The difference between acculturated certainty and intuition is the difference between two feelings of knowing. One feels hard and rigid, the other, fluid and gentle. We are weavers and pieces of tapestry in each others stories, we are the colors and textures of the living universe. We are sacraments who are here to expand the Earth’s awareness of Herself. Let’s remember who we are. Let’s look inside ourselves with love. Let’s feed the Life Force as it feeds us.
Wild Imagination
No wonder governments criminalize the use of mind-altering substances. Even some political manipulators know that the veil that covers the door to integrated intelligence is a biochemical event. There are many ways to wake up from our increasing isolation from each other, but unfortunately, electronic toys are replacing our indispensable connection to nature and her open field of clouds, animals and healing plants. The doors to inner freedom must remain shut for tyanny to rule. For that purpose cities have become ghettos of steel and cement, vast prisons of the imagination where perception is controlled by artificial consumer needs.
The wild imaginative faculties we are naturally endowed with are the greatest re-evolutionary tools we have. Imagination is trapped within the boundaries of imposed belief that could take us and many kin species to premature extinction.
We have been taught from birth to limit our creative power to fit into accepted social and religious containers. Imagine what could be discovered if we were not squeezed and frozen into various forms of pre-packaged egos (not so different from freeze-dried peas!!) Brains and hearts all dressed up and tamed to please mother, father, society, the moneydealers or those whose conditional love we want to win at all cost. What would life on earth look like if we were innernauts, ecstatically exploring and implementing the visionary landscape of the inner life, where imagination cr
Would it be total chaos, as "the authorities" fear, or would our world resemble once again that “Garden” we were supposedly thrown out of by the supreme authority, the wrathful father god? Exiled from Eded, we live in a non-imaginative, distorted world. The Arctic ice is melting, a great number of whales and dolphins are killed by underwater sonic rays developed by the military, and greater and greater numbers of children are used and abused by terrified and controlled adults, to name but a few of our ailments.
I, for one, do not believe there can be revolution from within the system because the system originates from the wounded psyche, not the visionary part of us. . Imagination is a vital component of our design as a species. We are here to discover, to invent, to create, and to celebrate our coexistence on this planet and our resonance to the stars dancing around us. By dangerously acting out of increasingly narrow bands of ego fancy, we risk a rupture of the field. If there is to be a revolution in our midst, it must come from surrender to the wisdom of our interconnected sentient legacy, all being playing together on the genetic lyre of the Life Force.
Andalucia, Dec 2004.
magination Freed
The Landscape of the Inner Life
This morning, after I got up four things happened:
I had an egg and toast for breakfast, then I read an article by Michael Mannion about Wilhelm Reich’s work, describing the boundless resources and applications of the “Life Energy” that Reich called orgone. Then I took a bath, and the next thing that happened is that I became aware of an opening in my inner field of vision. In front of my bath tub there is a window, and as I opened the window and watched the elegant, cloud-like evaporation of the hot water, I understood something I have been thinking about for twenty years, maybe more.
I have often asked myself: What is intuition? What is it to be clairvoyant or psychic? How is it that our relationships with others can alter our lives so completely?
The Field
The way we are “educated” as children, narrows down our inner telescope. We are manipulated into narrower and narrower fields of vision. This is done by various forms of interdiction like “Stop day-dreaming,” “Stop imagining things," and "You are making things up.” Then come the long and tedious school years, when the child is taught to become bored with her own mind. Hence she shuts down the cries of her heart that tell her that what most adults say and do is crazy. In many cases, the fate of the intelligence from the gut undergoes the cruelest denial. In school cafeterias and in many homes, children are fed addictive foods, controlled and drugged by vast intakes of mind altering, sugary “treats.” This kind of nutrition works against the body intelligence.
I remember that as a child I had recurring “tummy’ aches, natural signs from my body telling me that something in my environment was wrong.
What happens is that we learn to mistrust the information given to us by the life force. We shut down to the information coming to us from our immediate surroundings while paradoxically we become completely otherated: doing our best to adapt, trying constantly read other peoples thoughts, feelings and actions as “emergency” survival information. By the time a child reaches her teen years, in most cases the access to her inner life, her rich field of genetic mythological and co-creating information has been annihilated.
This process of acculturation is brilliantly presented by Joseph Chilton Pearce’s in his book The Biology of Transcendence. Pearce explanation of the concept of "field" was a revelation to me, for it showed me what I had always suspected.
As living organisms, we are deeply woven into a field of vital currents (which Pearce depicts in the model of the torus centered on the heart). As a speices, we are interconnected by a field of intuition. If we knew this, we could be creating our immediate reality out of the rich information material stored in our innate interspecies memory bank. I would call this, Gaia’s living memory bank, because the field is grounded in Gaia, the ground on which we literally stand.
The tragedy is, by the time we become adults our intuitive memory bank is almost bankrupt. We have learned to close our inner eyes to the vast landscape of information interpreted by the imagination.
Intuitive Knowing
I was a victim of 20th century human dressage, the conditioning that wipes out inner intuition and denies us access to the field. I am sad to say that until the age of forty I had never dared look inside myself. I had been beaten down into considering that my imagination and intuitive thoughts were forbidden by some sort of "thought police," hidden, societal enforcers who would punish me for what I knew inside.To cope with this intolerable sensation, I afflicted myself with several addictions that served me by overriding the desperate signals from my body—amongst these little helpers were, of course, television and idle chat.
But in the dark, moist confines of my inner being however, mushrooms spores of genetic material were refusing to die. Eventually I shed my masks of addiction, one by one, dreading the moment where the veil between my outer and inner life would lift.
Was there really such thing as an inner life, and why was it so scary?
The answer is, I think, that it is frightening because the first revelation we are given when we turn to the vastness inside ourselves is that we are not alone, everything is alive. Did I see that during my first L.S.D trips and then forget it? Yes, but it was obscured by the heavy unexplored pain I carried in my heart. If we are not alone but all together, and together we form a tapestry of meaning, a field in which everything matters. There is no place to hide but there is also nothing to hide from.
In the past I had been sentenced to fear—not only fear of the web of life, but fear of the life force itself. (I now realize that the work of Wilhelm Reich is important to our survival, because it exposes fear of the life force and describes the consequences of this fear.) For a long time, I felt a little bit like a flashlight that would have learned to fear the batteries inside herself. And, just imagine, I thought fear and mistrust gave me an edge, a fierce logical edge. But the edge is only the edge, and I found out that sooner or later, in one life or another, you will fall of the edge because someone who does not agree with your logic is going to push you into the precipice.
At moments you may feel, as I did, that rivers of grief are waiting to run through your heart, but it won’t kill you—if you can bear it, slowly, with your eyes turned inward with compassion, warm up your soul, isolated for too long, and your creative and playful imagination will feed you once again with the amazing, ecstatic memories of what it means to be human, a shining node in the web of all species.
The more the man-made manipulative feelings of fear and guilt recede, the more abundant and descriptive the inner information landscape will become. Not only long boats will appear, but ships and space ships and even time-travel highways that run along DNA spirals...
What I understood this morning in my bath is that to be intuitive is simply to be open to effortlessly synthesize more and more stories along the heart-gut-brain circuit without imposing upon them cultural, religious or parental censorship. The difference between acculturated certainty and intuition is the difference between two feelings of knowing. One feels hard and rigid, the other, fluid and gentle. We are weavers and pieces of tapestry in each others stories, we are the colors and textures of the living universe. We are sacraments who are here to expand the Earth’s awareness of Herself. Let’s remember who we are. Let’s look inside ourselves with love. Let’s feed the Life Force as it feeds us.
Wild Imagination
No wonder governments criminalize the use of mind-altering substances. Even some political manipulators know that the veil that covers the door to integrated intelligence is a biochemical event. There are many ways to wake up from our increasing isolation from each other, but unfortunately, electronic toys are replacing our indispensable connection to nature and her open field of clouds, animals and healing plants. The doors to inner freedom must remain shut for tyanny to rule. For that purpose cities have become ghettos of steel and cement, vast prisons of the imagination where perception is controlled by artificial consumer needs.
The wild imaginative faculties we are naturally endowed with are the greatest re-evolutionary tools we have. Imagination is trapped within the boundaries of imposed belief that could take us and many kin species to premature extinction.
We have been taught from birth to limit our creative power to fit into accepted social and religious containers. Imagine what could be discovered if we were not squeezed and frozen into various forms of pre-packaged egos (not so different from freeze-dried peas!!) Brains and hearts all dressed up and tamed to please mother, father, society, the moneydealers or those whose conditional love we want to win at all cost. What would life on earth look like if we were innernauts, ecstatically exploring and implementing the visionary landscape of the inner life, where imagination cr
Would it be total chaos, as "the authorities" fear, or would our world resemble once again that “Garden” we were supposedly thrown out of by the supreme authority, the wrathful father god? Exiled from Eded, we live in a non-imaginative, distorted world. The Arctic ice is melting, a great number of whales and dolphins are killed by underwater sonic rays developed by the military, and greater and greater numbers of children are used and abused by terrified and controlled adults, to name but a few of our ailments.
I, for one, do not believe there can be revolution from within the system because the system originates from the wounded psyche, not the visionary part of us. . Imagination is a vital component of our design as a species. We are here to discover, to invent, to create, and to celebrate our coexistence on this planet and our resonance to the stars dancing around us. By dangerously acting out of increasingly narrow bands of ego fancy, we risk a rupture of the field. If there is to be a revolution in our midst, it must come from surrender to the wisdom of our interconnected sentient legacy, all being playing together on the genetic lyre of the Life Force.
Andalucia, Dec 2004.
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