Man’s body is faulty, his mind untrustworthy, but his imagination made him remarkable. In some centuries, his imagination has made life on this planet an intense practice of all the lovelier energies.”

—John Masefield, (1874-1967), English poet.

Wanna be different? Wanna get rich, invent something brilliant, publish a best-seller, save the world, transform your life to a dream here on Earth? What’s the answer: hard work?

Nah, it’s imagination.

In the words of Dr. James Harvey Robinson, “Were it not for the slow, painful, and constantly discouraging creative effort, man would be no more than a species of primate, living on seeds, fruit, roots and uncooked flesh.” (quoted in Applied Imagination by Alex F. Orborn, Charles Scribner’s Sons, NY, 1957, p. 2)

Einstein may have gone too far when he said imagination is more important than knowledge. But he was quite right to point out that knowledge is limited while imagination encircles the world.

It’s one of the finest mind tools we have. You need to work your imagination until it has Olympic standard muscle and power!

Faculties Of Mind

The human mind has several important functional capacities, as follows:

1. The power to absorb, to observe, investigate (perception)
2. Retention: the ability to memorize and recall.
3. Reasoning power: the ability to analyze, judge, make comparisons and evaluations
4. Imagination: the power to think creatively, to foresee and to generate abstractions (postulation)

Any one of these is remarkable, if you really think about it; two or more would lift us above all our fellow creatures. But all four together amounts to a formidable thinking machine. Is yours in peak condition?

What we do with our minds on a day to day basis is to examine our surrounds (perception), make predictions of likely outcomes and plan action which will preserve or enhance us. These basic survival mechanisms run pretty much on automatic.

The special quality of imagination is not something we need to utilize; it’s a choice. Merely observing people at large will tell you that not many people do exercise this spectacular capability!

You want something better? You need to work up your imagination; turn it into a lean, mean, thinking machine.

You Can Develop Your Imagination

Listen, your imagination is your passport out of the Matrix, the tick-tock clockwork world of Mr. and Mrs. Salaryman and Salarywoman. They are stuck on a treadmill that feeds them thoughts, ideas and behaviors that are not their own. Poor things, they have to live in somebody else’s thought-world, whether it’s the bank’s, the government’s, the employer’s or a spouse’s world.

Imagination is the one thing that allows us to soar free. Even a prisoner in a concentration camp still had the faculty of dreaming and imagination. Historical accounts seem to suggest that those who used their creative dreaming muscle were the ones most likely to survive. Through imagination, each one could leave the camp and inhabit a world of freedom, kindness, beauty and health that was in stark contrast to the misery surrounding them. It was a world worth clinging onto and so many did… and survived, while others died in their tens of thousands.

Modern education discourages, even positively frowns on creative imagination. It is proverbial that a kid who is “day dreaming” is given in infraction; he or she should be invited to share the moment: “Come Patti, let’s all share in the magic! What were you dreaming of just now?”

Chances are the teacher would be shocked at the mind-power of many of these kids, if only the brake were taken off the faculty of imagination. Real education should not be about memory and retention, which has become almost the only thing that is valued; it should be about learning creative skills. Continue reading →