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Imagination is a wondrous and innate human ability that allows us to first envision new possibilities for life, and then to clothe these visions with emotion, energy, and purpose to express them. As we deepen our congruence with the Divine view and the life energies of Mother Earth, we can harness our sacred imaginations to first envision and then create a world where we live in harmony with our planet and each other.
Imagination is not only an individual power, but communities of people can likewise co-imagine their healthiest and most harmonious relationships with each other as part of a more sustainable Earth Community.
We can envision enhanced, healthier, and more satisfying ways of working, building, growing food, teaching, relaxing, parenting, traveling, playing, art making, loving, and living on Planet Earth from the perspective of awe, love, gratitude, and respect for Earth systems.
In our current age with a rapidly changing climate, we are evolving in our understanding of our deep interconnectedness with Earth systems, and recognizing the power we have as humans to choose whether to live in harmony with healthy ecosystems or to disrupt them. There are many ways that our cultures harm and even destroy Earth’s forests, mountains, rivers, oceans, animals, and climate. Earth is asking us to transform and to imagine new life-giving options in our relationship with her.
Holding onto regrets, shame, and guilt for our past mistreatment of Earth is not useful. We choose to have compassion for ourselves and be forgiving of the harmful attitudes we may have once embraced.
We can even imagine a different outcome on the part we may have played in past harms, knowing we are evolving in consciousness for our good, and being grateful for the vital path we have been on and our emergence to our current level of spiritually informed action. We can use Faith and resolve to move forward with trust in the Divine unfolding as we evolve in our Understanding.
"Our prefrontal cortex, a recent evolutionary development, gives us the capacity to envision possibilities beyond our present knowledge. By this power, we can leap from what is to what can be.”
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Linda Martella-Whitsett Your God-Given Potential: Unfolding the Twelve Spiritual Powers
We are ready to imagine big, bold, exciting, healing, and life-enhancing pathways forward in our climate-changing world!
We find an apt metaphor for the joy and challenge of fully activating our imaginations in the science of a caterpillar’s transition to a butterfly.
The caterpillar will grow plump with food, and then stop eating, hang upside down, spin itself into a silky cocoon, and then transform itself and emerge as a butterfly. To do this, while in the cocoon, the caterpillar will fully digest all its tissues and become nothing more than a soup of cells. It lets go of a previous identity, a previous state of being, a previous way of knowing reality. A certain group of these cells are known as imaginal discs that survive the digestion of tissues. Through the power of their genetic material, these imaginal discs know about being a butterfly and have resided in the caterpillar all along. The discs are activated once the caterpillar chooses to actively move toward its transformation. The imaginal discs then direct the soup of cells to grow into a magnificent butterfly.
Likewise, within each of us individually, and within our communities collectively, we have access to the power of imaginal energies from Source Divine. Through the evolution of our consciousness, we have the power to transform our lives, our societies, and our collective priorities toward a deeply loving relationship with Earth, if we choose to move actively toward transformation.
There is one caution when it comes to the precious power of Imagination – we need to use it wisely and with a focus on outcomes that align with the spiritual powers of love/harmony, enhanced life, applied wisdom, faith in good, and others.
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Using the power of our imagination from a basis of fear and separation consciousness could lead to outcomes that are disempowering, lonely, and disconnected. Therefore, we want to be disciplined with our power of imagination, and let love be its core value -focusing our attention on the realm of the good, the sacred, and the beautiful.