The greatest crisis of our lives is a crisis of imagination. We come to a dead stop because there is a barrier in front of us and we can’t imagine a way to get around or over it. Our work space feels like it is walled with cement blocks that are closing in tighter every day, but we can’t imagine where we would go if we quit. We can’t breathe in an airless relationship but can’t imagine how to take off. We look in the mirror, when we dare, and see the age lines, the skin blemishes, maybe the thinning hair, not the beauty that we may carry inside.
We go on repeating to ourselves the tired old stories, strapped on to us by family or past histories of defeat and disappointment. Or we cling to past memories of brighter days, or that win on the high school sports field, or that sweet summer romance, or that medal for valor or that early success that was never repeated. Either way, by nursing grief or guilt or nostalgia, we manage to go through life looking in the rear vision mirror, stuck in the past, never fully available to the present moment.
Or we miss the moment by carrying anxiety about the future, playing scenarios for what could go wrong. We give ourselves a hundred reasons not to take the risk of doing something new, something that would take us beyond the gated communities of the mind into the wilds of creative adventure.
Conscious of it or not, we go around playing our negative mantras. I’m too old. I’m not pretty enough. I don’t have the money. People always let you down. People don’t change. I’m so tired. You don’t think you do this? Pause for a moment. Take off the headphones. Listen to what’s playing on your inner soundtrack. It may be a song. Am I blue?
I confess there are days, especially between snowstorms in a Northeastern winter, when my mood can slump and go the color of the dirty grey ramparts of ice on the curb in my small gritty city. And more days like these in the shut-up times of pandemic I don’t want to get out of bed even to walk the dog, who is waiting for me patiently. I may be stirred back to life by a dream or a cheering message from a loved one or a plan for an ocean beach vacation or a foreign adventure. But when I find it is still hard to rise above a low, lethargic mood and dump those negative mantras – My legs hurt, I’m played out, I can’t walk on the ice – I call in one of the greatest life coaches I know.
I know him from his most famous
book. Maybe you do too. His book is titled Man’s Search for Meaning. His
name is Viktor Frankl. He was an Existentialist – which is to say, someone who
believes that we must be authors of meaning for our own lives – and a
successful psychiatrist in Vienna before Nazi Germany swallowed Austria in
1938. He was a Jew and a free-thinking intellectual, two reasons for the Nazis
to send him to a concentration camp. For several years he was in Auschwitz, the
most notorious of the Nazi death camps.
In the camp, every vestige of
humanity was taken from him, except what he could sustain in his mind and his
heart. He was in constant pain, reduced to a near-skeleton with a tattooed
number on his arm, liable to be beaten or killed at any moment on the whim of a
guard. He was there to be worked to death. He watched those around him shot or
beaten or carted off to the gas chambers every day.
He made an astonishing choice. He
decided that, utterly deprived of freedom in the nightmare world around him, he
would tend one precious candle of light within. He would exercise the freedom
to choose his attitude. It sounds preposterous, if you don’t know the
story of what unfolded. When people tell us we have a bad attitude in ordinary
circumstances, we are usually not grateful. The suggestion that we can choose
our attitude when the world around us seems cold and bleak, or we have suffered
a major setback, even heartbreak, sounds cruel, and maybe preposterous. But
let’s stay with Viktor Frankl.
When the light went out in his
world, he managed to light that inner candle of vision. Despite the pain in his
body and the screams and groans around him, he made an inner movie, a film of a
possible life in a world where the Nazis had been defeated and Hitler was a
memory. It was an impossible vision of course, an escapist fantasy. There was
no way he was going to survive Auschwitz.
But he kept working on his inner
movie, night after night, as director, scriptwriter, and star. He produced a
scene in which he was giving a lecture in a well-filled auditorium.. His body
had filled out, and he was wearing a good suit. The people in the audience were
intelligent and enthusiastic. The theme of his lecture was “The Psychology of
the Concentration Camps.” In his movie, not only were the death camps a thing
of the past; he had retained the sanity and academic objectivity to speak about
what went on during the Holocaust from a professional psychiatric perspective.
This exercise in inner vision,
conducted under almost unimaginably difficult circumstances, got Viktor Frankl
through. One year after the war, in a good suit, he gave that lecture as he had
seen himself doing in his inner movies.
What do we take away from this?
First, that however tough our
situation may seem to be, we always have the freedom to choose our attitude,
and this can change everything. Let’s
allow William James to chime in: “The greatest weapon against stress is our
ability to choose one thought over another.”
Second, that our problems, however
bad, are unlikely to be quite as bad as the situation of someone who has been
sent to a Nazi death camp. That thought may help us to gain perspective, and to
stand back from a welter of grief and self-pity and rise to a place where we
can start to dream up something better.
Third, we can make inner movies,
and if they are good enough it is possible that they will play in the theater
of the world.
Would you like to make your own life
movies, in which you enjoy the satisfaction of your deepest desires? Are you
willing to grow a vision of bright possibility so rich and alive that it wants
to take root in the world?
Here are some secrets of the imagination that
will get you on your way.
Dreams Show You the Secret
Wishes of Your Soul
Every night, if you make the effort
to catch some of what is going on, you will find that your dreams take you
beyond what you already know. You already have a personal film production
company, behind the curtain of the world, that is making dreams exclusively for
you. That comedy or horror flick, that romance or action adventure, may be
screened in the night to help you see where you are and how you are, or to give
you a glimpse of other life possibilities. In other dreams, you get out and
about, you socialize, you make visits and receive visitations.
Dreaming, you travel without
leaving home and can be as social as you like. You are also a time traveler.
You travel to past times, parallel times and into the possible future. You
scout out challenges and opportunities that lie ahead. Beyond seeing the
future, it is possible that, dreaming, the observer effect noted in physics
comes into play and you take part in the selection of events that will manifest
from a quantum soup of possibilities.
There is even more going on in your
nights. Indigenous wisdom teaches that through dreams we learn the secret
wishes of the soul.. There is even a word for this in the Huron/Iroquois language: ondinnonk. We are called to follow our heart’s desires, as opposed to
the calculations of the ego and other people’s agendas and expectations. We are
recalled to our deeper life purpose, and given sources and resources in a
deeper reality that will help us to follow our path with heart.
Your Great Imagineer Is Your
Magical Child
Don’t doubt for a moment that you
have the imagination required to grow a vision of manifesting your heart’s
desires that can carry you beyond the stuck places and the dark dreary times.
Your inner child is a master of dreams and imagination. She knows the magic of
making things up. She engages effortlessly in the deep play that generates
creative ideas without regard for consequences. Maybe you lost contact with her
as you started to grow up and the adult world trod on her dreams. Maybe there
was a time when her world seemed so cold and cruel that she wanted to run away,
and may actually have succeeded in running away, so a safe space in Granma’s
house or a garden behind the Moon. Maybe this is why you have been in a dream
drought for so long; when she went away, you lost the beautiful bright dreamer
in you. In chapter 2, you are going to learn how to reclaim that Magical Child,
how to convince her that you are safe and you are fun so that you can bring her
energy and joy and imagination into your current life.
What Is in Your Way May Be Your Way
The philosopher emperor Marcus
Aurelius came to accept, as a rule for his own life, that the obstacle may be
the way. When you find yourself blocked or challenged on your life road, that
may be a prompt for you to look for a better way, or develop needed skill or
the pluck and perseverance to see something through. you’ll want to look again
at what you feel is blocking or opposing you on your life road. Sometimes a
block is a pause button, indicating, Not right now. Try later. You may
discover that a block has been placed in your way to induce you to find a
better way. For every door that won’t open or slams shut in your face, look for
one that maybe opening. For every setback, search for opportunity. Look for a
gift in every wound or challenge though this can be hard and may require
hindsight from some distance away.
Your Big story is hunting you
Australian Aborigines say that the
Big stories are hunting the right people to tell them, like predators stalking
in the bush. The trick is to put ourselves in a place where the Big stories can
find us. We do that when we attend to our dreams and the dreamlike play of
symbols and synchronicity in the world around us. We want to learn to step out
of the tired old stories we have inherited from family, from other people
telling us who we are, from personal histories of failure and defeat. When we
are seized by the Big story, we step beyond limiting definitions and beliefs.
Great healing becomes available because we can now draw on the immense energy
that is generated by the sense of serving a larger purpose and living a mythic
life. The muse, or creative genius, and the intelligences of the
world-behind-the-world come to support our life projects, because we are
following a deeper call.
Your world is as rich or poor, as alluring
or dull, as you can imagine. Listen to your dreams, let your inner child out to
play, put yourself in a place where you bigger story can grab you. When
you move in the energy field of a big dream of life, the world responds to
you, because you are magnetic. You generate events and encounters that open new
doors, and your days sparkle with a champagne fizz of magic. Your dreams speak
louder and brighter and the extraordinary comes to meet you on any street
corner.
On days when you feel down and defeated,
remember Viktor Frankl, dreaming his way out of the nightmare of the death
camps. On any day, you have the freedom to choose your attitude, and this is an
exercise in creative imagination that can change everything.
Adapted from Growing Big Dreams: Manifesting Your Heart’s Desires through Twelve Secrets of the Imagination by Robert Moss. Published by New World Library.
Photo (c) Robert Moss
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