Don’t let them harvest your imagination.

Imagination is our sacred birthright

Don’t let them harvest your imagination.

Imagination is

your sacred birthright,

your dreaming body,

your soul garden,

your holy of holies,

motherboard for

creating a life.

Imagination is not a toy.

It’s freedom’s soil,

ground of song, dance,
love, hope, faith and

immanently possible

futures.

For heaven’s sake

don’t let any device,
religion, expert or ruler

enslave your imagination.

Don’t let them harvest

your imagination.

Don’t let them

enchant and entrain

you to technologies,

that profit and graft your limbs

to unprofitable ends.

Glory in your imagination

Water it, stake it and

harvest it for yourself

alongside artists, poets,

Inventors, any being

with heart wide open

who keep blooming.

Imagination is

your sacred birthright,

your dreaming body,

your soul garden,

your holy of holies,

motherboard for

creating a life.

I care a lot about imagination, yours and mine. We want guidance as we struggle with governmental and institutional impacts and chaotic streams of information. Where do we look?

In The Art of Ensoulment: A Playbook on How to Create from Body and Soul, I start with sovereignty of soul and its operating system–imagination– a key in my compass.

Our Sacred Trust: Sovereignty of Soul

The guiding star that orients one’s compass to an ensouled life is the sovereignty of soul.

“Blessed are the pure in heart for they shall see God.” Matthew 5:8

Humans thrive when we are relatively free of other people’s energies. We see the effects of freedom and oppression in parent-child relations, marriages, religious life, recreation, work, and governmental systems. We learn that while people can trample and disdain us in the flesh, our truest Self can continue unimpeded. I call this Soul. It’s the me of me and the you of you.

A living soul lives by a system as automatic as breathing. But, in highly networked, interpenetrating social bodies, energy gets confused, binds together, and gets out of whack. Soul guidance weakens. Sometimes it goes off the grid of consciousness.

I believe Free Will is an organic design mechanism by which humans preserve the soul’s integrity in body.

To ground soul, our will relies on support to be “who we are” despite those who impose on us. We diminish our sense of ensoulment when we use willfulness apart from heart and soul. This impacts the health of the whole system. Sovereignty of Soul, therefore, is a sacred trust between all beings—seen and unseen.

For this reason, the Prime Directive is:

“No Trespassing on another body
without permission.”

Plain and simple.

Remarkably, Divine Intelligence uses no force other than to continually support the sovereignty of each soul.

Have you made sacred vows to honor Imagination as a Sacred Trust?

Inspiration

“I become more and more certain, as the years go by, that wherever friendship is destroyed, or homes are broken, or precious ties are severed, there is a failure of imagination. … If we know what it is that makes other people speak or act as they do, if we know it vividly by carefully imagining all that may lie behind it, we might not quarrel. We might understand. Often we could heal the wounds.” A. Powell Davies, a Unitarian minister dedicated to civil rights

“There is a vitality, a life force, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and be lost. The world will not have it. It is not your business to determine how good it is, nor how valuable it is, nor how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open. You do not even have to believe in yourself or your work. You have to keep open and aware directly to the urges that motivate YOU. Keep the channel open.” ~Martha Graham to Agnes DeMille

Do you need to clean out your imagination? I imagine taking a vacuum hose to my brain. Really. I let it suck out all the stuff that isn’t mine as I feel it go down the hose into the center of the earth to be recyclcled.

Yawn. Yawning is the body's natural way of releasing and composting attention and refreshing all those heady wonder channels.

Do you need a retreat? Ask, what environments support my imagination? Where am I encouraged to see what I see, know what I know, and move forward with it? A spiritual director, therapist, playmate, community? Honor the world’s imagination with a collage, poem, dance, dream, vocalization, drawing, memory, story, or an act of care that inspires you today.

Do you need a fast? Some in the Christian stream like Ruth Gaskovski and Peco on the School of the Unconformed substack encourage a Digital Communal Fast.

It no longer feels like we are in a culture war but rather a spiritual one—an “unseen war,” as my Orthodox brothers and sisters call it. For secular-minded readers, an unseen war can be understood as a conflict in which one force seeks to capture attention and pull it away from what is most important—a.k.a., what’s most sacred.

To borrow Émile Durkheim’s secular-friendly notion of the term, the sacred can be understood as that which binds people together, fostering social cohesion through shared reverence. The Pull does the opposite—it creates social fragmentation through shared distraction.

An “attentional martial art” is needed to overcome The Pull, a phenomenon that fosters shared distraction by compulsively drawing people toward the screen—and then into it—ultimately reducing their agency. See more here.

Imagination is our Sacred Trust. I entrust you to yours. May our imaginations grow always more artful, loving, and full of seeds that promote collective grace, sympathy and joy.