Imagination
Table of contents
- 1. Some Considerations
- 2. Questions
- 3. Homework
I'd like to suggest Imagination as a topic for contemplative inquiry. Perhaps we can consider Imagination and related experiences and related human capacities (such as intuition, creativity, non-intellectual modes of intelligence) as Ways of Knowing. As an initial theme, consider the idea that:
Imagination is the Gateway to Reality
I'd recommend looking at this in your own experience, as an experience, rather than analytically. Perhaps some conceptual frameworks may be useful to point one in the right direction, but if Imagination is a non-analytic way of knowing, then it would be good to "catch it in the act." Don't theorize ahead of the "data". That is, try to de-emphasise "thinking about" this topic in favor of looking more directly at it in action, as a personal experience.
To contemplate (an issue) is to "open up" the question in your experience. Here are some questions and considerations that go at the matter from different perspectives. We're not trying to answer or discuss each of these. Skip the answers and go for the knowing and see what is evoked. Any way "in" is a good one.
Some Considerations
Imagination is one of those ambigous human topics that is traditionally viewed both with reverence and respect, and with suspicion.
Imagination is a way of apprehending the latent possibilities in any situation. Does it make sense that situations have latent possibilities - that they are not simply and fixedly as they seem to be "given"?
Imagination is a normal, essential part of the way we apprehend, interact with, and conceptualize about "reality". Every "is" is was once a "could have been" chosen from a range of possibilities. Perhaps this is even true in each and every moment. The Lojong (mind training tradition) for example suggests treating normal experience "as a dream". What do you think this means? Does it mean to regard it with suspicion as somehow unreal, and to hope to somehow "see through" the illusion in some way? I'd suggest a more imaginatively liberal interpretation, which is to see "dreaming" as a free, more creative and flexible state of consciousness than typical waking state. In this view waking is a subset of dreaming, in that it consists of imagination that is being continually brought into conformance with and relationship to a world process. Imagination might be what we call it when consciousness accesses the real latent possibilities of that world process. On the view that our experience of reality is "constructed", imagination seems to play a central role in that construction.
Notice how when you are with other people, there may be whole imaginative scenarios playing out - who you and the others are, what things mean, what might happen, and so on. Would it even be possible to function without this happening? Perhaps the same is true of something seemingly more concrete, such as driving or doing housework.
Imagination can be employed as a transformative tool of consciousness. Sure, that process can go astray, but ... can you imagine a specific way it could work for you, accurately and effectively?
Questions
How does imagination work for you in specific situations? Perhaps some of the following questions will be evocative:
- When are you aware of being creative, and how do you go about it?
- Do you have some basic beliefs and attitudes about the nature of imagination? What effect (do you imagine) holding those beliefs has on you and how you go about living?
- In what ways do you intentionally employ Imagination as a mode of knowing?
- In what areas of life is your imagination freer or otherwise more active?
- In what areas is your imagination more constrained, and why might that be?
- What do you imagine about Imagination?
Homework
Read the above suggestions ... perhaps you will "take on" some of the considerations (whatever works for you) or find something else. Then choose a specific area in your own life that involves imagination, look into your experience, see what is there, and what (if anything) develops. Report and /or share it with people.