Saturday, May 6, 2017

Pure imagination


On the path of the heart you will never be asked to “get rid of your story,” as if it were some defilement to cleansed perception. At times you will wear it as an ornament and at other times you can set it down, allowing it to rest from a long journey, picking it up again and playing with its textures, colors, and fragrances, dancing in the contradictions as you open into the mystery.

We human beings are storytellers. Go ahead, tell one. Then listen carefully as the characters, plots, and settings share their wish to be authored in more integrated forms. Practice intimacy with your story, touching the beauty, the pain, the joy, and the heartbreak of your life as it has unfolded over the months and years. Hold it close, but not so close that you become engulfed and lose perspective. What you are is pure imagination, as the great tantric master Willy Wonka reminds us.

What story are you telling? It is a kind one? Does it represent the deepest truths you have discovered about your experience? It is alive? Is it whole? Does it embrace you as you fall into the mystery? Is it rooted in the actuality and raging creativity of the here and now, or is it a remnant of an outdated there and then?

Hold your stories close and allow them to breathe and share their soul. There’s no need to be afraid. You will not be tainted, or lose your way, or fall from grace, or lose your “powerful” nondual realization. Come into the playground of the relative world, with all its richness and color. You need not fuse with it or become lost, but enter inside as a courageous archeologist of the heart. Because you care about this place, about how you and your sisters and brothers are making meaning of a crazy world, a world that has forgotten, and fallen into trance.

Go ahead, get messy, get gooey, send your awareness into the untidy, the chaotic, and into the muddy earth that is your glorious body and imagination, for there is no greater temple. End the spirituality of disembodiment and aggression, and dare to care for form as much as formlessness. For it is equally sacred. Cradle the form in your arms as you would a newborn baby, as it aches to come alive here and share its essence.

We’re all storytellers. This seems to be a unique expression of being human, of interacting with our world and exploring its meaning, its purpose, and its contours. We don’t know if a rose tells a story about itself, or a deer, or the moon, or an owl. In any event, it’s nothing to be embarrassed about or to think of as lesser than other modes of being and expression.

Even your story is pure when met with eyes wide open, a luminous and irreplaceable expression of the mystery that you are. What you are is pure imagination.


The Way of Rest summer retreat – registration open now 

New book – The Path is Everywhere: Uncovering the Jewels Hidden Within You – to be released in June