www.patriciapearce.com/podcast
In this episode I speak about one of the greatest gifts as well as greatest challenges we have as humans: our imaginative mind.
The human imagination can bring forth sublime creations as well as terrifying nightmares. In this episode we look at how we spend most of our lives living out of the mind’s stories, and how we can work with the imaginative mind from a stance of Love.
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Transcription
Hello, beautiful souls, and welcome to this week’s podcast episode. Today, I would like to talk to you about one of the great gifts that we have as human beings, which is the power of our imagination. Our minds are very imaginative. And if you look about the world, and even look around the space where you are right now, everything that you see that was generated by human beings is a product of the human imagination.
And we have as humans, we have the ability with our imaginative minds, to conjure and bring forth great works of beauty, of art, of sublime music, and paintings, and beautiful stories. And, of course, the ability to bring about amazing technologies. And the fact that I can speak with you right now testifies to the fact of the power of the human imagination. That I can speak to you across time and space, and this voice of mine can be recorded and transmitted. And all of this is the product of the human imagination.
This, of course, is one of our greatest gifts, and also one of our greatest challenges. Because just as the human mind, the imaginative mind, can imagine and bring forth great and beautiful works of art, it also has the capacity to bring forth, and conjure, and imagine, and even bring forth into form nightmarish stories, stories of great suffering and cruelty. And all of that is also the product of the human imagination.
The fact is that most of the time, we humans are living inside of the stories of our imaginative mind. We pretty much in every instance, are living within some sort of a story that is playing out in the mind. And some of these stories we have generated ourselves about ourselves. Some of these stories have been given to us by family and society and religions. And they form yo u could say, a library, or you know, the shelves of our minds are filled with these stories that have been given to us and the stories that we ourselves have created. And we live most of our days, immersed in these stories of the mind.
Now every now and then we’ll have a moment where the imaginative mind, the story mind, narrative mind goes quiet. In moments of I would call a mystical awareness, where something breaks through and we apprehend, we see, we realize a reality that exists outside of the stories of our minds. We see and we experience ourselves as being one with everything that is that transcends all time and place. And those mystical moments are moments when we experience the essence of our being, when we find ourselves immersed in the oneness of all things. And we know that in those moments, there is no story. There is no story. There is only love, there is only awe, there is only wonder. And it’s not until we drop out of those states back into the temporal mind that the stories begin to play out. The mind begins to take these experiences and fashions from them some sort of a story.
So this imaginative mind is something that we can draw on when we want to bring forth something that is truly exquisite and something that has never manifested before. And this story mind, this imaginative mind is also one of our great, I would say burdens in a way. Because the mind as I said can can conjure up nightmarish stories. And the mind conjures nightmarish stories when it is out of touch with the knowing of the heart. It is when mind has become decoupled from the knowing of the heart, which the heart knows the truth of oneness, the heart knows and experiences the oneness and the union of all things. And so the heart is our the portal of our awareness into the realm of love, the reality of love.
When mind becomes disengaged, from that knowing of the heart, from that knowing of the reality of love, that’s when it spins off into these, I’ll say egoic scenarios that are made of fear, of anger, of domination, stories that believe in death, all of these things. When the mind is decoupled from that knowing of the heart, the mind begins to conjure these stories that are out of touch with the reality of love.
And in psychological terms, there’s a term called psychosis. And psychosis refers to the mind when it is out of touch with reality. And you could say that for aeons, we human beings have been suffering from a form of psychosis, in that we have been abiding in a story in our minds that is out of touch with reality. And reality, of course, is love. So this planet, the history of humans on this planet, has been one in which we have been playing out this form of psychosis, this form of being out of touch with reality and conjuring up these stories in the mind.
And we can look at the global stage. And we can see these stories, this psychosis of the mind playing out in these stories of division, of enemy, of other, all of these things are the mind’s false stories.
And we can see it in our own minds. We can notice in our own minds, when these stories of fear and separateness and all of that are playing out. We can witness it, we can witness that story mind, that imaginative mind playing out this form of psychosis.
And I want to emphasize that this, you could say is a form of mental illness that has been plaguing human beings, and it plagues each of us to varying degrees. And like all illness, it is a cause for compassion. It is not a cause for shame, or judgment or condemnation. It is a cause for great tenderness and compassion, and love.
And we bring that tenderness and compassion and love to ourselves, when we see these stories playing out in our minds. When we witness that form of psychosis present within us. We simply hold it, we don’t feel shame about it. And I want to speak from experience here because I have seen this playing out in my own mind as well. And at times in the past very intensely. And this is cause for compassion, to bring compassion to ourselves when we are in those moments. When the mind has lost its moorings in the truth and the knowing of the heart, and has spun off, it’s gone off the rails you could say, and it’s fallen into its own swamp of fear, of judgment of shame. And as I say, any illness and mental illness is included is a cause for compassion. So to hold the mind in great compassion when this is occurring.
So this is the power of the imaginative mind. This is our great gift and our great curse as humans that we have this capacity to conjure up story. We have this capacity to create from the imagination. And when the imagination is out of touch with love, and when the imagination is in service of ego, in service of fear, that’s when we lose our way.
So when we do this spiritual inquiry and we go into the mind, and we really begin to notice what is playing out in our own minds, we see more and more how the mind is operating in story. And we don’t do anything about that. We don’t have to do anything about that, except simply observe. And we can say to ourselves, story, this is a story. And we don’t have to take it any further than that. We can simply hold it in love.
And more and more as we hold it in love, we are bringing the mind back into coherence with the heart. The heart is love, the heart knows love. And as we hold the stories of the mind in love, we are allowing the mind to get back in touch, and to experience for itself that reality of love. So by holding the mind’s psychosis in love, we allow the mind to begin to come back home to the truth of the heart.
And when that happens, then the power of our imagination is coupled with the truth of love. And at that point, the power of our human imagination, which is so extraordinary, can partner with love to bring forth new expressions, new awarenesses, new stories, new art forms, that symbolize and depict love.
Now, understanding that, ultimately, love is the only reality, this gives us a way to interact with the stories in the mind and interact with the stories that we see playing out in the world. Because if we see a story that’s playing out in the world, or in our own minds, that is not a depiction or a representation of love, then we know ah, this is a false story. This is the mind playing out its false ideas. This is the mind simply playing out its form of psychosis. And so understanding that gives us a way a litmus test, if you will, to identify and to discern in our own minds whether a story that is playing out in a mind is useful or not. Is this story that I’m entertaining in my mind, is it representing love? Is it bringing love more fully into my awareness? If it is, great! Go with it. I for one love stories, I love a good story because they can transport us into this imaginative realm where all possibilities exist.
If on the other hand, I see that a story is not depicting love, then it’s not really a story that serves me. It serves no purpose. And then I can begin to disengage from it. Not out of a sense of having to obliterate it or annihilate it, as if it were something important, but simply to recognize, oh, this is a non-thing. This is nothing, this doesn’t mean anything. So I’m going to simply allow it to be and let it release in love.
So I wanted to share all of that with you today because it was playing out in my own awareness recently, and this awareness that we do live most of our days in story.
As we become more and more present to the moment, of course, story begins to fall away and we abide in pure presence. And yet there is this in us that loves story. It is that imaginative mind and it can become in service of love in our own lives and also in the world.
So I leave that with you to ponder in this coming week. And until next week. I bid you peace