The Three "Only" Things: Tapping the Power of Dreams, Coincidence, and Imagination (21 page)

To address our challenges, we need to draw on extraordinary sources of information and invest our energy and attention in a form of active imagination that dares to re-vision everything.

To be citizens of the world (to quote Marcus Aurelius again) we must cultivate
sympathetic
imagination, which is what allows us to understand the feelings and motivations of people different from us. The ability to imagine one's self in another person's place is vital to healthy social relations and understanding. A sociopath signally lacks this ability.

To bring peace and balance to our world, we require
historical
imagination, by which I mean both the ability to claim what is helpful from the past and the faculty for spotting alternatives to a particular event track — past, present, or future. Winston Churchill was a master of historical imagination, and his ability to navigate through the worst crises of the twentieth century was intimately connected to his ability to imagine the consequences of choosing differently at any turning. When he studied the past — most notably in researching his biography of his ancestor the Duke of Marlborough — he was constantly investigating what might have happened had different choices been made, and drawing the lessons. When he considered the future, he not only demonstrated extraordinary prescience (writing in the 1920s, he forecast weapons “the size of an orange” that could destroy cities), but he seemed always to be tracking
alternate
possible event tracks. As Isaiah Berlin wrote of him in
Winston Churchill in 1940
, “Churchill's dominant category, the single, central organizing principle of his moral and intellectual universe, is a historical imagination so strong, so comprehensive, as to encase the whole of the present and the whole of the future in a framework of a rich and multicolored past.”

Of course, Churchill made mistakes. One of them may have been the creation, from the demise of the Ottoman Empire in 1922, of a state called Iraq. But had later Western leaders had the ability to imagine as Churchill did — rather than rushing to darken the consequences of one of that great man's historic errors — we might have avoided the later catastrophe of the Iraq War. Having helped to invent Iraq, Churchill would surely have asked whether it made any sense to try to install a democracy in an artificial country composed of three populations that hate each other's guts.

Whether the issues are in our world or our personal life, the practice of imagination requires claiming a creative relationship with the past. There is an image from Ghana that springs to mind. It shows a strange bird looking over its shoulder. This symbolic bird is called Sankofa, and its role is to remind us to bring from the past what can heal and empower us — and dump the rest.

PRACTICING IMAGINATION

One thing we want to reclaim from the past is the wisdom of the child mind. The practice of imagination begins with making room in our lives for the child who knows it's okay to “make things up” and knows this is
fun
.

When asked why he was the one to develop the theory of relativity, Einstein said: “A normal adult never stops to think about problems of space and time. These are things which he has thought about as a child. But my intellectual development was retarded, as a result of which I began to wonder about space and time only when I grew up.”

Mark Twain insisted, “No child should be permitted to grow up without exercise for imagination. It enriches life for him. It makes things wonderful and beautiful.”

Whatever age we have reached, we all need a daily workout, and a place to go, in the real world of imagination.

Keep working out, and you'll remember that, as poet Kathleen Raine wrote beautifully, “Imaginative knowledge is immediate knowledge, like a tree, or a rose, or a waterfall or sun or stars.”

Build your home in the imagination strong enough, and you may find it is the place of creative birthing we all long for, the state of mind Mozart evoked when he said: “I can see the whole of it in my mind at a single glance. . . .All the inventing and making goes on in me as in a beautiful strong dream.”

CHAPTER 10
The SEVEN OPEN SECRETS of IMAGINATION

I
n one of my retreats in California, I asked the members of the group to come up with songs that had special power for each of them — songs that could give a lift to any day. While some participants came up with old favorites (including the Beatles and the

Beach Boys), a woman writer delivered a completely original song, full of juice. It was such fun we were soon all singing along with her:

Make it up as you go along

Make it up as you go along

Make it up

Make it up

The way will show the way

There is magic in making things up. The key to that magic is to be found in learning and applying the seven open secrets of imagination:

1. By picturing our blocks, we can move beyond them.
   
2. The body believes in images.
   
3. If we can see our destination, we are better than halfway there.
   
4. The Big Story is hunting us.
   
5. There is a place of imagination, and it is entirely real.
   
6. We can grow a vision for someone in need of a vision.
   
7. The stronger the imagination, the less imaginary the results.
   

1. BY PICTURING OUR BLOCKS,
WE CAN MOVE BEYOND THEM

At my workshops, I often begin by helping people relax and then asking them to pull up an image from any part of their lives — something that happened on the road that day, a dream from childhood, an image that just pops up spontaneously. If nothing comes, I advise people to consider what they are feeling most strongly in their bodies. I ask them to go to that place in their bodies and see what comes to them. There are people who still have a hard time calling up any kind of image. They are blocked.

This is actually a tremendous moment of opportunity, as long as they are willing to give a shape and a name to their blocks.

“I'm sorry. I'm just totally blocked,” said the woman I picked to go first in sharing an image at the start of a program I was leading in Rhode Island.

“Tell me what you're feeling.”

“Frustration.”

“Where do you feel this frustration?”

She indicated her torso.

“Put your hand on that place. Now I want you to follow your feelings into that place. Can you pretend you are moving into that place in your body?”

“Yes.”

“There is someone or something there. Do you see it?”

“Yes. It's my father.”

“What do you need to do in relation to your father?”

“I have to find out whether I can forgive him.”

“What would you need in order to do that?”

“I'd need to get my little girl back.”

I took the risk and said, “I think she 's right there. Can you see her?”

“Yes.”

“Can you welcome her back into your life, and release your father?”

“I'll try.”

The next day, in Mystic, Connecticut, the workshop began the same way. Life rhymes. The man I picked to go first said, “Sorry, I got nothing.”

“What are you feeling?”

“I'm blocked.”

“Where do you feel the block?”

He indicated his heart area.

“Can you describe the block? Does it have a shape?”

“It's big. It feels like a cube.”

“Is it like stone, or metal, or maybe wood?”

“It's wood.”

I took another risk. “Could it be an alphabet block, like kids play with?”

“That's what it is. It's an alphabet block.” Now he was excited.

“Can you picture yourself getting really close to this alphabet block, and handling it? How old are you when you get close to this block?”

“I'm four years old.” There was certainty in his voice.

“Can you see yourself, helping your four-year-old self to make a word?”

“Yes. We 're making the word D-R-E-A-M.”

His eyes were shining. I asked him if there was something he wanted to do to honor this encounter with his four-year-old self.

“Oh, sure,” he said. “I'll stop at a store on the way home and buy some alphabet blocks. I have a four-year-old son. I guess he and my own four-year-old are going to have more fun together.”

The practice of imagination, on an everyday basis, involves
clearing
unhelpful images that block or misdirect our energies, and
choosing
to focus on positive, mobilizing imagery that gives us courage and confidence.

One of the challenges to clearing the negative images is that frequently we are oblivious to the hold they have over us. Like dust mites or bacteria, they may feed and proliferate far below our conscious perception. They may come swarming through us in a moment of panic, of nausea, of gut-wrenching fear. They often have their origin in past trauma, guilt, or shame. The incidents that gave them a hold over us may be deeply hidden or repressed, locked behind doors we do not want to open.

A paralyzing fear or a numbing block can hardly be called an image at all. Yet there is an image within the fear or the block that is waiting to be discovered, and when that image is brought to consciousness, and reworked, vital healing and forward momentum become possible.

We are talking about clearing our personal history. We don't have a “Clear History” button in the brain like the function you can click on the toolbar of your computer. But we can run a selfscan to bring the hidden saboteurs out of the shadows.

Scanning and clearing can be a simple process, one that can sometimes be done on your own:

• Identify a problem or challenge in your life.
  
• Pick a quiet place and time, close your eyes, and go to the place in your body where you feel that issue most strongly.
  
• Now ask for an image of that challenge to become clear to you.
  
• When you have that image, see whether you can rework it with your conscious intention.
  

A woman who said she often felt “knotted up” with anxiety did this exercise. The picture that came to her was of a horribly tangled and knotted ball of string. When she visualized herself gently untangling and smoothing the string, she felt a wonderful sense of inner release. The frayed and knotted string became strong rope. Soon she was able to picture herself using the rope to climb a steep slope — a spontaneous image of another, specific challenge in her life — that would have been beyond her resources and abilities before.

In this simple example, we see how the practice of imagination can work in everyday life. First, we bring an issue into focus as a personal image. Next, we interact with that image and try to change it (or strengthen it, if it is positive) with our conscious intention. Along the way, if this is working well, the images will come alive, and things will develop in a spontaneous, unscripted way. That's when we know that imaginal events are becoming real. That's when our bodies — and perhaps the universe — start to believe them. At the end of every act of imagination, we 'll be able to judge the results by our feelings and our energy levels.

The blocks we encounter on our roads — whether they are in ourselves, in our circumstances, or both — may be teachers and helpers, as well as part of life's cycles. A block can drive us to discover a new direction, spur us to develop new skills and courage and stamina, or lead us to look again at what really matters in life.

• A block can serve as a
  timekeeper
  , directing us to pace things out correctly and develop patience.
  
• A block can be a
  test
  that requires us to demonstrate or develop the necessary qualities and skills required to pass to a new level.
  
• A block can be a
  detour
  that leads us to a better place than the one we were trying to get to.
  
• A block may be part of a
  course correction
  that enables us to go
  up
  instead of just on and to reappraise what we really want to accomplish (and which part of us is doing the wanting).
  
• A block may prove to be the
  thrust-block
  that helps us develop the energy to kick off toward bigger things.
  

We won't know the nature of a block until we are ready to give it a shape and a name — and then discover what happens when we play with it or try to see it differently.

The moment of perception, in itself, can change everything.

2. THE BODY BELIEVES IN IMAGES

An image carries a charge; it sends electrical sparks through your whole body. This shows up when brainwaves are recorded by an electroencephalogram. At the same time, an image sends a stream of chemicals washing through you. Their composition and effect depend on what image you are entertaining. If you are sad and low, dwelling on images of grief and failure, you are manufacturing “downers.” If you are thinking angry and aggressive thoughts, you are pumping adrenaline through your body. If you have been able to shift your mind to a relaxing scene — to a cabana by the beach where you are listening to the gentle rhythms of the waves — you are producing a natural tranquilizer whose chemical structure is very similar to Valium. If you can summon up images of triumph, you are mobilizing and multiplying neuropeptides that will boost your immune system.

This is one of the reasons why the body does not seem to distinguish between an imaginal event and a physical event: they both shift the body's electrochemical systems.

So we want to become much more aware of what images we are allowing to work on our bodies, including the ones we haven't noticed.

The power of healing images is now widely recognized in the healthcare community, a very positive development. Practitioners often distinguish several basic types of images that are relevant to health.

Receptive
images are those that pop up spontaneously, often in dreams or in-between, floaty states of consciousness. Spontaneous images of this kind may also jump out when a patient is asked to describe what he or she feels in a certain part of the body and says something like, “I feel I've got a choke collar round my neck.” Or, “It feels like a dragon's egg is trying to hatch in my belly” — as I once announced to a startled ER nurse when rushed to a hospital in the middle of the night for what proved to be a kidney stone.