Imaginational Freefall

My post today is about the womb of imagination, the birthplace of anything goes. I’m sharing a fun trick today, although ‘trick’ is not quite the right word….not like ‘imaginational’, anyway.

You might be wondering what I mean by ‘imaginational freefall’. Basically  ‘imaginational freefall’ is a bungee jump from a bridge of thought, attention, or intention without a harness. You don’t need much, if any, training and whatever instruction I share with you might have to be thrown out because it just might get in the way.

So I will share with you what I’ve done on occasion and we’ll take it from there. Actually, I’ll share some details of my last imaginational freefall and I will drop (hint)s along the way.

Recently, after finishing a shower, I was drying off and as I was doing so I took notice (hint) of the act of drying off . I paid total attention to the feel of the towel, the swiping action of my arms, the sight and feeling of the water droplets on my skin, the sound of my breathing as I was drying off (hints).

I then widened the circle of my attention (hint) to the bathroom tiles on the walls, the floors, the structure of the bath and shower, the edifice of the house, and the existence and essence of all these things. I carried my thought to our planet as a whole and wondered at the innumerable inventions we have introduced to a planet of earth, water, and sky.

Ultimately, I flew (hint) out into space and could see Earth from a distance of light years. I looked around at the stars and galaxies nearby and distant. I was in awe. I imagined life on other planets, in other worlds, and started flying over great, imaginational distances and viewed several worlds simultaneously, wondering (hint) what the details of their lives were.

Then I ‘landed’….back on Earth….in my little bathroom.

I guess you could say I ‘woke up’.

Ok, these were the mechanical details of an imaginational freefall. The imaginational part should be obvious. The freefall part is not so obvious and yet is.

What is a freefall? In physical terms, it’s a fall with no grounding, no support,  and no slowing down. You’re riding gravity’s pull and the higher you are the faster you fall.

Now, if you’ve ever free-fallen from any height (a cliff, a building, or a high diving board, for example, in reality or in dreams) then you know the physical feeling of that falling momentum, right? The involuntary pull of your weight, the centripetal surge of your insides. It’s a freaky feeling and can be scary (in fact, the only 2 fears we’re born with are the fear of loud noises and the fear of falling).

Well, this literally is the feeling I get during imaginational freefall. I experienced it during the episode I just described above, and it’s a physical signal that I’m truly in imaginational freefall, but one that I cannot take notice of for more than a trillionth of a nano-moment or else I ‘land’, if you know what I mean.

So what are the instructions on how to do this? And what the heck is the point??

As I already shared with you, there are hints in the account above. I don’t want this to get too instructional because that defeats the purpose which is ultimately and necessarily to awaken your inner mystic.

I’ll briefly list the hints from above and you can fill in the empty spaces of knowing with the substance of your experiences.

1) Remember, an imaginational freefall is a ‘bungee jump from a bridge of thought, attention, or intention without a harness.’  It’s about letting go and stepping off the edge of what you know, or think, is sure and stepping into the groundless space of imagination with no harness, i.e., with no self-consciously guided thought, no precedent, no destination. Just freefall.

2) Take notice. Total immersion of your attention and awareness on the moment. The moment could include what is around you physically, sensually. Or the moment could be just what is going on internally – thoughts, feelings, images. Or both. You define the moment….wait, that might be too active, too masculine (energetically); better yet, let the moment define itself, tell you what it is and you just take notice (passivity is the needed state for a successful, fun imaginational freefall). Stay totally receptive. Take notice. Take, receive – get it?

3) When you take notice, be aware of the sensations – what do you see? what do you hear? what do you feel, smell, taste? Don’t think about you are sensing – just feel it, see it, smell, hear it. Get it? If what you sense is internal only then, again, what do you see, smell, hear, feel?

4) Expand. If it is appropriate, widen your circle of awareness. I mention this (about appropriateness) because, again, you don’t want the driving force to be you in thinking mode. Remember, in a physical freefall you are being pulled, you are not pushing or directing – in other words, you are not in control. It is the same with imagination.

Also, expanding your circle of awareness may not be needed – maybe you just want to stay confined to a small patch of imagination, especially as you start these exercises. That’s fine. At times you may want to explore only a leaf, or a cell, or an atom; or you may fly as a hummingbird, run as a cheetah, or swim as a blue whale; or you may lie on the pavement as a homeless man, play as a saxophonist in a jazz club, or negotiate the ultimate peace treaty among nations as a head of state. Depending upon where you leap from (a thought, a focus of attention, or an intention) you will feel your way through the freefall.

5) Fly. This can be mastered somewhat easily or it can ruin your freefall. It’s similar in principle to expanding your awareness. When you really get good at imaginational freefall you can introduce an element of ownership and still remain in freefall. It’s similar to lucid dreaming in which you are aware that you are in dream state and decide to ‘own’ your dream actions through self-guidance. I know this may seem to contradict what I mentioned in ‘step’ 1 (these are not steps, this is not linear). It doesn’t. In any case, you will experience many seeming contradictions and inconsistencies but in the realm of imagination, anything goes, and usually does.

I’ll give you an example from real life: a man leaped from a burning skyscraper to avoid burning to death. A photojournalist observed the man falling and took about a dozen photos of his descent. The photojournalist observed that the falling man stopped flailing his arms and legs at some point, put his arms close to his sides, and continued headfirst for the rest of his fall. Apparently, the body language signaled that the man changed from a state of resistance (evidenced by his flailing arms and legs) to one of acceptance and even ownership (arms to his sides, headfirst). The photojournalist commented that the photos of the man, at the point when he ‘took control’, appeared as if he was flying through the air, not falling.

6) Wonder. Be the child again. Wonder, marvel, enjoy. Just don’t think about it like I did, not if you don’t want to land. Be fascinated, be not startled. Marvel, but say nothing is marvelous. Say nothing. Think nothing. Remain in child-like wonder – no thinking, no analyzing, no defining, no resisting. Wonder, do not ponder. Just wonder. Because you will anyway.

Well, this is it, I think.

Now that you’ve read the instructions, discard them. Listen, but don’t follow. Just do. You want your experience to inform your reading/learning, not the other way around. You will have your own discoveries, receive your own revelations, and share your own stories. And what you experience may depart and even disagree with what I’ve shared. That’s fine. You must experience your own truth.

And this is the point of imaginationa freefall – to experience your own truth, your own imagination, and exercise them freely and creatively.The point is to awaken the inner ‘mystic’ within you, that artist of life that expresses uniquely as you and through you.

Doing so will help you establish your own authority and sovereignty in the realm of imagination. Your mind is your own and is your willing servant in the act of creation. Using your will to direct its creative energies will help you discover and experience your innate powers of thought, will, and imagination.

From childhood we are conditioned to give our minds in deference to external ‘truths’ and ‘authorities’. We do this by agreeing with them and assimilating their precepts and teachings, often unconsciously. As a result of this the skies of our imagination become clouded with information and knowledge that stifle the free-ranging, creative self. We must reclaim our minds and imagination and recover our uniquely expressive selves.

Imaginational freefall can show you how.

Reflecting on Birth and Silence

When my son was born I was the first to see his head emerge. It was a water birth and I was the only witness to this  moment. In the days and months that have followed the birth I have revisited the moments of that day, reflecting on how it went and what it meant.

When my son emerged and laid on his mother’s breast, vocalizing his first sounds with the sweet, robust cries of purpose, my heart raced through a storm of emotions and my breathing barely could keep up. All I could muster were heaving cries with the mysterious, powerful energies triggered by the genesis of life. A holy trinity was born in that moment – a son was born and in being born gave birth to a mother and father.

I can’t articulate much of the feelings coursing through me at my son’s birth. This makes sense since I too was born at his birth, experiencing a new world of being. The old world was washed over with new rains, my vision immersed in strange waters, and any articulation retreated to the twilight of our mingled creation.

The absence of words serves a great purpose: it sharpens the receptive sensibilities. Words and any kind of projection  muddy the waters of sublime experience. There are moments that deserve our best silence. Those moments need to remain in the emergent state, never quite arriving, when the only sign we seek is the breath, telling us that life is present. And that is enough.

With pronounced receptivity we glean the whispers of illumination contained in hidden rooms of silence.

Yet, there’s more.

If we persist in our deference to the silence we may hear the invitation by more silent forces that reside within our being. Our own lives and the living of it take on added nuance and meaning, and to us are revealed previously unknown aspects of our being that can inspire us through their revelations.

For the same reason, and by similar dynamics, great visual art remains wordlessly compelling, and yet its story can be told, or even better, new ones created, for centuries and millenia by the observers that choose to tell them.

The art, much like the life-changing experience and the memories that follow, remains in silence – watching, observing, looking for the sign of life, and no more. It knows better than that.

A Dream: You Made It Just In Time

I’ll relate to you a dream I had about 16 yrs ago.

I was sent on a mission to retrieve a book. Who sent me on this mission I cannot say, I do not recall. As I journeyed on my quest for this book I came upon a cottage. It was white and unadorned. The cottage sat in the country, in a green field on a sunny day.

I went up to the window and peered inside. In the kitchen was a small table and on the table sat the book that I was to retrieve. Immediately after seeing the book a monster appeared from around the corner of the cottage. The beast was sort of like a half Tyrannosaurus Rex, half dragon, and it charged after me. I ran from the beast as it chased me in circles around the cottage.

When I had the chance I dashed into the cottage through the back door that opened directly into the kitchen, grabbed the book and rushed out in a frantic hurry. The beast chased after me as I ran furiously away but it gave up after a short distance.

I arrived at a building where I was to take the book. I entered what seemed like a lobby. Inside, an angelic being quite taller than me stood. He was a being of the brightest white light with a beautiful, noble face. I approached him and handed the book to him. He took the book and then looked at what appeared to be some kind of watch on his wrist as I stood in nervous, silent wait.

Solemnly, he said, “You made it just in time.”

Before I could even feel my relief I heard a thunderous chorus of “Hallelujah!!! Hallelujah!!!”

I looked in the direction from where it came. There was a staircase and on the stairs were 2 lines of people – one on the left side and the other on the right. They were ecstatic that I had made it – they were genuinely happy for me. They were people of all backgrounds and every one of them was dressed in a long white robe. I joined them on line; I don’t recall if I stood on the left or right line. In any case, I was the last one on line.

We then started to ascend the stairs.

The stairs seemed to go on forever. When I finally reached the top I stood with the assembly in silence. Before us was a pair of huge doors that formed an arch. There was no sound, no motion.

Then, without notice, the huge doors began to part at the middle where they met, opening very slowly and swinging toward us. As they opened, the brightest, most intense light flooded through the opening from the inside (but the light did not hurt my eyes). The assembly of people began entering. As I neared the huge entryway I could see inside a bit – it seemed to be some kind of enormous chamber, larger and higher than any cathedral or open court and along the wall, opposite the doors through which I was about to enter, were tiers upon tiers of balconies along the entire vast height and width of the wall. I could make out that there were people, or beings of some kind, seated on these balconies. It was so bright inside that everything seemed to be composed of pure white light.

The moment I reached the threshold to enter……I woke up.

Seeing with the Eyes of Imagination

As I was walking past the neighbor’s house the other day, on my way to the park for my almost-daily workouts, I remarked to her, as she sat on her porch smoking a cigarette, that it’s been a great summer (weather-wise). The day was awash in blue-sky sunlight and the warmth was perfectly temperate and dry.

‘Are you crazy!?’, she said, ‘It’s been a terrible summer! Too much rain, it’s been humid….just terrible!’

‘Really?? I don’t think so. We’ve had beautiful weather, only a few days have been humid, and the rain has been pretty regular but it’s great for the garden and the trees.’

‘Yeah, you’re right, the rain is good for the garden. But still, it’s been terrible!’

With that I just smiled and kept walking to the field with echoes of our exchange accompanying me.

People are funny, myself included. The way we see things; the way we shape our attitudes, hopes, fears, prejudices; the ways in which we share with others as we say what’s on our minds and hearts. More often than not we see, or choose or are conditioned to see, only with the eyes we inherit at ground-level. We see with the eyes of a worm and we say the sky is brown; we see with the eyes of a chicken and say we can’t fly; but when we see with the eyes of falcon, or my favorite, a hummingbird, we fly into blue skies.

Maybe that’s why glasses were invented – not so much to see more clearly but to filter what and how we see (and thus see what we’ve been missing). That could be the same reason why we dance, meditate, have babies, fall in love, eat our favorite foods on scattered occasions – it helps us ‘see’ not so much with our eyes but through our experiences that filter what we see and how we see it. The world looks a lot different when I eat heaping portions of nutritious, organic salad everyday than it does if I ate a half-gallon of butter pecan ice cream.

Today, for instance, is a rainy, windy New England summer day. And it’s my birthday. The rain today reminded me of my childhood, because it seemed that it always rained on my birthday. I remember taking it personally, as if I were marked, or mocked, somehow to have my birthday washed out by gray skies raining down god’s indifference, or disapproval. I felt singled out for being…..me. I could see only through the filter of my melancholy and the world, it seemed, did not like me.

I still experience, in nano-moments, that same dejected child in me. He cries for a sense of belonging, for a sense that somehow his life is a valued part of the whole. But imagination serves me well now in adulthood as it always did in childhood. It gives me access to the invisible, but not indifferent, world of spirits and beings who do notice and do care. Imagination gives me a world of my own, a world of delights and devices that I am free to share with others for our mutual benefit and enjoyment. Imagination allows me to see the sky as blue when it’s covered in gray; it gives me the wings to climb and punch through the layers of gray into the expanse of liberating vision.

Now, when it rains, I imagine I am a tree and I smile….because if the trees don’t complain, neither will I.

Stay in Flow

As I begin writing this sentence I am one person, one expression of life, and by the time I finish writing this sentence I have already changed and shed some of what I was at the beginning and hence, am someone different even if only by the slightest degrees.

To illustrate on one level, cells have died and others were birthed in the time that I write this; moments have come and gone; memories have been filed and new ones created. Entire lifetimes are exhausted at minute levels of our individual and collective beings and with that comes a shift at every second, minute, day, and year….into eternity.

Time becomes irrelevant as the point of these life transitions and exchanges is more life and with that an accompanying expansion of awareness, of seeing, of feeling, of reaching, and even of returning takes place…..often at levels hidden from our conscious awareness!

Do our thoughts, our beliefs, our paradigm reflect this flow of life which, like a river, offers a change of scenery and of views as we travel along its current? Are we flowing, shifting, inching forward in the journey of Life?

As long as the river is flowing it cannot freeze. Nature shows us this natural phenomenon and we can learn from its object lesson to gain insight into ourselves and our path.

Am I frozen, stuck, on certain emotions, beliefs, or habits? Am I ‘frozen in time’, continually acting out past pains, past events, past expectations that cannot be undone, retrieved, or fulfilled, respectively? Am I not looking ahead, pressing forward toward an inspired vision that gives direction and purpose to my present efforts?

Just as water becomes colder, denser, heavier as it freezes so does life for us when we are not in our flow.

I can remember times in my life when I was not in flow and the symptoms of being stuck. I don’t express creatively (writing, photographing, sex, for example); I don’t eat well or exercise; I neglect my spiritual life; I don’t dream, or rather, I don’t remember my dreams. For me, these are signs that I am not in flow. Then I go within for the guidance and take action.

You know what the symptoms are for you when your life doesn’t flow. Things don’t feel ‘right’. YOU don’t feel ‘right’. And even though change, transition, evolution are still taking place within you (remember your cells?) the YOU of you remains stuck and your soul remains ‘frozen in time’ as it were.

So let us remember that Life continues expressing, shifting, evolving whether we do or not. Life sustains us and supports us and will give us more energy and more power if we work towards a higher vision and purpose, thereby increasing our capacity for increased energy and power.

Then, we will not only experience but with wonder, awe, and gratitude bear witness to our life’s progression and the manifestation of the Hidden Life Power that expresses in us, through us, AS US.