It’s not just that we have imagination.

We ARE imagination.

The whole world we experience, every little bit of it, is a tangible, colorful story that is constantly created within consciousness.

Although it doesn’t really look that way, at all.

What it looks like is a wet planet (round or flat) within a system of many other planets, a planet with a bunch of creatures walking and slithering and flying around, a planet with stuff that is just there (like trees and mountains and stars and villas by the sea).

And somehow we are there too.

That’s about it.

What you see is what you get, right?

It’s just the world, and life, and it’s already complicated enough so who cares about the stuff we don’t see (the stuff I so passionately like to talk about every day)?

Well, fair question.

And here’s my answer: the real magic of existence, the real freedom, is not hidden somewhere in the created world (even though we can really learn to appreciate and love that amazing fabrication), but found in the knowing.

The knowing.

The knowing of being alive, the ground zero of awareness, the thing before all other things.

The knowing itself, the ‘uh, yeah, of course I am alive!’.

That one.

The real magic and true potential can be found in the awareness of everything that plays out in front of us, although it might sound mundane or obvious or even boring.

But it’s where the real juice lives.

This whole creation (what you probably call ‘my life’) is entirely made possible by being aware of it.

Without consciousness the world wouldn’t exist, because we simply wouldn’t have a notion of anything.

Without consciousness, there would be no such thing as imagination.

But we totally miss it, this mind-blowing essence, because it is not part of what we experience.

We only see the moving parts.

The birds, the lack of money, the neighbor, the fear and the insecurity.

We get so deeply involved with and in the content, that we never realize that we need something that is before and around all of that, to make it even work.

We get lost in the chaos of the moment, without really noticing that it always passes, only to be replaced by a new thing that makes us do it all over again.

We hardly take the time to breathe, to rest, to appreciate.

We are always running from A to a much more important B.

And then, of course, the B gets quickly forgotten while we start longing for C.

Over and over again.

Meanwhile we are lived by something SO incomprehensibly big that the person we think we are will never even come close to understanding what that means.

We are all part of a dream, and within that dream we just dream a bit more.

But let’s get practical.

Because: ‘Yeah. But. Whatever. Who’s got time for that and who cares about all these metaphysical abstractions anyway?’

Another fair question.

I care, and so should you, really, because exploring this changes everything.

There’s a way to get a direct, untainted sense of the bigger picture, the endless potential, and you don’t even have to get your head around it.

And that direct sense makes everything less serious, less frightening, less threatening, less heavy.

It’s like sitting in the movie theater, being lightly but securely aware of your surroundings, AND lost enough in the story to enjoy it.

We can live like that!

Being in it, but not of it, floating somewhere in the middle.

We can somehow get what we will never be able to intellectually understand, because we can feel this subtle but unmistakable connection to existence.

We can know it.

It is here right now, reading this, using your eyes and brain for the experience.

It’s the energy before everything else.

The true source.

It’s the most essential element of life, it’s life ITSELF, and at the same time it’s the easiest thing to miss.

And that’s what we do, most of the time.

But somehow we can use our imagination to begin the exploration and discover the richness of being fully aware.

Curiosity will get you started.

—

(Photo by @katiebarrett, for Unsplash)