Saturday, December 25, 2010

The Imaginal Cell

it was just another dinner in our house in christmas eve, about seven of us sitting by the rain with some leftovers and cheap wine, surrounded by our dog and cat running after our chickens and duck as usual.
not bad for me at all.

especially when Roland from AwkeningtheDreamer and FourYearsGo told me the story of imaginal cells, after I got a bit drunk and tried to explain the universe for him with my imagination about cocoons, what I said was probably:


Imagine our world is now a completed cocoon, as everyone waits impatiently inside the threads of constructions over the history, the threads of civilization and modernity; imagine our minds are cocoons as well, constructed, protected but blinded by our own threads of reasoning since the Renaissance, to weave ourselves with these threads into a culture, a history, a nation, an identity, into something to belong to and live within.

Now we have came to this stage, when we are still threading our cocoons to erase the emptiness from inside, narrowing down the void of unknown and imagination; our cocoons are narrow enough to blind and suffocate ourselves now, and we keep threading with matters of facts, which is against our instinct. It’s the stage of time to stop building and consuming what we have with our linear thinking, predicting what we don’t have outside for future consumption with our linear thinking, so we can pay some attention to the nonlinear but inspiring nature of ourselves, which is what we truly have been trying to figure out, predict, and protect, yet never been successful – with our linear thinking.

the connection, the common sense between our inner nature and the unknown outside our cocoons, allows us to be mature enough to break free, to live a new life with the void – the universe, the chaos, the space, the freedom, the peace.

as part of the chaos, part of the intangible creativity, human isn’t just the linear life-death or pleasure-pain, we are the abstract will of freedom, the indefinable poetry of life in between.

That’s why we have art and music to start with.





And then he went on:



The caterpillar’s new cells are called ‘imaginal cells,’ they are totally different from the caterpillar cells, so the immune system thinks these new cells are enemies, attacks them and gobbles them up.

But these new imaginal cells continue to appear. Pretty soon, the caterpillar’s immune system cannot destroy them fast enough.

More and more imaginal cells survive, and these tiny lonely cells start to clump together into friendly little groups, clustering together, forming a long string of imaginal cell, resonating at the same frequency, all passing information from one to another there inside the chrysalis.

Then at some point, the entire string of imaginal cells
suddenly realizes all together, that it is something different from the caterpillar.
and in that realization, is the shout of the birth of the butterfly.



And that’s what’s happeing on this planet.

(by zoe)