After watching Avatar – the life’s mission of all involved no doubt – I feel motivated to recreate my life and future.

A quick consultation with the Master – through the I Ching – encourages me to act on this inspiration:

(Hexagram 8, Water-Earth, 000010) It’s time to address the fundamental principles of your life. Reorganize all aspects of your affairs according to new ideals. You’ve outgrown your current situation.

For a long time I’ve not been  living up to my ideals or been able to summon the willpower to overcome draining habits and attachments.

The last ten or eleven years were all about learning what not to do. So many decisions were based on weakness – they haven’t taken me very far and the person I am is a very disempowered and disappointed one. I look at myself and I don’t like what I see. I don’t are if others like me but I know I’m nothing compared to what I should be, what I imagined I would be, or what I could be. Wow – count the ‘I’s. Angela would be scolding me right now for writing self-indulgently.

It sounds discouraging but I need to accept this disappointment in the present to start creating myself again. I still have faith in myself and my Master and there’s a few years ahead yet.

I’m writing down all the things I want to change (not here). In moments of weakness I can refer to it. I also need to constantly defer to my inner self and higher power – what I call my Master. Most would call this praying.

Avatar

I’m not sure what it was about the movie that inspired me so. For sure by all standards it was a great movie, but there’ve been other great movies that didn’t have this effect.

For one, it was based on a spiritual paradigm: consciousness as non-physical and independent of the body. To see this concept worked into such a believable (or “internally consistent” if you prefer) film was rousing in itself. But that alone isn’t it.

The film also represented a respect for life that is found in many indigenous cultures, cultures that include the killing of animals but acknowledges and respects their souls. It verges on Ahimsa – non-violence – getting there in principle. This was a comforting touch, but not it either.

It might have been the freedom Jake experienced in his new body and the reconnection with life he found the moment he awoke in it. Since my teens I’ve wanted to fulfill my physical potential but through bad habits I’ve only been stunting my physical growth.

A memory surfaces, of walking along a tree bough as a child. It felt awesome to stand confidently and trust my body to keep its own balance. A primal energy awoke in my lower belly – so strongly that I’d climb the tree just for the buzz. I’ve hardly felt this since, as like the rest of us I’m pretty much disconnected from not only nature, but even from my own physical self most of the time.

I think the main inspiration came from the concept of the Avatar. Jake was crippled but experienced a new existence through being plugged into aanother more perfect physical form. He felt and learnt things he wasn’t able to in his real life. The avatar became his real body as he came to identify with the ways and wolrd of the Na’vi.

Yes, I’m sure the effect I felt was the metamorphosis of the old into the new – growing out of used things. And Jake fell in love with a giant blue chick. Well that was the clincher.

Now, while not many of us have giant blue avatars waiting for us in the garage, we can step into new selves, a new future any time. It’s okay with me to accept inspiration from anywhere. Perhaps today is simply the day I’m supposed to wake up from my dream – and Avatar was just a pleasant coincidence that moved things along, or not.

But of course there are no coincidences and here’s a gigantic all-time thank you to all involved in the making of Avatar!