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:
- The power to absorb, to observe, investigate (perception)
- Retention: the ability to memorize and recall.
- Reasoning power: the ability to analyze, judge, make comparisons and evaluations
- 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.
Artists are privileged in this respect; an artist sees something that doesn’t actually exist and replicates it, in one modality or another. Even photography, which you might think is only copying, allows creativity to enter and renders things not quite as they really are. Ansel Adams, for example, famously over-exposed parts of his negatives, dodged and held back certain tones and qualities, until the glorious final images we have come to know and love are as unreal as caricatures.
Thus art is very liberating and can be used to develop the faculty of imagination. Again, the school system gets it wrong and kids are often taught there is a “right” way to paint or a “correct” way to use clay or an “accurate” performance of music. This is suppressive to their true abilities.
The Automated Life
I see the real death of imagination all around me today: in coffee bars, stores, schools and homes… even in public parklands. Modern electronic gadgets are taking over to such a degree that the faculty of imagination is rapidly becoming a redundant muscle. We have computers, tablets and smartphones to think for us. They fill in the blanks in our minds, offer images, suggestions, colors, sounds and ideas, none of which are natural to us.
Our own mind has a uniqueness that is not even close to the mind of a software programmer. Yet we are all gradually having our minds slid onto digital tracks, from which it becomes quite difficult to get off. I’m quite logical and linear when I want thought power; I’m a member of MENSA, the high IQ club. But I also have a powerful creative side that has enabled me to win poetry competitions, write books and play a number of musical instruments. Talk to any of my friends: I have an absolutely vivid imagination, that can go right off the thought Richter scale.
Read my book To Fly Without Wings and see if I haven’t!
The point is, my mind can generate its own composition and internal environment. It’s becoming hard now to protect this inner world from invasion of what is, in effect, other minds… other people’s thoughts or thought forms.
We need our imaginations today like we need oxygen!
Practice!
Fortunately, imagination is something that can be practiced and developed. It is not a genetic given or even environmentally implanted. It’s an inherent faculty that just needs awakening.
But how?
Here are some simple fun exercizes to get you going:
Write a limerick. These are the humorous (sometimes rude) doggerel lines that go like this:
A Russian who danced the gavotte
On the deck of an Englishman’s yacht
Lost his balance and drowned
And was buried on ground
In what’s known as a Communist Plot.
Try and write your own! Why not? You start with a promising line like this: There was a young lady called Betty…
Try and create a tune by humming (or if you play an instrument, something that has never been plucked or played before)
If you had all the money you could possibly need, what would you endow… and why?
Getting more serious, use Jon Rappaport’s suggestion: what can I imagine might be my life’s desire?
Here’s a beauty: think up all the things (including skills) that you would need to know, in order to make a million dollars or more.
Brainstorm: think up 50 different futures that are better than the life you have now (I think I’ll take a go at that one myself)
It’s one of my sayings and is written up in the next book to come out, that a big, bright, beautiful future is a measure of sanity. Think about that. Then imagine yourself and big, bright, beautiful future. Silly you, if you don’t write it down and read it back to yourself every day!
Let me finish with a lovely quote: The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams,” It’s by Eleanor Roosevelt (1884-1962) American diplomat, writer, and First Lady of the United States from 1933-45.