Boldness + Creativity = How We Change the World
A couple centuries before scientists realized that reality is a mass hallucination, William Blake claimed that everything is Imagination. Blake saw human beings as occupying a unique position in the cosmos, as we have – or could have – the freedom to apply our imagination to whatever we choose.
As Mercury was stationing to return to direct motion (Wednesday, 11/20, 2:12 pm EST), I did a little tarot spread from the William Blake Tarot of the Creative Imagination. The first card I drew was the 7 of Poetry – Boldness.
In addition to being a prolific and innovative artist, Blake was an iconoclastic visionary who prefigured the psychological universe we all inhabit today. He was ahead of his time and probably is still ahead of our own time.
Here’s what Blake said about the artist’s responsibility to society:
The wretched state of the arts…demands a firm & determinate conduct on the part of artists to resist the contemptible counter arts established by…politicians…
Ed Buryn, creator of the Blake Tarot, writes about the 7 of Poetry: “This card urges you to face your fears and live heroically…You can do your duty to life — countering fears and mortality itself — by doing what you love, upholding truth, and encouraging others in the same bold path.”
I love this last sentence:
“You can do your duty to life by doing what what you love, upholding truth, and encouraging others in the same bold path.”
The Perverted Modern Imagination
If imagination is the only thing that truly exists, then we can re-create the world by imagining it differently.
This is, of course, what real artists do: they show us the world as it exists in their imagination.
But we live in a time where imagination has been degraded. Most people’s imaginations were crippled early on by family-of-origin trauma, driven underground by the patriarchal dogmas of the family religion, and perverted through long years of school – where the curriculum is designed to teach kids how to shut up, sit still, and become obedient servants of the ruling classes.
In adulthood, any remaining sparks of imagination must compete with the relentless barrage of images most people consume daily on television, the Internet, and social media.
Ascension: We are the Neural Network of Mother Earth
A colleague proposed to me recently that humans are kind of like Mother Earth’s brain. She had a vision in which she saw that Mother Earth’s consciousness has been semi-dormant for centuries.
Now our living, conscious planet is awakening again. She longs to evolve beyond her current state of depletion (chemical warfare, devastation of the forests and oceans, constant war, poverty, abuse, etc.).
This feels like a helpful metaphor to me.
As the physical inhabitants of the planet with the capacity to change reality, we are in a unique position to help Mother Earth return to her true state as a Garden Paradise.
But how can we imagine a better reality when we are still trying to “succeed” within a system that hates the imagination? How can we imagine a better reality when we are so tired and stressed and sad from trying to make ourselves fit into a job, a relationship, a family that will never work for us?
If we are the brain cells that Mother Earth needs in order to renew herself, how can she ascend when we have grown weak and dull and complacent? Choosing to argue within ourselves and complain about the sad state of the Brain, rather than doing what we were made to do?
Blake saw that our duty was to be ourselves, to express our own uniqueness, and to do – to the best of our ability – those things that express our own Divine spark.
We didn’t incarnate here at this time to be obedient wage slaves. We didn’t come here to live out the bankrupt dreams of our parents’ generations. We didn’t come here to blindly follow society’s marching orders. We didn’t go through everything we had to endure to get to this point in our lives to say, “Well, the world is going to hell and there’s nothing that poor little me can do about it.”
We came here to re-create the world, plain and simple.
This is our duty, to our own eternal spirit and to this beautiful planet and her plants and animals who give us so much nourishment and abundance while asking so little of us in return.
The astrology of 2020 tells us we are heading into a hardcore cycle of death and rebirth in human society. If this isn’t obvious to you now, it will be apparent by early January when we have a lunar eclipse in Cancer opposing the epochal Saturn-Pluto conjunction in Capricorn. The time to claim our divine right of liberty is now.
September 18 – December 2
Because we’ve done it. We’ve demonstrated that dreams do come true. Not through ceaseless striving or self-sacrifice but simply by surrendering the egoic mind and making the radical decision to always trust your inner guidance.