I decided to sprinkle this article with quotes from my work-in-progress,
The Magician Awakes---
Who is in charge of your life?
Quote 1: There are those who believe life is a museum. You walk through
the rooms, find one painting, stroll into it and take up permanent
residence. But the museum is endless. If you were a painter, you'd
never decide to live inside one of your canvases forever. You'd keep on
painting.
In a climate of mediocrity, the independent individual is not moved
to agree with the prevailing narrative or some fabricated need to go
along with the crowd.
Quote 2: There is a non-material faculty called imagination. If that is stimulated, perception immediately expands.
Who can tell you what to do, how to think, what to envision? Who, besides yourself?
Quote 3: We re-learn to live through and by imagination, and then we
enter and invent new space and time. But space and time aren't superior
forces. They operate and come into being at the tap of imagination.
The person who is enmeshed in a thousand excuses for opting out of
the future he wants---that person is never going to move off the
starting blocks. He's going to become an artist of his own stagnant
swamp.
Quote 4: With imagination, one can solve a problem. More importantly,
one can skip ahead of the problem and render it null and void.
Excuses are not impressive. As clever as they might be, they don't
exhibit very much. They're minor works in a small distant storage room
of the museum.
Quote 5: There are a billion murals on a billion walls, and the person
chooses one and falls down before it and devotes himself to it. He
spends a thousand years trying to decipher it. So be it. Eventually,
he'll wind his way out of that labyrinth, because where else can he go?
Then he'll enter another labyrinth and undergo the same process. He'll
do this on and on and on, and finally he'll get the notion that he can
imagine his own labyrinth. So he does. He invents many labyrinths.
Then one day, it'll occur to him that he can imagine whatever he wants
to. It doesn't have to be labyrinth.
Finding, discovering, inventing your vision of what you're going to launch---that's another matter entirely.
Quote 6: You can enter imagination as if were an infinitely fluid
medium, or you can give it sharp lines and edges. You can balance left
and right, or you can tilt it eighty degrees to the right. You can do
anything you want to. You can put a million pink quarks into a bowl and
turn the bowl upside down in the sky. It's Tuesday or it's Thursday.
It's raining. The sun is out. It's raining and the sun is out.
You're the king in that domain. You're the one. If anyone ever
suggested this would be a walk in the park, they were lying. On the
other hand, you can supply yourself with great energies. You can
fulfill your own destiny. And by destiny, I don't mean something that
is preordained. I'm talking about your recognition that you have power.
Quote 7: You can imagine a cosmos that is a forgery of, and a substitute
for, the individual. In fact, historically, people have done that on a
continuous basis. It's called organized religion.
Contrary to the silliness that prevails in some quarters, the future
is not written. It is wide open. It is a space that is waiting to be
made. And no one can make it for you.
Quote 8: Imagination isn't a system. It might invent systems, but it is
non-material. It's a capacity. It feels no compulsion to imitate
reality. It makes realities. Its scope is limited only by a person's
imagining of how far imagination can go.
Here is the secret about time. There is always a gap, a
discontinuance between the past and present. Why? Because you and your
vision and action are that gap. It is always there, in the same way
that a blank canvas is always there for the painter.
Quote 9: The universe is waiting for imagination to revolutionize it down to its core.
Whether this era is any different from others doesn't matter. "Better or worse" doesn't matter.
Quote 10: I'm not breaking a system into parts. I'm not trying to teach
a person how to tie his shoes. I'm talking about the proliferation of
endless new worlds, not seen through a porthole, but imagined and
invented.
If you're going to be the adventurer, if you're going to develop a
vision of your future, how much sense does it make to restrict, shrink,
and lessen the vision? And how much sense would it make to build the
vision and then just leave it there, like one of your possessions, on a
shelf?
Quote 11: In educating people about a subject, you can break down
information into palatable bits. When you do that with imagination, you
disintegrate power.
What does waiting accomplish? What does postponement achieve?
Quote 12: Imagination is larger than any universe. It needs no sanction
from the world or from other worlds. It is not some secret form of
physics. It is not religion. It is not cosmology. It is not any one
picture of anything.
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