I’m an expert on falling down the Rabbit Hole. I live in the world of the imagination and the impossible. I rely upon the imagination to fill me with ideas on a continual basis. If I lived in the ordinary world, I would disintegrate in short order, because the ordinary world is a place filled with reasons why ideas can’t succeed and with the wounds of failure and painful memories of the past that haunt us with fears, holding us prisoners to our past. In fact, even while writing this, a friend called for a business-related matter but in warming up to our meeting, he asked what I was doing. I told him I was writing a little piece based on Alice in Wonderland.

He asked if I liked the movie. I said, “Not really but Disney’s animation version was magic. Alice and animation were meant for each other.”

He asked me why I loved Alice so much and I carried on and on about my many reasons and even brought the wisdom of Alice into the nonsense of the politics of Washington – which was not all that difficult. But after all that, he said, “I have an idea,” and off we went into the realm of the imagination, into the world of what is waiting to be created, ideas just waiting for a chance to incarnate.

Falling down the Rabbit Hole requires the capacity to “let go” and allow your imagination to take flight, giving form and vision to possibilities and impossibilities – before you let your mind tell you they are absurd, ridiculous, too expensive, and then that final blow, “What will people say?” What do you care what people say? I never have – and that is the great secret of the Rabbit Hole. You simply have to get over your fear of what other people think. For what possible reasons do you require the approval of others when it comes to your creativity?

My imagination belongs to me. It is off-limits to the influence of other people, and most certainly to uninvited opinions. My imagination is given free rein to go off to places known and unknown to me. I dwell in the realm of ideas, original thought, and endless possibilities. Why can’t this or that happen and why are we humans the way we are? I was most interested, for example, in why we didn’t want to heal than in finding out more ways to heal. I believed more insights into healing would be found through investigating our fear of becoming whole and healthy. I imagined what other people would not even consider – that people do consciously find their survival power in their wounds and therefore becoming healthy is the most threatening option in the world for them.

Your imagination is one of the great passageways to discovering your charism or the “unique grace of your soul.” Though your charism is more than your creativity, your creative gifts are very much a part of all that defines your uniqueness.

Charism is the term used to define the special or unique mission of religious communities. When Mother Teresa founded her order in India, she needed to provide a statement describing the charism of her community; that is, what is the unique calling of the spirit of this new community?

In that same vein, you have a charism, a purpose to give to life – the creative essence that this moment in time in your life is awaiting. Imagine that: your creativity, your “being-ness”, as a life ingredient essential to the ongoing wheel of human evolution. It is our turn to do our part, each in our own way. And just as every bolt and screw is needed to hold up a house, every human being has his or her time of contribution. What can we imagine ourselves contributing?

Visionaries and creative geniuses, great poets, writers, and pioneers of science and medicine knew this grace, if not by name then by its creative authority within them. They did not hold back. None of these individuals sought approval before acting on who they were, though they indeed had deeply personal struggles. We all do and those will be ongoing until we die. More likely than not, we will incarnate again and continue the struggle.

Emily Dickenson dwelled in her charism (and in impossibilities) as did Shakespeare, Mozart, Bach, Einstein, Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin. They became immortal because they never stopped their imagination from engaging in the world in which they lived, be that an isolated bedroom, a physicist’s lab or plotting the American Revolution. I like to think they all fell down their unique Rabbit Holes. They imagined worlds that did not yet exist and their lives became devoted to incarnating those worlds. I have no doubt that they imagined far more than six impossible things before breakfast every morning.

It’s pretty easy to tell if a person has what it takes to sojourn down his or her Rabbit Hole. Within seconds of conversing with them, they say something that reveals whether they are courageous or frightened, or whether they travel backwards in their consciousness, reviewing the past, thinking about relationships long gone or rehashing past quarrels. Those examples are familiar to all of you. Another indication that a person is “walking backwards” through life can be witnessed through a gradual diminishing of that individual’s creative life energy in general.

Creativity, please keep in mind, is not about painting, singing, or artistry. Creative energy really should be understood in the broadest way you can imagine, beginning with our relationship to our life force itself. We must utilize the life force running through us each day. Walking, eating, breathing are “acts of creation”. We may not think of those basic acts of life as creative artistry, but they qualify as acts of creation. Using our energy in any way is an “act of creation” – period. Every choice we make, every thought we construct, every personal judgment we make, every emotion we feel – all of these little inner flutters – send sparks of our life force into acts of creation. Some may only amount to one more psychic free radical sent off into the collective consciousness to mate up with the billions and zillions of other psychic free radicals our endless negative thought forms generate, but these are micro-creative acts.

Our micro-positive thoughts gather together in the same way, forming “units of creative grace”, counter-balancing the creative influence and power of psychic free radicals. There is no difference between how the laws of creation function in the whole body of our global system and in your micro-body. We are living, breathing, creative creatures and perhaps the most spiritually practical way to view the purpose of life is as an experience in learning to consciously work with the laws of creation at the micro and macro level. As Jesus said, “As it is in heaven, so it is on Earth.” Though life becomes deeply personal, what if the real purpose – the one Buddha and Jesus taught about– boiled down to a fast, impersonal journey of discovering that love works, and the rest is illusion. Now that’s a Rabbit Hole trip if there ever was one.

And yet … and yet … what if discovering creative ways to love while letting go of “all that is illusion” is really the end game? Now wouldn’t that make a great topic for a Tea Party?

Next lesson: Wishing Versus the Power of the Imagination.

Love,

Caroline