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IMAGINE NATION
Written April 10, 2013

AE - Willaim George Russe
Self Portrait - 1903

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Friends.


Like many people, I have probably spent far too much of my life jawing and talking about problems: the world, the government, the town, friends, neighbors, enemies, you name it. Most of the time, such energy is entirely wasted and probably just “pollutes” the psychic realm. You may wonder whence our polluted world comes; surely much of it is owing to our own turbulent minds and emotions.

So, the question becomes what can we do to replace stale thoughts and wasteful rants, misdirected attachments and disturbed desires? (Our moans and groans are really about the world not being the way WE want it.) How about some healthy doses of imagination?

Yes, imagination. Have you any? How about sharing it with the rest of us?

In recent years if not far longer, it has seemed to me that the American scene has been bubbling over with grumblings, complaints, and bitching about this that and the other thing. People are even shooting each other more and more frequently, maybe in part out of their sad, sad frustrations. At the same time, too many people seem to have little to share.

Where is the courage (guts) and imagination that made the USA a land of which we were once proud? Can we pull out bits from the imaginative part of our minds to offer the world around us? Then, can we draw from within our bulging bellies some good old American intestinal fortitude enough to put those bits of imagination out there - into manifestation?

Some of these thoughts have been percolating in my consciousness for years, but they came to the fore when I ran across a few bare paragraphs summarizing the wonderful thoughts of an Irish writer, artist and poet. I was so taken with those morsels that I immediately ordered A Memoir of __ from Amazon.com.

To read what __ had to say about IMAGINATION and other pertinent things, continue below.


AE - Willaim George Russe



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Here are Wikipedia’s opening words on AE:

“George William Russell (10 April 1867 – 17 July 1935) who wrote with the pseudonym AE, was an Irish nationalist, writer, editor, critic, poet, and artistic painter. He was also a mystical writer, and a personage of a group of devotees of theosophy in Dublin for many years.” I will let you research him further if you are a mind.

Apropos of the subject at hand, AE wrote in The National Being: Some Thoughts on an Irish Polity (1916) these words: “None of our modern States creates in us an impression of being spiritually over-souled by an ideal as the great States of the ancient world.”

To broaden the hint, he also scribed: “What is a nation, but an imagination shared by millions of people?”

In The Living Torch, AE said,

“A nation is but a host of men united by some God-begotten mood, some hope of liberty or dream of power or beauty or justice or brotherhood, and until that master-idea is manifested to us, there is no shining star to guide the ship of our destinies.”

A nation cannot be simply one man or woman’s idea, but must be a collective one. Can we work together to revive, resurrect or reproduce the destiny of our once great nation?

In a prophetic mood, Russell imagined, “... some time in the heroic future, some nation in a crisis will be weighted and will act nobly rather than passionately, and will be prepared to risk national extinction rather than continue existence at the price of killing myriads of other human beings, and it will oppose moral and spiritual forces to material forces, and it will overcome the world by making gentleness its might, as all great spiritual teachers have done. It comes to this, we cannot over hatred by hatred or war by war but the opposites of these. Evil is not overcome by evil but by good.”

“Nations hate other nations for the evil which is in themselves ... when humanity looks on its own image and finds it terrible it changes its heart or else it breaks the mirror.”

Can we even begin to give and share in such an heroic way? Certainly not until we can imagine so.

Please put your thinking caps on with AE and me. Let’s work at making America into an IMAGINE NATION. (Those beyond the borders: Consider doing the same in the land which favors your presence.)

Robert

Another AE quote from The Candle of Vision:
“I think of earth as the floor of a cathedral where altar and Presence are everywhere.”







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