A decision arises and is executed in the realm of choice, thought and action. However, the ease and excellence of a decision is rooted in inner clarity and understanding arising from total awareness that lies beyond choice, thought and action. Decision is the vital link between being and doing.
Obviously, to choose one definite course of action or response from among many possibilities is a decision. Decision implies a defining moment of arriving at clarity and definition. To translate our deepest values into concrete action calls for a clear understanding of what we are and what we wish to do in any given situation, at any particular moment. To arrive at complete clarity about who we are and what we wish to do is to arrive at a decision. Obviously, decisions in an everyday sense take into account factors relating to the results we wish to achieve or the destination we wish to reach. Yet, beyond the obvious and the mundane, one needs complete awareness and clarity to arrive at a decision that will achieve a desired result or fulfill our deepest sense of purpose.
To move from confusion to clarity, to move from chaos to order, to move from stagnation to dynamic movement, to move from aimless wandering to clear direction calls for decision. Yet, decision itself has to emerge from the clarity of one's own understanding. This in turn arises from total awareness of oneself, of one's real purpose and mission, one's vision and goals, one's abilities and limitations. Thus, the defining moment that translates one's inner clarity into definite thought and action is decision.
ARE WE ASKING OURSELVES THE RIGHT QUESTIONS?
ultimately, every aspect of your own personal experience can be seen from a perspective that is completely impersonal. And it is from that vast universal perspective alone that true liberation can be found. The impersonal view reveals to us that the separate-self sense, or ego is nothing more than an illuasion of uniqueness, created moment by moment through our compulsive habit of personalizing almost every thought, feeling, and sensation we have. From the biggest perspective, all human experience can be seen as part of a process an evolutionary or developmental process that is moving forward in time.
Our own personal experience of that process in all its many dimensions inner and outer, gross and sublets ultimately a very small part of an infinite unfolding. Thoughts and feelings that arise in individual consciousness reflect emotional and psychological structures of habits that have slowly developed over hundreds of thousands of years.
If you step back and begin to look more and more objectively, in light of this greater context we exist within, you will slowly but surely begin to recognize for yourself the impersonal nature of all of your own experience. In that recognition, the personal dimension will suddenly become completely transparent to you. This insight, even if only temporary, will completely undercut every belief you have about a unique, individuated entity who lives in some separate bubble, mysteriously isolated from everything else that exists. You are a process. Dare to face this for yourself, and you will discover a radical objectivity that liberates you, right now, to consciously participate in the highest level of that process, which is the evolution of consciousness itself.
Creative imagination is given to everyone, but most do not realize that they possess it. Not everyone has the imagination of a truly gifted artist, but all have it to the extent that they are able to relate to the creative life force, and allow it to flow through them. Not all are creators, but the ideal beholder must also engage in the creative act, if he sincerely wishes to participate in the experience of the one who created the work of art.
This participation requires a very special effort, one which most are not willing to make. They expect, even demand, that a work of art speaks to them immediately. Make no mistake--art is not a direct means of communication. It speaks indirectly. You hear it with an inner ear and perceive it with a third eye. It does not reach your intellect, first, as does the written word. You have to prepare yourself to receive it. In this sense, the pleasure experienced through an appreciation of the plastic arts is like that derived from poetry. When, at last, you begin to sense its meaning, you realize you are in contact with some force, higher than yourself.
The true lover of art experiences something of the same elevated emotion that the artist felt during the moment of creation. This is one of the symbolic functions of the artist--to act as a medium in communicating a message to those who may be less sensitive, and thus less able to receive their own messages.
Pegot Waring, American sculptor.
Speak with Granite Tongues.
The imagination is immune to control. Prisons seen or unseen cannot fully enclose the eternal imaginative powers.
The imagination goes through walls made of rock, steel, or convention, prejudice, and fear. The imagination is not bound by where we live or who we are. The imagination is always looking beyond the horizon, and entering into new worlds, unknown and unexplored. The imagination is a shadowy realm whose boundaries reach to the infinite. The imagination goes beyond time and space and is a life unto itself.
The imagination is always there first, as it comes upon the reality before it is a reality, the fact before it is a fact, and beholds the truth before the truth can be known. The imagination reaches and grasps into the unknown with a power all its own. The imagination is ever in part discontent, ever restless, searching for a land beyond. Imagination never quite reaches the ultimate land or destination it seeks or if it does it instantly seeks another, and thus it never dies. For imagination to reach the ultimate and accept that as all, never to seek another destination beyond the horizon would be the death of imagination.
No imagination needs to forever reach out and find new lands, new worlds, new destinations, inventions, ideas, and concepts. The imagination needs to be free, and cannot be stifled or quenched. It is the spark of creativity and innovation which has guided humanity since the beginning.
The Imagination has worlds of untapped resources ever to be found which will release their fresh contents of vigor and beauty always giving variety and wonder to our existence.
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