On Imagination, Meaning + World Making

I don’t tend to plan out what story we'll be working with each season in my membership group, Root + Rise in advance. I don’t make a spreadsheet at the start of the year, mapping out our myths and exploratory themes. For me, that takes the magic, mystery and flow out of the creative process, of letting the right tale find me at the right time, as it inevitably does. Sometimes, I’ll have a particular story I definitely want to work with, and I’ll allow it to let me know when the time is right. Often, I’ve had a story that my ego-self didn’t feel ready enough to explore yet in a group, but its presence was undeniable. Again, I let it show me how it wanted to be worked with, rather than me imposing the limited purview of how I thought I should work with it. I let it show me how it wanted to guide us, the type of container it wanted to be as we explored the themes it wanted us to look at through it.

Each time I’ve surrendered rigid control over the process, dropped into my imagination, and let the story take the wheel, those beautiful cosmic winks of affirmation known as synchronicities reveal themselves as navigational signposts on the mysterious and non-linear journey that is collaborating with creation.

This season was no exception. Given the intensely twisty - and profoundly revelatory - month that February was for me personally, I had absolutely no idea what this season’s story was going to be until just over a week ago. I knew from past experience that it would make itself known at exactly the right time, as long as I removed unnecessary distraction - which last month happened to be an accelerated initiation in. And the story did make itself known. Certainly not one I had expected, but when it arrived, my body’s affirmative response, alongside the spontaneous download of what the story will be guiding us into, through and towards this season, all felt like alignment.

This spring in Root + Rise, we journey with the Middle Eastern story of Queen Scheherazade & King Shahryār, which is itself the origin fable of 1001 Nights (or Arabian Nights), a favorite, and occasionally intimidating collection of tales from when I was a child.

19th century painting of Queen Scheherazade by Sophie Gengembre Anderson

One of the main reasons this story of Scheherazade feels so aligned is because of these pivotal times that we’re in. (As you may have noticed, pretty much everything I’m guided to do right now involves the stewarding of an individual + collective evolutionary navigation into this new aeon.)

Pivotal times, because alchemically, we’re in an accelerated trajectory from the element of water into the element of air; the dizzying speed at which technology is moving is testament to that, among other things. As my dad said recently, “Technology isn’t waiting around for anyone.” And it isn’t: technology has its own autonomous animating spirit that happens to be working through us. Unfortunately, collective human consciousness is not advancing at the same pace as technology is. Our collective consciousness is not yet at a mature enough place where we can work with and steward these immense technological advances with care, creativity and responsibility - which could result in some dire consequences. (Think clear water running through old, rusty pipes, and coming out the other end contaminated, corrupted and poisonous.)

Collectively, our consciousness is still mired in the old + rusty conditioning of scarcity, deficiency and not enough, giving rise to systems of power over, enslavement and oppression. If this is the consciousness with which we use technology, inevitably to dominate and control each other, this is the reality that will be starkly reflected back to us by an increasingly autonomous technology.

Or, to put it simply: what and how are we teaching this advancing consciousness of technology about us?

(My new Substack ~ The Immateria ~ is the space where I’ll be offering some of my more outlandish + empowering Aquarian explorations around this. Join here if you enjoy spending your time outside of the suffocatingly stale dogma-box of materialist science.)

But back to this spring’s excursion with Queen Scheherazade: what in the world does rapidly advancing tech have to do with this 9th century Arabic tale?

To distill a much longer response down to its essence: imagination + meaning.

Specifically, the power of the imagination to create new, life-saving, life-sustaining realities via the meanings we choose to make, and the words + language we express them with.

Imagination, when wielded with integrated + embodied power + wisdom, creates new meanings, and has the power to transmute and evolve systems of harm and oppression. These systems are also moving through a death-rebirth cycle. How we work with our imaginations to tell new stories - both personally and collectively - is the lynchpin of conscious participation that will be the bridge during this time of alchemical sublimation.

We’re moving very quickly into a time where consciousness is going to be making meaning and creating realities via our individual imaginations, which necessitates an anchoring in our inner authority, the True Self or soul. What we think and believe to be true is going to be making themselves apparent in manifest reality much faster than we have been accustomed to, as we move from the element of water to air.

Just as technology is becoming more autonomous, so too are we. But what consciousness is this autonomy rooted in? If it’s rooted in the unnatural conditioning of us vs. them, power over, not enough, etc., then those are going to manifest much faster and more intensely as our lived experience.

Imagination is a portal through which consciousness can evolve, by courageously telling and, crucially, embodying new stories. But first, we must strip away all that is false, all that cannot be taken with us into this new flowering of consciousness. The mythic call to adventure requires us to become brave enough to claim and integrate our raw, organic, soul-aligned power, so we can wield our words with wisdom and creativity, like Queen Scheherezade did, not only saving her own life, but the lives of many other women, and transmuting wounded, violent power into Love.

This is just the tip of the iceberg of what the story of Queen Scheherazade & King Shahryār will be guiding us through this season, so we can emerge rooted, unshakeable yet flexible during these tremendous times. So we can finally learn to trust what we have been taught to mistrust: our True Self, our tremendous power to create, and to collaborate with the rapidly advancing energies of this time - technological and much else besides - with responsibility, care and love.

Jung coined the term individuation. This is not to be confused with ‘individualism’ but rather about the soul’s journey of Self-actualization, a radical journey that is no longer optional for any of us.

One Self-actualized human can be dangerous to the systems of harm in their life and community. Many Self-actualized humans wielding the meaning-making power of their imaginations with integrity are globally catastrophic to those systems, especially when those systems are gasping for their last breaths.