The Most Essential Element of Creating Anything
This experience unfolded on the heels of a particularly surprising and insightful Conversation with Consciousness that shifted what the word ‘imagination’ really means in the most unexpected way.
And as usually happens, once we get it - we get the chance to really get it.
I was in my garage, sitting behind the wheel of my dead car, fingers tapping out an unconscious distress signal to the Universe. Listening to the voice on the other end of the line, I was doing the mental math:
1) call CAA (first-snow-storm-of-the-year-icy-roads-endless-waiting)
2) figure out how to get car out of garage
3) tow to shop
4) let it sit, lonely and unavailable, for an undetermined number of days til the mechanic (who’d just done an “all systems a-okay” check on my perfectly running car 3 days prior) could diagnose and resolve the problem.
I have no idea how modern cars work, but I know there are computers and sensors and a whole lotta digital magic going on behind-the-scenes, so when it wouldn’t start I called the experts. The mechanic listened to it turning over and said, “It could be a spark plug, a fuel pump, maybe something else… it could be anything. You'll have to bring it in.”
Beyond the obvious challenge associated with that (mmm, d’ya hear the “it’s not starting” part?), it seemed a bit extreme. The engine was turning over, the dash lights were on, it simply wasn’t igniting. But he was clear, he couldn’t help over the phone, and I was in the midst of agreeing to this version of reality. Meanwhile another voice was sparking in the ether, an inner nudge saying, “Ummm, wouldn’t it make more sense for someone to just look at it here, where it is?”
I mean yes, of course, great idea if I knew a someone like that. But. I don’t.
I didn’t see it yet, but the lesson I’d been offered that morning in my conversation with consciousness was showing up for a test drive.
Choice time: Believe the limitation of what’s here (book the car in and get CAA on scene ), or take a step back from the momentum that’s building to ask, “What else is possible?” and see what comes in.
AN IMAGINATION INTERVENTION WAS FIRING UP
I told the shop I’d call them back and closed my eyes. “Okay, who do I know who’s mechanically inclined?”
Waited….
Nothing.
Conjured a few friends faces and their particular talents. My friends have some awesome skills, but as I scrolled for ‘expertise with cars’ it came up zero.
Then this rolled in: “Maybe Bonar knows someone.” Dialed my friend up, “Hey, do we know anyone who’s mechanically inclined?”
“Yeah, your neighbour Dom. He’s a mechanic.”
Dom! Right, I totally knew this, but I’d forgotten. And I knew he was home, had just waved to him arriving a half hour before. Dom of the wood pile adventure, who I’d navigated my way out of a near fisticuffs with back in August.
This is how magic operates—shifting to an intentional yes back then opened up potential now.
I knocked on his door and asked if he’d mind having a look at my car.
“Sure! No problem, let me just change.”
While I waited I found my flashlight and got the hood open, and now that I was waking up to possibility, I decided to really open this new insight up and see what it could do.
I took a few moments to imagine with clear intention and trust. I felt my being woven into the fabric of an endlessly creative universe that’s on my team, and conjured awareness of helping spirits in the space, inviting them in.
We think it’s a physical thing or a different circumstance that we want, but it’s always the energy that ‘thing’ connects us to that we’re really after.
Philip Sheperd, author of “Radical Wholeness” puts it this way, “We want to achieve or acquire qualities of peace, well being, joy, ease, etc. But these aren’t things we can possess, they’re inherent qualities of the present moment. We can only experience them in the here and now.”
Once I opened to perceive the energies of connection, support and ease, it didn’t much matter what happened next. What I wanted was now activated in my field of awareness, and I was lining myself up with it.
IMAGINATION IS THE BRIDGE BETWEEN PHYSICAL REALITY AND THE FIELD OF POSSIBILITY
Dom slid in behind the wheel and turned the key, getting the same result I had. He turned it a second time and it started with ease.
“Hey! What did you do?”
“Oh it’s really simple,” he smiled. “With a fuel injection car, as opposed to the old days when we used to give the car gas, it gives itself gas. But we’ve had some cold, dry weather that just changed to warm and humid, so I think your sensors got confused.
It was giving itself too much gas, essentially flooding.
What you have to do when that happens is the opposite of what you would do with a carburetor system, you need to actually depress the gas pedal. Just once, quickly, and it will signal the car to stop giving itself fuel. Then it’ll start.”
“Do you think that’s all it was?”
“I’m sure that’s all it was.”
It was a nasty winter day and I’d been planning to drive to a town a half hour away. I asked if he thought that was a good idea.
“If it was me, I wouldn’t hesitate. The problem is fixed, and if it happens again, now you know what to do.”
I went. And it’s been all systems go ever since.
WHAT’S WANTING TO EMERGE FROM BEYOND THE KNOWN?
The first step in conjuring a reality that doesn’t exist is to drop your commitment to the one that currently does.
No easy task—it’s compelling to argue the case for the restriction of our circumstance. We’re conditioned to believe that what we can perceive right now exists—and what we can’t, doesn’t.
But just because we can’t see it doesn’t mean it’s not here.
When we’re committed to the current track we’re on, to “the physical problem that we’re limited by”, we’re excluding something that is far more powerful than physical circumstance - the ability of our imagination to conjure something new.
We can manage life, or we can open to possibility and create with it.