So, what is an imp? The imp is a little devil from the woods who lives and acts in a most impulsive way! The imp is a spoiler, rarely tells the truth, reverses himself on a dime and can never be held to any agreement. The imp defies all reason and simply cannot be nailed down to anything. The imp is impishly spontaneous, outrageously fiendish, and at times malevolently rageful.
Let’s stop blaming the Russians! This Friday the imp becomes King through democracy’s divine ritual of inauguration. The collective unconscious, Mother Nature herself, has delivered her imp son, Donald Trump, to take over world leadership. Gaia has taken the imp from the woods and installed him to lead the world. Why?
Gaia long ago gave birth to human consciousness. When she bid us eat the apple from the tree of knowledge she bid us take her forward in new and more efficient ways. Since leaving the Garden, human consciousness has mastered technology and increasingly distanced itself from its animal, instinctual roots, from Gaia herself.
Today a majority of humans live online. Facebook gives us the news and organizes our memories. We text, Twitter, Instagram, and Snapchat. We romance on Match. Soon cars will drive themselves, as drones deliver our goods. We have become beings of mind, of reason, of the rational, logical, technical with nary a spiritual thought or experience. Our god is Google. Our ego consciousness, Gaia’s hopeful gift to us, has so dissociated itself from the Garden and enthroned itself as creator that the planet that births and feeds us has become a rapidly metastasizing cancerous tumor.
Gaia has pulled the imp from the woods to level our God of Mind and bring us back down to true mindfulness that incorporates all that we all are, nature in all its forms. Our mind has become too high and mighty, our dissociation from and disregard for nature without and nature within has constellated the impish destroyer. He simply defies all reason. He typifies the world’s most exaggerated ego. Here Gaia is presenting us with the homeopathic cure. In homeopathy like cures like by intensifying the symptoms of a disease to activate its necessary cure. Trump is both the homeopathic agent of exaggerated ego and at the same time the imp from the woods who defies all reason. He comes in the archetypal line of the savior.
Dionysus was such a savior in antiquity, a spring god who broke through all the dams of civilized order to fertilize the earth with orgiastic fervor. Christ was another such savior who came to tone down the instinctual bloodlust and orgy of that same Dionysian fervor through a ritual of communion, accenting instead the ascension of spirit, which in human terms facilitates the dominance of mental control. Unfortunately, the mental plane of humanity has grown to deify itself today, with mind our god, completely overpowering and dissociating itself from its instinctive nature. We are disembodied humans who live in our heads.
Donald, the “new savior,” is indeed a primitive, dangerous nature spirit that threatens world survival. His installation is bound to unleash the pent up instinctual energies of the collective unconscious in an orgiastic outbreak of unbridled lusts for all kinds of power and grab. Then there’s the danger of the autocrat, a la the Hitler variety. We must learn from history. A charismatic king can unleash a collective fervor that infects the populace at the expense of individual reflection and integrity. That was how Hitler mesmerized a nation to follow his will.
Mother Nature has gone to such a drastic measure to level the deified ego of reason, which has disregarded its irrational core, nature itself. That’s how dangerous our dissociated ego has become to the survival of the planet. Mother Nature has brought in a bombastic, dangerous imp to check the overgrown God of Mind at all costs. The question is, how much destruction will be necessary before a new guiding principle emerges?
Mind is critical, but it becomes irrelevant and useless if it deifies itself and does not include nature in its identity and care. Until that happens we will be at the mercy of nature’s impish destroyer, who seems quite content to bring down the God of Mind along with civilization itself!
Realize, with the installation of the imp outwardly, we are subject inwardly as well to the imp’s control, within the Self. We are all living cells of Gaia, all in this together, and therein lies our opportunity. If we can bring our mind down to embrace our earthy substance, and move toward necessary balance in our bodily home, we remove the imp from power within because we voluntarily humble ourselves to our true needs. If enough individuals, as conscious cells of Gaia, take up this challenge we offer the healing potion so badly needed, and the imp might all the more quickly be returned to the woods.
Begin to unplug the self from virtual life and plug into what’s really all around you. Bring life out of the head and back into the body at the rhythm of the heartbeat. Sleep well and listen to nature’s guidance in your dreams. Be in solitude. Be in real human interaction and communion. Embrace your inner imp by paying heed to your spontaneous impulses and find a way to live them in right balance. Allow your mind to be challenged by your disavowed needs, embrace the fullness of your nature. Nature abhors too much order, it’s simply unnatural. So, allow for some form of chaos to bring renewal to too ordered a life.
For better or worse, we enter now the time of the Reign of the Imp King. Trust that, as in all things, nature will only let things go so far, but be empowered within yourself. Nature once gave us the gift of consciousness. If we learn to use it in her service now, we are sure to be restored all the sooner.
Embracing my inner imp,
Chuck
