Lessons in Imagination.

I wonder, with all the TV ads and psychosocial engineering we’ve gotten used to, we’ve lost track of the power of imagination. It’s been reduced to “wouldn’t it be nice if…” like owning a new car, winning the lottery, getting laid; it’s been confused with dreaming. Dreaming is an enjoyable pacifying pastime. Like the American dream it captures people, immobilized by pleasant thoughts of moving. Imagination is very different, a powerful, deep and delightful tool, an adjunct to reality, not an alternative. I see my body/mind as containing far more than my puny conscious and habitual body used like a donkey to walk and talk. Unleashed by imagination they can both experience from within themselves elevated realities wondrously different, but always, always real. As humans we have a highly developed sense of how we reflect each other, a facility we so easily get lost in. We fall into being actors for the viewings of others and lose our own presence. Similarly our unconsciously held imaginative realities can be usurped by unreal conscious dreams. In a sense we are actors when we need to be real and drab realists when we need to enact our imaginative playfulness. Yet it’s so hard when we have one eye on the mirror of what we look like. But imagine the mirror is gone and one is not alone, simply free of it’s stare. And with this freedom comes the reality of being. And with this reality of being comes the equal realities of imagination. The turkey gabble of human mirroring becomes a pauper’s prison. To imagine one must find some secret pool away from this constant gaze, catch a bus if you will to somewhere else. The bus stop recedes and one is travelling in all the unconsciousnesses that one holds in one’s mind and body. We have mirror neurons that fire when we see a movement in the exact same way as when we do a movement so as we see we also secretly do unconsciously, so seeing a beaver swim on a wild life documentary and we’ve done it with them and somewhere hold the memory of it. This is human mirroring put to good use. In imagination we can inhabit their watery playground and experience their reality, their lunge for a fish, returning swim, trot to a favourite eating place, trap it under a paw, take the killing bite, be wary for possible stealers of it, eat fast and roll over full. Or on the other hand dance like Beyonce; it’s all there in your imagination. This is in no way ‘pretending to be’ or look like; it’s a process of imaginatively ‘being’ in that reality. It comes not from your conscious mind consumed by ‘your’ reality but a vast wellspring of what you hold unconsciously in your body/mind.

Imagination is no daydream, it’s muscle, a powerful tool that takes practice and focus to dive deep into and be always, always real in. It can be practicing a skill without moving, finding an answer without thinking or healing your body by picturing the ailment and wrapping it in loving attention or extracting some malignant cause. It can be the powerful resource we often call magic.