On Just Knowing

,And Moving Through Life Without an Imagination

I’ve been thinking a lot about systems change, and what that looks like. Specifically, I have been thinking about what systems change looks like when: a) I have a tendency to throw the baby out with bathwater and, b) I don’t have any imagination.

True stuff. I cannot visually or intellectually, or in most other ways create something that I cannot see. Before you jump to a conclusion of, “that can’t be true,”consider the fact that it is a common enough phenomenon that there is a word for it: aphantasia.

Though, technically speaking, aphantasia is confined to the inability to visualize mentally, not having a ‘mind’s eye’, I also cannot conceptualize in ways that others do, say, from nothing to something. For me, that means I cannot ‘imagine’ what something tastes like unless I’ve tasted it, I can’t organize without someone else creating the tool to do said organizing; I know smells and tastes, etc, but don’t imagine them.

I don’t do guided meditation because that stairway to the garden of peace I can’t see (and someone talking in my quiet time is enough to make me scream).

Basically, I can’t imagine something I cannot see. When I create paintings, I cannot see them ahead of time without someone showing me—and they do sometimes, usually one of the ancestors in my world or the color itself speaks. I begin with one element that I know of or the nudge to ‘just begin’ and then the process evolves through other guidance.

It sometimes feels odd being one who can’t create visually via the mind but communicates with the unseen world via visions, eyes open and closed. Ancestors and others communicate via visual information; sometimes strikingly clear, sometimes notso, much like the process of painting.

The closest I come to imagining something that doesn’t exist is to practice what I think are going to be uncomfortable conversations ahead of time but, even then, I’m formulating that from past experiences. It’s one of the reasons I’ve never had a 5 year plan or career path and cannot lean into ideas around ‘magical thinking’.

For nearly 10 years, others have laid out plans for me. Visions and dreams were maps complete with itinerary. You’re going here, to do such and such or meet so and so. Then when that job was completed, I was shown the next place, step-by-step. Now I’m in a position where I am not shown what’s next. Despite my just knowing, the clarity of what’s next does not exist.

However, and it’s a big, however, despite that lack of clarity or even later on today or tomorrow, I know things in the way others don’t. I’ve got gobs of stories about ‘just knowing’. I’ve have been told ‘your certainty is really disconcerting’, and I’m super-comfortable with saying I don’t know how things are going to unfold precisely—I just know they will ultimately.

When I ‘see the future’ it’s because it’s been shown to me in some way that I can anchor into. That’s the job and responsibility of the prophet and we don't have the luxury of bypassing it or unknowing what we know.

I just know about the Sinaloa cartels intersections with Indian gaming because I’ve been told about it and given the details. I just know about the intersection between the Sinaloan money laundered through Indian gaming and landing in the hands of Al Qaeda because I’ve been shown it. I just know the End Time, that connects all those threads,which is real, because Uriel showed it to me. I’ve not created these things because my mind and body don’t know how to do that.

I just know what smells and tastes go together in the kitchen, what colors work in a painting, etc. Mostly, that is. It’s happened a couple of times where I’ve had to trash a meal or canvas because the experiment didn’t work out.

For me, systems change isn’t about imagining something different, it’s knowing that something different can be created, like something in the kitchen or on a canvas. The foundation I work with isn’t ‘from scratch’, it’s recognizing what doesn’t work within most social systems, and knowing that, despite my tendency to prefer bathwater and baby tossing, that’s not useful for most things.

I can see, damn near spontaneously, from a witness perspective, what doesn’t work and how to make it work or shitcan it. If it seems that the round file is what fits the bill, I know what to create differently.

From there, I work backwards while building; knowing what I know and what I don’t. Research and others who know more than me in particular areas are what make the dream (that’s not a dream) work.

Though a DEA supervisor did ask me once if, “Has anyone asked you if you were mentally ill?” (To which I responded, “Nope but they sure did put me under surveillance.”) No one has actually called me a Pollyanna but they have made it clear that my certainty—that requires a trust in self and not-self others don’t have—is ‘merely naivete’ and that I’m foolish (or deluded). Except, decades ago, I began a track record of ‘doing the thing’ that others wouldn’t or couldn’t.

And here we are.

I just know that the sexual trafficking of girls and women will end through my work at the intersection of the Sinaloa & CJNG cartels, Indian Country, and Al Qaeda. I know that it will happen in less than 20 years.

I just know that from that the sexual abuse of infants and children will end in less than 30 years. because one thing leads to another.

I just know that all the information that I send to multiple law enforcement and intelligence agencies in the US and beyond would be siloed, held as a ‘useful secret’, if I didn’t share the same damn information to each of them, not caring who’s toes feel stepped on when I know the things I’m not supposed to know.

I do not know how all this is going to unfold but, working from what doesn’t work, and knowing what does there’s already a structure. I don’t have to burn down (or toss out, to keep the theme) the whole thing.

That’s not the primary challenge, though. The primary challenge for is the lack of fellow breathing human partnership.

When you walk and talk with the dead that most are afraid of (for many reasons), when you breathe for the dead that most are afraid of, when the thing you’ve been created for is not what others thing they want and their own imaginations are limited, it’s hard to develop capacities for the internal shift that creates the external shift. Without those capacities, it’s difficult to create the external and systems change.

And so I dance with the discomfort of just knowing the change that will be made without knowing how it will be made and if I will continue to do this without physical, embodied community or working relationships because other people’s imaginations are like mine.