Imagination Seeks Attention

how to read the 'soul glyphs of the numinous realms'

An article sent by my friend Ernest, who posts as the electric mule, shows that artificial intelligence may soon replace artists. To turn text into imagery, Google has Imagen, OpenAI has DALL-E, there’s Craiyon and a company called Midjourney, whose founder the author interviewed. These programs aren’t cheap. To ‘train’ one requires access to millions of images and high-powered processing that may cost a million dollars or more. Even at the exorbitant cost of art school, it could provide more than a few scholarships.

The art images the supercomputer scans are done by real people and their genuine intelligence. But there seems to be no plagiarism police for artificial artist drones. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, right? If someone crazy doesn’t want their art served up in the metaverse goulash, the company will consider a way to let you opt out. If you’re even aware that you’ve opted in.

And here’s something really crazy. They’re already censoring for misinformation, which they lump together with gory graphic violence. I’m surprised that child pornography didn’t get a shout-out. What is the text prompt that would translate to an image of misinformation? There are already excellent cartoonists doing a great job of rendering the truth pixalable—Robert Malone dishes them out every week in his Friday Funnies and Sunday Strip.

Would anti-vaxxer Mona Lisa suddenly make people gasp and say, “I’ve been wrong all along?” They stress that it’s not like Photoshop where you can, say, make a Bucha massacre look like it was done by Russians instead of neo-Nazis by changing their white armbands signaling neutrality to blue. It makes art not photo realism.

But the same reason it’s absurd to call it misinformation is the reason it’s absurd to call it art. It generates cool pictures but is as souless as a drum machine. Both art and information require a heart, an intention, a complex idea that can’t be adequately conveyed without deep access to the mythic and symbolic. The process of painting a picture, like writing a poem, is a way of collaborating with spirit and finding out where it leads you. It’s a question, not an answer.

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In Rob Brezsny’s Free Will Astrology, he has a post called You are a fluid process, not a fixed thing. He quotes Carl Rogers that we are:

a flowing river of change, not a block of solid material; a continually changing constellation of potentialities, not a fixed quantity of traits.

Philosopher Stephen T. Asma writes:

Imagination Studies, or imaginology, also promises to reunite the body and the mind, reintegrate emotion and reason, and tesselate facts and values.

Rob writes:

Your imagination is the single most important asset you possess. It's your power to create mental pictures of things that don't exist yet and that you want to bring into being. It's the magic wand you use to shape your future.

He quotes Gloria Steinem that:

Imagining anything is the first step toward creating it.

And then he cites an article called Imaginal Hygiene by M.T. Xen on Reality Sandwich from 2008. It begins with a quote from Caroline W. Casey, described as a Visionary Activist Astrologer, who says:

Imagination lays the tracks for the reality train to follow.

Xen continues:

… we need a more holistic worldview. We must see through the cracks of the 3-D empire and surface the deeper, more inclusive layers of consciousness, where all beings exist and all is interconnected. This, to me, is the ultimate purpose of the human imagination. It is to give expression to the creative matrix of Nature, to allow the whole to become more conscious of itself. As cosmologist Richard Tarnas puts it, “The human imagination is itself part of the world’s intrinsic truth; without it the world is in some sense incomplete.”

This understanding of imagination and its applications to our lives is how we overcome what philosopher Jacob Needleman calls the “foolish realism that sees only facts of the outer world and is blind to the laws of the inner world.” It is how we can make sense of synchronicities, of the whole breaking through the trance of our separative existence. It is how we can understand inspiration, the pregnancy of the world wanting to birth itself through us. It is how we find our voice, by feeling into the collective unconscious and speaking what the community needs to hear. The whole will draw from us what is needed. This is how we come into our own power, into our humanity.

It seems that while a rich, fertile imaginal life is a birthright, it has to be claimed – that is to say, the imagination has to be disciplined and developed. The carrier or the medium of imagination is our attention. Attention is energy, one that can be exercised like a muscle. The high arts of its development include the one-pointed concentration that comes of meditation, the energized focus of unselfconscious creative activity, and the merging of awareness and action in the present moment (often known as “flow”). If it is not disciplined or engaged in a healthy fascination, the attention wanders, is wasted, and often co-opted. …

A more visceral way to understand the imagination is as a clear or clogged channel, not unlike your intestines. When you feed yourself with junk ideas, become bloated with ideologies, create chronic constipation from identity fixations, and infest yourself with the parasites of media hype and its addictions, you cannot expect the nourishing flow of creativity to flow easily through your being and blush your life with its radiance. Nor can you expect to easily become as a hollow bamboo for the Goddess to play her tunes, as a hollow bone for the Great Spirit to sound his whistle. No—what is needed is to flush the system and repopulate it with the flora of rich archetypal perceptions and Divine visions. What is needed is imaginal hygiene!

Imaginal hygiene is the inner art of self-managing the imagination, to defend it from forces that compromise, pollute, colonize, shrink, and sterilize it, and to cultivate those that illuminate, expand, and nourish it. I feel knowledge of this and its application is essential to the story of human survival into the 21st century. Its practice is necessary for us to cultivate the visionary clarity and strength needed to achieve the great personal and planetary transformations that increasing numbers of us are being called to perform, for the capacity to transform is in direct proportion to the capacity to imagine.

… Becoming fluent, or at least conversant, in the soul glyphs of the numinous realms, the apriori realities, allows us to make much greater sense of their expression in the life we see around us in the 3-D world. This helps us to read the world, to become literate in its symbology.

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Related to this, a new viewer, Steven Martin, recommended a TED talk that had changed his life: Jill Bolte Taylor’s My Stroke of Insight. Jill is a neuroanatomist and brings a human brain onto the stage to show that it’s composed of two distinct halves with a narrow bridge connecting them. Neither is redundant with the other.

She became a researcher because her brother was a schizophrenic and she wanted to understand why she could connect her dreams to a shared reality and make them come true while his were delusions. As part of my PhD study in the Psychology of Creativity, I was also interested in the connection between creativity and schizophrenia and how it related to the corpus callosum and the right and left sides of the brain. I talked about this in What Is the Matter?

One morning in 1996 Jill woke to find that she had an insider’s view of the two sides of the brain because only her right side was working, due to what was later diagnosed as a hemorrhage on the left, causing a slow-motion stroke. She recounts her experience through the lens of her scientific background. According to Jill, the right hemisphere is all about right here, right now. She says:

Information in the form of energy streams into all of our senses and then it explodes to this enormous collage of what this present moment looks like, smells like, tastes like, feels like, sounds like. I am an energy being connected to the energy all around me through the consciousness of my right hemisphere. We are energy beings connected to one another as one human family. … In this moment, we are perfect, we are whole, and we are beautiful.

The left hemisphere, she attests, is a serial processor about linear thinking—the past and the future. It takes the enormous collage and organizes it into “details, details, and more details about those details. It takes all of that information and associates it with everything we’ve ever learned in the past and projects into the future all of our possibilities.” It thinks in language, the ongoing brain chatter. It says ‘I am’ in a way that separates me from you. And that’s what she lost on that morning in 1996.

She describes feeling enormous and expansive, at One with all the energy that was. And then her left hemisphere would kick in and come back online saying, “Hey, we’ve got a problem. Pay attention.” And then she’d go back to what she affectionately calls La La Land. I can’t do justice to her charming and laboriously painful description of making a phone call, only to discover that she sounded like a Golden Retriever. But she does get help and then she surrenders, realizing she’s not the choreographer of whether she lives or dies and being okay with that.

When she wakes up later to discover she’s still alive, everything is overstimulating, too bright, too loud, too too. But she also feels enormous, expansive, “like a genie just liberated from her bottle, my spirit set free like a great whale just gliding through a sea of silent euphoria, nirvana.” She doesn’t know how she’ll fit the whole of herself back into that tiny little body. But then she realizes that she is still alive and has found nirvana. She “pictures a world filled with beautiful, peaceful, compassionate, loving people who know that they could come to this space at any time, they can purposely choose to step to the right of their left hemispheres.”

She concludes, “Who Are We? We are the life force power of the universe, with manual dexterity and two cognitive minds.” She believes that “the more time we spend choosing to run the deep inner peace circuitry in our right hemispheres, the more peace we will project into the world.”

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A Course in Miracles calls this experience revelation, which is “a complete but temporary suspension of doubt and fear. It reflects the original form of communication between God and His Creations.” The Course describes this experience as intensely personal and not able to be meaningfully translated, although Jill does a darn good job. “Revelation is literally unspeakable because it is an experience of unspeakable love.” Awe is its appropriate response.

Miracles, on the other hand, are interpersonal. They’re expressions of love between equals. Like imagination, they’re not under conscious control but the readiness for them is, like attention. The attention we give to miracles is consciously seeing others as equal, as having the same integrity as us, the same desire for a better world with a better future for everyone. They’re little ways of reminding people, through a glance, a smile, a compliment, a joke, that they’re better than perfect, they’re a unique gift to you and everyone else.

Revelation is like the right hemisphere of the brain, it exists outside of time and is a great place to be, but it doesn’t induce action. Miracles exist inside of time and because of time. Like the left hemisphere, they’re linear and horizontal. Their function is to save time by traveling like electricity between us, and letting the doubt and fear fall away. Imagination is the corpus callosum that passes love notes between the place of knowing and the journey of becoming. They encourage action in the here and now.

The right brain says it’s all going to be okay. You’re not the choreographer of your life. The left brain says, we’ve got a problem. Talk to everyone like a golden retriever!

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For more Rob Brezsny quotes and insights, here’s What’s the Best that Can Happen?

My daughter Cassandra has a new question: what’s the best that can happen? This is her response when I have a decision to make, and it’s revolutionized my life. Instead of “hoping for the best but preparing for the worst,” I imagine how events could play out that would be of amazing benefit to everyone involved. This is distinct from wishful thinking, I believe, because it isn’t a superstition. It’s an acknowledgement of having no control over outcomes but seeing the best way things could go, and doing your part, should the universe contrive to make that happen—or something better.

And another with Rob and Caitlin Johnstone, Meaning is All There Is:

A viewer warned his loved ones that he was putting my 'crazy' in his echo chamber. To live up to the warning, I bring on the crazy by talking about ultimate reality with Sufi sayings, Jewish legends, free-will astrologer Rob Brezsny and Terence McKenna. I tell the story of a mole turned hawk and Russell Brand kissing Yuval Noah Harari's forehead. I cite Kurt Vonnegut's 'karass' in the disorganized religion of Bokonon and quote Caitlin Johnstone on being ineffable. I end with a simpler explanation of Charles Eisenstein's Parallel Timelines and my craziest theory to date, involving God and the word 'tantric'.

and then the one I mentioned on right brain, left brain: What Is The Matter?

Responding to Russell Brand's interview of Iain McGilchrist, I discuss time & space, brain hemispheres, love & hate, knowing & not knowing, New Age annoyance, and child prophets. I use a Crow Tarot deck to illustrate infinity and make my pitch for why the crow should represent the Wholly Spirit. Why should doves have all the fun?