Imagination: Attention as Creation

From the flight of a swift to the heat of our own internal emotions, our attention has the power to animate everything it touches. Discover how the cycle of receptive and active imagination can help you navigate your inner landscape and build deeper relationships with the world around you.

Enjoy this 10-minute read or let me read it to you here. 

Watching a flock of swifts circling the sky at dusk, I’m hypnotized by the play of light and shadow, the rise and fall of the waves they make. I do not notice the individual birds, even though each of them is vividly attuned to those around them and the dying light. A hungry hawk picks out a straggler I do not see until I’m caught up in their timeless story of predator and prey, sustenance and death. I realize this world of complex relationships is viscerally real to and cocreated by the attention of each individual, but completely invisible and therefore irrelevant to me if I remain simply transfixed by a mass movement in the sky.

Physics describes how light can be both a wave and a particle. So too can a flock, school, or herd be both a movement and a collection of parts. Its shape and function is determined by what the observer perceives and values. When an individual catches our attention and emerges, it becomes an entity in and of itself, no longer just a part of a communal movement. We interact with it. We invite it into the story we tell about life, posing questions and eliciting responses it may never have considered before. How do I feel when I am the focus of attention? What do I want and how do I move when I’m alone and separate?

By being singled out, witnessed with consciousness, interacted with as if we are special, we become more self-aware, sentient, and autonomous. We become capable of seeing ourselves as individuals with unique desires and dreams instead of just moving along with the flock or herd, imitating and responding as we always have. We become something different. Something new that has never existed before.

This is how the cosmos was and is continually created. Universal consciousness drew matter from the void, light from darkness, and galaxies from clouds of dust through attention, curiosity, and imagination. And the things its attention coalesced became animate, self-aware, taking on properties and propensities of their own that then interacted with others and created exponentially more new and even more complex forms – atoms combining into molecules, cells clustering into organisms, organisms forming colonies. All from being singled out, drawn in to a new story or vision, and then cocreating it. Everything that exists is a creator, a creator of the world in which it finds itself, a world that ripples out from it in all directions based on what it notices and what relationships it values and engages in.

For us humans, the creative power of attention extends far beyond the material realm. Through language, we conceptualize what we cannot experience with our senses. Imagine an airplane and feel driven to build it. Envision a sustainable, democratic society and enlist others to co-create it. Transform a swarm of 10 billion humans eating, mating, and shitting their way across the planet into a singularly breath taking lyrical arc of failure and redemption by telling a a story of desire, freedom, and overcoming the odds.

How we speak about ourselves and the world defines what is and isn’t real to us. Call the feeling in our belly Fear and withdraw from life; name it Excitement and dive in. Change is possible when we recognize the creative power of our attention and focus intentionally on what we want to nurture within and around us, simultaneously withdrawing life force from what we do not want to sustain, driving it into extinction.

Creation through attention has two components: an inhale and an exhale, the archetypal feminine and masculine, a passive receptive stance and an active assertive stance. Before we can invite something new into existence, we must first become acquainted with where we are and who shares our space. We must receive the fading light, the movement of the swifts, the hawk, and our own wonder before we can tell a life-affirming story that informs our lives. This is what separates imagination from fantasy. Fantasy has no grounding in shared experience and therefore serves to separate us from life instead of cocreating mutually sustainable networks. When we imagine, we allow an image to form of something that is not yet real to us, something that may already exist and is simply becoming known to us or something that is in the process of becoming through our participation.

Receptive imagination begins with focusing our attention on what is present – on “listening” deeply to the textures and shades we see, the sensations on our skin, the sounds around us, and what we experience within ourselves – the lines of thought, the warmth or constriction of emotion, the subtle sense of presence or spaciousness. As we practice allowing ourselves to receive this information from our environment and within ourselves without judging or reacting, we can begin to notice things shifting of their own volition. A thought may become a butterfly. A sensation may form a river. A spaciousness may reveal a cocoon. The tree or person before us may elicit a profound sense of grief. These images, sensations, and unfoldings are gifts from beyond our conscious awareness, conversation prompts that can become reciprocal relationships. They are the way we allow the “other” – whether our subconscious, ancestors, spirit guides, brook, bobcat, or human – to invite us into an exchange of co-creation.

Active imagination is when we use our attention to guide our experience. When we intentionally change a thought in our mind to something more aligned with our values, turn the idea of an altar into something we can see and touch in our physical space, we are creating. When a sensation becomes a river and we imagine ourselves floating along, observing the trees on either side, we are creating an inner landscape. If a feeling of rage becomes a bear, we can imagine ourselves standing strong before it, without running, and wait to see how it responds. And if we clear the brush from a riverbank the way we sense it wants, or call a friend to say the thing that’s inspired us, we are inviting others to co-create with us.

This is how receptive and active imagination are powerful collaborators in building relationships both in the outer world and in our arguably vaster and more powerful inner world. I receive a sensation of heat and constriction. I actively imagine that heat bursting into an inferno. I receive the image of a forest fire and a memory arises that redwoods are built to withstand fire. I actively imagine myself standing at the foot of a redwood and asking it how to be with the heat of my rage. I receive its answer as a sensation of feeling deeply rooted as my hardened armour is lifted away in a hot wind. I actively decide to find a bit of redwood bark to add to my altar, reminding me to return to this tree in my meditation when scorched by the heat of an intolerable anger.

Meditation is listening. It’s cultivating the capacity to be still and receive what is already here. It’s embracing stillness and darkness as a healing mother.

Prayer is speaking. It’s using words, active imagination, and action to affirm and engage with what we value, with what we aspire to make more real. This cycle repeated over time creates new bonds and patterns in our minds, our relationships, and our reality. We may begin to experience more spontaneous insights, more vivid dreams, a sense of our bodies morphing into other forms, all of which bring greater gifts from beyond and more to integrate through intention and physical action. The process of creation becomes a cycle of magnifying energy.

These experiences, when received and performed in service to connection and the greater good within and around us, foster a sense of humility and privilege toward our creative power. We understand the importance of loving versus judging attention towards ourselves and others, holding all experiences with compassion because we do not want to create jealousy, resentment, or hate. When we understand the power of imagination, we become more aware and intentional about the media we consume and the dark, unrealistic fantasies we indulge, knowing that what we place our attention on becomes real within us, and then around us. And we become wary of how physically and emotionally heightened states can create or destroy impulsively through us without our conscious consent.

Energy and possibility become manifest when seen and related to.  Just as the swift’s world is invisible to me until I learn about and look for it, so too are the metaphysical worlds invisible – just a void of darkness – until we come to believe and engage with them. And by so doing, they take on greater form, power, and presence in our lives.

Intentionally engaging the power of both active and receptive imagination initiates a process of alchemical transformation that enables us to more fully embody our authentic selves and live a more meaningful, impactful life.

Nancy

“Just sense that dimension of Being”. Adyashanti on meditation as conscious attention, breaking the addiction to form, and the subtle dimension of the unchanging self. https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=yqmXfBb1FFM&t=726s&pp=2AHWBZACAQ%3D%3D