“Imagination is everything. It is the preview of life’s coming attractions.” Albert Einstein
© Copyright Walter Bruneel
If Einstein was right, we are blessed beyond all measure through the power of our imagination. That is, of course, if we understand and own that power. If we do not we may simply be playing with a double-edged sword, and cutting ourselves, and those around us, to pieces.
Whether or not we fully realise the power of our imagination, we are still living with the results of it in every moment of our lives. If we wake up to the truth of our potential we can operate our imagination from a clear and inspired space and create wonder, but what if we continue in our current state? What if our imagination is out of our control, and is the operator of us?
Have we really understood its true power?
How many of us have any real control over how we use it, or know how to make it work for us?
Look at imagination in its least inspired form, assumption. We meet a new person; they do something that reminds us of somebody we have met in the past, a person who once was hurtful. Within seconds we may have assumed the worst outcomes imaginable arising from continued contact with them. We are probably backing away, closing the door and finding more imagined reasons to justify our decision to rule them out of our life. Worse still we are probably announcing our conclusions to everybody else as though it were fact.
Or perhaps we are sat at home waiting for somebody. They do not arrive on time. What will our imagination create: betrayal, disrespect, something else is more important, a car accident? In come the torturous emotions that come with our worst imaginings, and by the time the other person has arrived our time of potential joy has been over turned.
Such small miseries played out across the world and creating a joyless existence for ourselves, but what about when these small miseries join together in race, nation, gender, age and faith? The scale of imagination on the collective front ready to wage war on the perceived other, ready to strike with weapons conceived of in our darkest hours?
Such a waste of a powerful imagination, uninspired recreations, recycling over and over again leaving us living the life of the hamster on the wheel, and usually in the state of denial that any of it has anything to do with us. If we can take one positive from this perhaps it will be that we are reaching a point where the misery we have created is now so awful that we are forcing ourselves to wake up from our nightmare.
What drives us to use the gift of imagination to create such misery; a gift that could equally be used to paint beautiful images, invent ways to overcome suffering, to delight in dance and music or travel through time and space?
Have we simply forgotten ourselves? Are we in fact so great at the game of imagination that we have perhaps forgotten our earliest imagining…. the imagining of ourselves as separate?
If we forget that we are one with all life, a part of the Field, then we remain in an unawakened state and find ourselves at the mercy of our unmastered field of consciousness. Instead of playing in a world of delightful creations we are living in the hell of the illusion of small powerless beings, full of fear, and at the mercy of an impersonal universe, and “otherness”.
What will we imagine next?We can have a world built by the power of the imagination in awakened dreamers, or we can have a world built by the power of imagination in the unawakened dreamers. That’s the difference between a world built upon inspired dreams and a world that is a world built full of recurring nightmares.
Imagination is a great power. Great power brings great responsibility. The question is whether to deny it or to delight in it?
The choice is yours, and it makes all the difference.
copyright © 2010 by S. Koshare Edouardes
All rights reserved
