Imagination. Creativity. Curiosity.
What happens when we neglect these jewels of our minds?
We turn into sour, numb lunatics.
We morph into agitated mice in boring metal cages and pre-programmed robots incapable of creating dreams. We become walking corpses of shifting anxiety and seek relief in a glass of wine, a snort of coke, a prescription pill, a stranger’s mouth or a high intensity notification from a tiny bright screen.
Who has time or space to hear the barely audible whispers from our long neglected imaginations? Our imaginations are banished during the 9-5 workday, locked in our internal jails, only to fleetingly emerge at night, if we are lucky. I’ve heard many people recently say,
“I don’t have dreams anymore.”
How many imaginations have been snuffed out, amputated, severed, scorched, locked up, stomped on, shattered, numbed, ran over, dissolved, disintegrated, transformed to dust or simply ignored?
We’ve become modern mindless consumers who unquestioningly have absorbed the cunning marketers’ messages which were carved out in backrooms and Powerpoint presentations not that long ago. We accept this like blind children. We stopped thinking for ourselves long ago.
Somewhere along the way, we stopped thinking of ourselves as creators.
But now that paradigm is being blown wide open. For the first time in human history, each of us has the opportunity to reach the entire world, for free, if we choose to do so. We can create our own airwaves (podcasts), our own channels (YouTube), our own monetized blogs (Steemit.com), our own storefronts, book publishing, apps, ICOs, the list goes on. But many of us are depressed, stressed, unable to focus, distracted, lacking both time and money to commit to the task or simply don't have access to the knowledge or resources.
Many of us are from a different paradigm. We were born into a cultural wasteland.
We are from the vapid world of consumerism and centralized power and we have been programmed to believe that we do not possess the skill, talent, gumption, genius, creativity or the (insert a thousand more attributes here) to carve out our unique path of discovery and life. Our imaginations have withered, to the delight of the mass production puppeteers.
Mega Corporations are fairly new inventions. Humans did not evolve from them, and so we must examine them with careful intelligence.
We have forgotten the thousands of years of humans creating things like hair art to remember the dead, recipes for new meals, crops, collages, letters, books, scientific theories, explorations of the sky, jewelry, dances, paintings on the wall, paper cut-outs, paper-making, masks, studies of static electricity and so many numerous, interesting things in life. We have forgotten the gift economy that flourished in tribes of the past. We have forgotten what formed our own humanity.
We need to reinvent what it is to be human.
And this reinvention is happening right now in decentralized virtual nations. We need to bring back our imaginations more than ever. The present and future paradigm of becoming a creator demands us to do it.
If you're lost like most people on earth right now, here’s what you can do:
1. Make a pact with your imagination.
What do I mean? This means you need to first notice it, respect it, bend to its wishes. You have to vigilant. You can’t be lazy. If you have too much shame, work on resolving that first. For example, my imagination usually presents itself to me in the form of an obsession or fantasy. Somewhere along the way, I was taught that obsessions and fantasies are bad. They are not. Let me repeat, OBSESSIONS AND FANTASIES ARE NOT BAD. They are the fascinating, lonely children of your imagination. They are desperately trying to tell you something. Listen to them, follow them, develop them. Then let them go after you have properly nurtured and designed them.
2. Take up some new kind of activity.
If you’re a writer, start painting, if you’re a painter, start playing an instrument. Einstein used to play the violin when he was struggling to solve a mathematical problem. Changing your creative dial effectively lowers the stakes for your mind and allows it to become flexible again. This activity is called combinatory play. I consider myself to be a visual artist but people kept telling me to write a book. Now I move in and out of many creative disciplines and allow myself to explore without much thought about outcomes. My mind is much more flexible now that I have cast off an identity for my ego.
3. If your mind is completely blank and you have lost touch with your imagination, I suggest you begin the process of cutting away things like stressful jobs, bad relationships, addictions and so forth.
The only way I can hear the whispers from my curiosity is to have silence and solitude. I still have negative compulsions but now I am aware of these bad habits. I’ve developed a new feeling of calm and mental acuity that I have not had access to for a very long time. Mainly because I was drunk for a significant portion of my 30's.
Make a list of your life’s activities and figure out what to chop away. Carve out silence. Listen to your own mind until you can feel your creative impulses again.
If you really want to blow your mind, read Andrei Draganescu’s article, Evolving. Here's part of it summed up for you:
"You are not special. Elon Musk is. This system glorifies the ones who somehow break the funnel. These rogues then spill out large amounts of change into our environment. To contain this, we devised a system of investing humans with special abilities. Of course we don’t have them, only they do.
The personality cult pattern is the foundation of the culture of heroes. From ancient demigods to modern day pop stars and fame flooded CEOs. It is all about how they are simply better than everyone else.
No one is better than everyone else. We’re all sweaty and smelly at times and mean and stupid at other times. Some of us exploit opportunities, that’s it. Opportunities are cracks produced by environment into the walls of the funnel of change. -Andrei Draganescu
And perhaps Andrei's best line he ever wrote is:
“I hate the orgasmic drop of alive that bursts only to vanish.”
Cheers,
Stellabelle
this article first appeared on Medium.com in a slightly altered form.