The Creator Within: How the Cosmic Mycelium Actualizes Imagination

Don't call me a quark, but all things are connected via a universal synaptical map right down to the last lepton. We, and all things, are wired into the cosmic grid. Every tremor across the galaxies, every act of love or violence, warms or judders us all—ever so slightly, however imperceptibly. If I believe in astrology and you believe in the zodiac, we are both partially right. If I believe in pantheism and you believe in voodoo, neither of us is off-base. If I subscribe to numerology and you to tarot, each of us is tapping into a corner of cosmic truth. No single thread defines it all, because a finite fringe is not the entire prodigious rug.It seems logical to suppose that all thoughts are similarly woven into this matrix. Not just the heavy, tectonic thoughts that reshape the loom, but our air-light imaginations too. Artists may simply possess more sensitive antennae for abstract notions, or vision tuned to different spectrums to which our ultraviolet eyes are blind. As a child, I remember realizing that if we can think a thing, it must be fact. Somewhere. Even if it exists across the vast expanse of space on another sweet-spot planet in a different solar system—that all fanciful conjurings are merely radio waves from another reality, and some of us are just more dialed in than others. Children imagine all kinds of wondrous things that have no precedent for reality on our little blue ball of rock and iron. Where does this come from? The mycelium. Then, adults teach us to dismiss as nonsense anything we cannot see, touch, or legitimize through science—and poof, our antennae are retracted and dormant. Those feelers into the cosmic matrix are delicate; they recoil like an anemone beneath an accusatory finger.Later, through the emancipation of adulthood, many of us relax—or grow old enough not to care about the scathings of others—and allow those tendrils to drift back out into the tide. There, we detect all kinds of wondrous flotsam—what we now call the rabbit hole. But unlike Alice’s hallucinogen-induced tea party, this is a fiber-optic, crocheted blanket that illuminates and permeates all things. If we are exploring the concepts, theories, or notions belonging to others, it is best to hear it all. We shouldn't feel guilty about getting lost on YouTube, because every belief is indeed a tiny fragment of the entire truth. Remembering that—that each idea is a piece of the overall puzzle—is as important as understanding the simultaneous significance of everything. Our mistake occurs when we land on one concept and view everything else, prior and subsequent, through that single ocular loop. No matter how gem-like that tidbit is, or how beautiful it appears beneath the magnifier, it is simply one hair on the back of the omnipresent Totoro.Could Totoro actually exist? Somewhere in the universe, he absolutely does. That is a certainty. Otherwise, Hayao Miyazaki could not have seen him in his mind's eye—in what we call imagination. Somewhere on another sphere, circling another star, in another part of this or an adjacent universe, there is a Totoro. And a cat bus. That is the point. We are all connected and thoroughly influenced by that connectedness. Simultaneously, we are budding creators who one day, when our souls have reached a transcendent state, will make things like Totoros ourselves—for real. We won't just pick up the signals and tell the story; we will conjure sublime things from nothing across a vast infinity of universes with infinite possibilities.When they say God made us in His image, that, I believe, is what they meant. We are creators operating under His auspices. Never stifle your or your child's imagination. Revel in it. Be joyous that you can see, sense, and perceive. For though we label it imagination, what you are actually seeing is the universe as it truly is: an infinite spectrum of life and wonderment. The more we open our eyes to view it, the more we will see. That is how it works. It is a muscle that atrophies only through subduing. And therein hides the final truth of these paragraphs today.