How to ReEnchant Our World

Holly Woods
11 min readApr 17, 2024

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I spend a lot of time pondering how to help us all become the humans we need to be to create a different future.

While I understand the structural bones of what’s needed for us to become better allies with each other and planet earth…

… including a more awakened awareness,

… a moral or purposeful compass,

… a caring, compassionate and empathetic orientation to other humans and all sentient beings, and

… a long-view of how to be stewards of this bounteous planet we call home, rather than solely aiming for short-term gains like profit and pleasure…

… I realize that we won’t come close to accomplishing these objectives unless we (collectively) can also feel free to be our most noble selves.

To fulfill our own deepest desires.

To manifest that which springs forth from our souls and enlivened spirits.

To live fully according to our innate blueprint. That which we came to be in this lifetime, across the many expressions of our soul’s trajectory.

Alex Grey, the visionary American artist known for creating spiritual and psychedelic artwork, noted in Sacred Mirrors: The Visionary Art of Alex Grey,

“If we are spiritual beings created out of divine substance, how does this suggest we live?”

Certainly it seems that if we are to live as divine beings, we would want to acknowledge our interconnected nature, and the innate enlivened force within us, so evident in all forms of life on earth.

Yet, from the time of Aristotle, and later during the timeframe of Carl Linnaeus’s modern classification system in the 1740s, humans began to understand, dissect and define the world around us.

Almost as if to blindly separate ourselves from this divine nature, we became a distinct and disconnected species.

In doing so, we began to placate the gods of logic and reason, the scientific method, convergent thinking and limitation. The modes of our brain’s left hemisphere.

Rather than the goddesses of imagination, divergent thinking, interconnectedness and possibility. Expressions of our right hemisphere.

I don’t really mean to imply that left brain is more associated with masculine tendencies, nor right brain with feminine, though in general that’s how the mythical attributes of hemispheric function have been historically ascribed, and thus, in our patriarchal world, the left hemisphere has dominated over the right.

And also not to project there’s anything wrong with science, logic, and defining our options. We’ve made great strides as humans with these mental expressions.

Just that this pattern of critical sorting, evaluating and closing down hasn’t and won’t lead to the greatest innovations needed for our new future, nor help us relax the left hemispheric self-imposed constraints that keep us disconnected from the wild possibilities that live in the right hemispheric ambiguity.

Our squeamish discomfort with the unknown, and our need to vanquish uncertainty, keeps us stuck in rigid, mechanistic, linear and results-oriented mechanisms that dissect reality rather than expanding our true awareness of it.

Our need to ‘control’ our future through precise determination in fact limits the possibility that we will arrive at solutions yet to be imagined.

In doing so, we deny the opportunity that lies at the chaotic edge of emergence, preceding the distant envelope of inspiration.

How can we live magical, synchronistic and sacred lives, made of divine substance, if we are separated from all that we are?

Looking Through a Different Lens

I remember one of the moments when I realized I wouldn’t find solutions to my massively traumatic past if I only looked to existing fields, scientific research and expert insight.

This transitional moment that I wrote about in my book The Golden Thread was a turning point to stepping into full responsibility for my life, my health and my future. I could either comply with my medical internist’s suggestion to try some pain management protocols for the twelve disorders related to my immuno-compromised state, or I could end my suffering and leave the planet.

Managing pain or committing suicide literally seemed the most viable options from the traditional conceptual framework I’d been living within.

Or I could step outside the framework of western culture and seek solutions beyond which I had any familiarity and couldn’t yet imagine.

After three decades of psychotherapy, heroic doses of allopathic medical care, and generous consumption of pharmacologic medicines, I knew I had to look outside the box to uncover new approaches to resolve my lifetime of PTSD, nervous system and emotional instability, immune system collapse and consequent disorders, and an exhaustion of “trying everything” and failing.

It took several near-death experiences to convince me to step outside the bounds of conventional beliefs about healing to open Pandora’s box and further explore the role of spirituality and alternative healing modalities.

I had to move past the intellectual reasoning of my scientific mind, step outside the judgment of my family and colleagues who labeled me as crazy for trying healing methods that weren’t acknowledged and hadn’t been peer-reviewed, and listen to the callings of my intuition, guidance, curious mind and beliefs in possibility that exists beyond conventional wisdom to find my cure.

Iain McGilchrist, psychiatrist, former Oxford literary scholar, and author of The Matter with Things: Our Brain, Delusions & The Unmaking of the World noted that:

“It’s by logic that we prove, but by intuition that we discover.”

My perseverant approach to my own healing and evolution, and willingness to explore what exists beyond the norm and status quo in any field, has served me well.

I am grateful for the circumstances that led me to the orientation of “what’s next, what’s possible, what can’t I see yet?” This far-fetched curiosity has led me down some rabbit holes that ended up unlocking solutions that I never would’ve imagined otherwise.

Creativity is the Ultimate Expression of our Divine Magical Nature

Some of the most significant and profound discoveries and innovations of the modern and post-modern eras have been products of imagination, elicited by dreams, the arts or even psychedelic-induced states.

Most likely earlier inventions were also products of these liminal states, though fewer records exist about such discoveries because it was considered normal (back then) to be given visions from the gods.

No less than the theories of relativity and evolution, the periodic table, the model of the atom, Paul McCartney’s song Yesterday, analytical geometry, the structure of a molecule, and Keith Richards’ song Satisfaction were derived in dream-states.

Francis Crick’s double-helixed DNA, Aldous Huxley’s Doors of Perception and Heaven and Hell, Steve Jobs’ many inventions, Alex Grey’s Sacred Mirrors, Kary Mullis’ discovery of the polymerase chain reaction to isolating DNA, Sigmund Freud’s invention of psychoanalysis, neuroscientist John Lily’s mapping of the brain’s pain and pleasure centers, physicist Richard Feynman’s discovery of path integral formulation of quantum mechanics, and advances in technology and the computer revolution were among thousands of inventions or discoveries made through the use of LSD.

Linear perspective, surrealism, optical illusion, nonlinear horizon lines, multiple-time depictions, pointillism, perspective distortion, unfreezing time, indeterminate time, 3-dimensionality, cubism, and abstraction all originated through artistic imagination and creativity.

Even Descartes, notable philosopher, scientist and mathematician, famous for logical rigor and the statement “I think, therefore I am,” came to his awareness through fantastical visionary dreams.

How different would our world be if Descartes had instead (and more accurately) surmised,”I imagine, therefore I am”?

How can we rediscover ourselves, and re-enchant our world, to find our way to a different trajectory than the one we’re aiming toward now, unless we become reacquainted with the world of imagination, creativity and possibility?

What is Creativity?

Practical definitions of creativity are as elusive as the process to evoke it.

Iain McGilchrist, in the Matter with Things, defines the three stages of creativity, including:

Preparation- knowledge gain, domain expertise, and human experience, in which conscious and unconscious, willed and serendipitous elements prepare the spirit and soul for a new awareness;

Incubation- the unconscious act of ‘staying out of the way’ of synthesis of the emergent threads, and

Illumination- unwilled, effortless, light bulb moments flowering out of the above steps.

You can’t make creativity happen. It is an induction of a highly attentive state, listening and receiving without knowing what you’re listening for.

Nor can you expect it to happen in highly-structured, confined, mechanistic, convergent or constraining circumstances, prevailing forces in our contemporary world.

Creation most often looks like:

Illumination- from the Latin illuminationem- to throw into light, or make bright, or more succinctly, to evoke a new awareness,

Inspiration — from the Latin inspirationem- inhaling, breathing into or upon, or Middle English also breathe or put life or spirit into the human body, and

Enthusiasm- from the Greek en theos, or Latin, enthousiasme- to be inspired or possessed by a God

All of which suggests that creativity, or art, is a revelation of the human soul or spirit.

Alex Grey (Sacred Mirrors) suggested that the true glimpse of our divinity is only possible as the rhythm of the cosmos resonates through our form, or that we become living spiritual forms as artists or creators.

In fact, philosopher Ken Wilber, in his essay In the Eye of the Artist: Art and the Perennial Philosophy in Sacred Mirrors and artistic Master Roger Lipsey in An Art of Our Own believed that true art must involve the cultivation of soul and spirit.

Wilber wrote, in his essay in Sacred Mirrors,

“… the artist must train not only his eye but also his soul, so that it can weigh colors in its own scale and thus become a determinant in artistic creation.”

One can extend that indeed all expression of the universal, that which exists and is meant to be enlivened, requires cultivation of the soul.

Wilber also wrote of the three eyes of being human, through which all human expression emerges.

Wilber speaks of Sensibilia, in which sensorimotor intelligence, or the eyes of flesh (body), feelings and impulses emerge which evokes the material world of object permanence, e.g., solid surfaces, colors, and objects, and in which a pre-personal, preverbal, and preconceptual world identifies a world of matter and bodies

The second ‘eye’ is Intelligibilia, or the world of ideas, symbols, concepts, images, values, meanings, intentions, or objects perceived by the mind from a personal, verbal, and conceptual world.

And the third ‘eye’ of being human is Transcendelia, or objects perceived by the soul and spirit in a transpersonal state. This eye of contemplation opens a world of subtle energies and insights, of radical intuitions and transcendental illumination. It is most often achieved through meditative disciplines, dream-states, and psychedelic-induced states.

Ultimately, imagination and creativity, and unimagined possibility require non-constrained states. Mind-wandering states. States in which the egoic Self is reduced, or even annihilated, to allow the vast forces of creativity (illumination, inspiration, enthusiasm) to emerge without censoring.

Why is This Form of Creativity So Critical Now?

Obviously, we are in the midst of one of the most egregious meta-crises humans have ever seen.

And because these interconnected, multi-modal and intransigent crises are metastatically expanding in every realm of human existence, there are no known solutions, in the currently-contrived material world, that are capable of retracting the tipping point we long ago surpassed.

Christopher Bache PhD noted in LSD and the Mind of the Universe that

“we must trust the universe, without understanding why things are unfolding in the way they are. Fortunately, the universe rewards our trust.”

Dr. Bache spent two-plus decades experimenting with the mind-altering substance LSD in order to gain access to that which was beyond the constraints of his conscious mind. A respected and tenured professor, Bache hid his exploits from public dissection until he had endured the requisite statute of limitations, and had retired, so that he could no longer be censured by legal or academic structures.

His vision of the future, derived from these futuristic and visionary exploits (much like many of the inventors noted above whose discoveries have changed the course of humanity forever) suggests that, at some time in the future, humans will

“give birth to its next self-expression, a fully conscious soul, green to its roots, feet firmly planted on the earth, but fully transparent to the creative intelligence that everywhere presses upon it.”

While we live in a world of profound intelligence, discipline, rigor, discovery and innovation, too few of those traits are applied in a way that recognizes our world has suffered from the weight of progress, stability and certainty.

We are now victims to our own perceived victories.

The only hope is that WE, as humans, may become the beings that can alter our current stage of consciousness enough that we create a hive-mind and imagine possibilities that do not currently exist.

To become the Creators the world needs now.

How to Evoke or Predispose Ourselves to Creativity

“Creativity is seeing what others see and thinking what no one else has thought.” Albert Einstein

Wordsworth once noted:

“…inspiration requires both the effort by which the mind ‘aspires, grasps, struggles, wishes, craves’ and the stillness of the mind which ‘fit’ [the poet] to receive it, when unsought.”

An effort must be made at first, but despite the effort, inspiration still only comes unsought.

Unlike the rigorous, structured and defined process and roles of our current social environments (e.g., educational institutions, corporate cultures, financial institutions,) the conditions required to evoke or predispose ourselves to more creative pursuits require us to forgo the confines of narrow focused attention, conformity and convergence into rules, regulations and limitations.

Yet to be creative, to live into the untempered, unrefined and wild process that will bring us solutions that can meet the moment, we need to:

  • Tolerate ambiguity & uncertainty, be open to the unknown and undetermined
  • Have flexibility and willingness to respond to changing contexts
  • Promote divergent thinking or connections between remote ideas,
  • Allow unconscious processing outside our normal focused attention
  • Seek out anomalies, rather than sameness,
  • Allow our imagination to wander into analogies, metaphors & images as these will likely spur new and delimited perspectives

But it also requires…

  • That we know ourselves deeply, rooted in purpose, and aligned at the deepest soul level, so that we can become most true to our innate desires, cravings and that which wants to be expressed,
  • That we allow ourselves an aliveness that forsakes all efforts to limit, to sacrifice, or to edit our truest voices and awareness,
  • That we allow our expressions to emerge, to evolve, and to change as rapidly as the swift winds that blow through us when we are free.

How to ReEnchant Our World

How do we begin to navigate a world that is wildly uncertain with even more ambiguity, while also bringing back the enchantment that would entice us to save what we have left?

To persevere in our quest to become the humans who can create a new future?

The three key skillsets, about which I have written before here and here, include:

  • An Inner Compass and Mastery of your Inner Mindset
  • Outer Mastery and Practical Action toward a Possible Future, and
  • Co-Creating with the Cosmos, or Living as the Future You.

We are easily coming to an awareness that we must become the most adept, capable and courageous navigators of an uncertain, volatile and emerging world.

And in the process of gaining an inner mastery, learning to take practical steps into an unimaginable future, and listening to the unseen forces beyond the material world, we will become the Creators who can enchant the world newly.

About the Author

I’m the Author of the bestseller, The Golden Thread: Where to Find Purpose in the Stages of Your Life. Download this free audio course to learn about your own Golden Thread of purpose.

I’ve spent my life imagining a world where we could all become who we’re meant to be, awake and alive in a way that allows us to express our most innate, natural and purposeful gifts.

I believe the bridge to our future exists in becoming rooted in our purpose, and more prepared for the unknown. Download the Navigate Our Wild Future Playbook to gain tools to help you prepare.

And very soon we’re unleashing an initiative designed to help us all learn to become the audacious and inspired Creators to reenchant the world.

Stay tuned or contact me to learn more.

Explore at Emergence Institute.

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Holly Woods

I guide leaders to navigate the uncertain future so they can enact world-changing visions, rooted in purpose and catalyzed by synchronicity,.