Albert Einstein said: “Imagination is more important than knowledge.” But he goes on to say, “For while knowledge defines all we currently know and understand, imagination points to all we might yet discover and create.”
Most of us are familiar with the metamorphosis of the butterfly. From the moment a caterpillar hatches it eats, stores and grows, consuming everything it can.
Before it is ready to shed it’s skin for the last time it has an instinctual urge to stop eating, and wander until it finds a safe place to ‘let go’ and willingly enters into a not-yet-known condition.
So here is what biologists are telling us about this ‘not-yet-known’ condition. When the caterpillar sheds its skin for the last time, a chrysalis emerges, into which the caterpillar now commits it’s form in full faith.
This chrysalis, not only restricts the caterpillar’s previous form of activity, it also serves as a protective shell, a place of silence, free of distraction that contains all it might yet discover and create.
Although this chrysalis looks lifeless, near death, the over consumptive body of the caterpillar inside is literally liquefied, turned into a soup. And within this soup there are a number of cells, that scientists actually call “imaginal cells.” Scientists say these cells are dreaming, they are imagining the birth of a butterfly.
These cells are so completely different from the original cells of the caterpillar that it’s immune system perceives them as enemies, a sort of virus and immediately attacks them. The imaginal cells though continue to appear, in even greater numbers, recognizing each other, bonding together, until the new cells are numerous enough to organize into little clusters. And one day as more of these clusters discover and connect with one another, they reach a critical threshold. On that day, from this apparent “death”, beyond what was not-yet-known to the caterpillar, a gene that has lied dormant and asleep, awakens. This gene contains a new information code, a new pattern, and what was once the essence of a caterpillar now becomes the creative culture medium for a new form….. A butterfly
The ancient Greeks used this transformative event to signify the human soul’s capacity for self-renewal, and thought of the soul as a butterfly, a creature that once dwelt crawling on the earth, but later made a marvellous change into a creature of the air, a creature with wings, able to fly upwards from the earth into the realm of spirit.
Every one of us is blessed with this amazing capacity for self-renewal, this gift of the mind…. Imagination. You have, indeed, in your mental nature a power that can transform your life; first in thought and afterward in action. But, unless you have before your eyes a vision of the things of life as they might be, and as they ought to be, there is a subtle tendency to accept without protest, things as they are.There is something inside of you that needs to be expressed and if you can imagine it, it exists. If not right now it exists as potential.
You have the capacity to imagine yourself being or doing whatever you can imagine, and this precedes you actually being or doing it.
So if your imaginal cell is a quiet little thought somewhere in the silence of your mind dreaming that you can become greater than you are right now, of doing something greater than you are right now, know that this thought will immediately come under attack by your current knowledge and understanding, creating layers of resistance. As you ‘let go’ and hold fast to your willingness to dream and continue in full faith to imagine the new person you are about to be, doing the things you want to, new thoughts will begin to emerge. When you commit yourself to these new thoughts they will begin to cluster together into new patterns of thinking, and the layers of resistance will fall away. Creating themes of healing change, growth, of becoming something completely different than who you were before. When you recognize the reoccurring themes of those tiny little imaginal cells creating inspirational thoughts within your mind, you will discover new images of possibility combined with your latent resources, replacing the images of what you used to know and understand.
It is here that you awaken to the beauty that is within and discover that you are not guided by the world but by your heart, creating new images of potential, so that you too can fly and inspire others to look within at their own imaginal cells.
"What the caterpillar calls the end of the world, the rest of the world calls butterfly".-Richard Bach
Now Let us Go Into the Silence......
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