Imagine

“I wish it need not have happened in my time," said Frodo.
"So do I," said Gandalf, "and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring

Someone asked today in the Spiritual Networks Community what song title I would tattoo on my skin if someone gave me a million dollar for it. "Imagine" by John Lennon jumped to my mind. We spiritual travelers spend too much time contemplating how we could escape from the mean world we live in, when in fact we should accept the world we live in as a mirror image of the struggle that is brewing inside of us. We can try to change ourselves, but change is hard and requires time. In the meantime however, we can take the supposedly suffocating constraints and obstacles life supplies us with and look at them in a completely new way. God would be mocked if there wasn't a creative Way to manifest our spiritual vision here and now. Imagination can do that for us.

Our power to imagine is just like J. R. R. Tolkien's ring. Our capacity to think gives us power but it has also cut us off from the holy Now. All the fears of repeating the pain of the past, the regrets of the past, the fantasies of being more powerful in the future, it all comes from the same part of the brain that gives us the power of imagination. Imagination can take the power of the ring and transmute it into something constructive and spiritually meaningful, using all the means and constraints we have at our disposal. Imagine, think big and then manifest it. You have the power!