What About Imagination?
I believe it was the spiritual teacher George Gurdjieff who pointed out the different dimensions of imagination’s use. It came as a great relief to understand this, as I have always been of two minds about the practice of imagination. What he said went something like this: For those asleep, imagination is a drug; for those awakening, imagination becomes a magic wand.
As a contemplative teacher and mystic working with the Inner Constellation Mobile — a practice rooted in sacred geometry — I find myself returning often to the question of imagination.
If you have ever watched the dances Gurdjieff had his students perform, there is a lot of imagination in them — like watching water move or wind move leaves in the trees. It is like nature. The body feels at home in these movements, even when they can look a little mechanical from the outside.
So how do you use your imagination? Many of us use it to catastrophize what is happening in the world around us. And it isn’t looking very pretty.
But we are also responsible for the thought-forms we create. Are we generating more fear, gloom, and doom, or are we working with the emergent possibilities that appear in our imagination as old structures collapse around us?
When mental health is challenged, do we label it psychosis? Or do we consider that a higher dimension may be coming into consciousness that the body-mind has not yet prepared for — and that the coherence of spirit, body, and mind is temporarily disrupted? Do we have a place in our hearts to hold this without fear?
Whether we are conscious of it or not, there is a collective pressure to evolve. What do we do with this pressure? Do we collapse? Do we speed up? Or do we open ourselves to new possibilities — new ways of relating, new ways of attuning to nature through our embodiment?
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We no longer simply label a tree a certain kind — we feel it in our hearts. Something has shifted. Do we sense that we are heading somewhere, that there is an opening, a subtle invitation?
I believe the pressures of our time — the meta-crisis — are our soul calling us home. Much of it is remembering. Remembering that there was a time when we said YES to life. Not a hesitant yes — a full YES, so powerful that it caused an incarnation. A spark of light came into the world. Yes. That is you.
A spark of light, embodied for a short time. Can you remember? Do you feel the delight and the thrill of that remembering?
As I wrote in the recent September 5 Substack post, the mystical path is about listening. We listen beyond how things look. We listen to the timeless dimension — to the sacred that seers and mystics have spoken of through the ages. We are not separate from any of this.
So let yourself come home through the challenges meeting you in your life. Don’t dismiss them as obstacles. Befriend them. Understand them as the soil from which a deeper dimension of your soul can emerge — preparation for a deeper level of embodiment. It will birth a new coherence between the body, heart, and mind. We experience more flow when we use our imagination as a synthesizing wand that never forgets the beauty of life as the primary expression.
Our resistance and fear are strong. They keep us from evolving. So pay attention, and don’t let them run the show. Acknowledge them by listening — as you would to a hurting child — and then listen beyond the fear, beyond the resistance, beyond the judgment.
I am not saying to abandon discernment. In fact, a clear yes to life gives you a more precise discernment because it is not built around fear and judgment. Judgment is imagination on freeze. It freezes life into a binary system we easily get trapped in — and then we pass it on through our lineage, our collective, and the structures of our culture.
This is why change seems slow now: we are paralyzed by fear and judgment, growing sluggish and losing touch with our true selves and purpose. Perhaps we can find ways to awaken and harness the magic of the creative possibilities waiting within our hearts’ imagination.
Thank you for reading, listening, liking, or sharing.
If this resonates, I write weekly on Substack about the mystical dimension within us — how to remain attuned to our deeper nature while navigating a wounded world that has forgotten its divine identity. I’d love to see you there: substack.com/@lauramadsen
