What is the Imagination?
Imagination is everything! It is the preview of life’s coming attractions, it is the gift that will set our mind free.
It is faculty through which we encounter everything, the things we touch, see, hear and unite to form a mental picture, sensations and concepts. Imagination helps to create meaning to experience and understanding to knowledge. It is also the possibility of what we may now and understand.
Einstein said “The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind its faithful servant. We have created a society that honours the servant and has forgotten the gift.”
Our logical mind often tends to fix or concretise what we know or think we know, whilst the conceptual mind, our conceptual imaginative mind searches for possibilities that do not always make sense to our logical side.
Limitations
Our limitations are like concrete, holding us to a pattern, too often long out worn. Imagination is the faculty of freedom. With imagination our possibilities become limitless, our ideas possible, our future imaginable.
Don’t get me wrong, logic and knowledge are valuable, most valuable, they help us define and unfold things in a comprehendible manner. It is the faculty that gets things done, that labels, tabulates, orders and systematises, it makes sense of our world just as much as our intuitive mind, just in a different way.
Are you creating or are you confining yourself in concrete?
Imagination – A Gift of Being
Imagination is a gift of being, of possibilities, and of hope. It is like the source of an idea, the idea and the hope of an idea all wrapped up in one box. In this way it is the source of all true art and science.
Imagination sets us free!!
Play as if a child
In freeing our mind, we need to look to the imaginative play of children. They have no limitations. They build castles in the sky and bridges across time, flying craft from boxes and cakes from mud. There is no right, no wrong, only play.
We adults on the other hand often limit ourselves by favouring mostly the logical side of our mind and relegating our imagination to fantasy or child’s play, something to roll out on weekends or maybe on holiday.
It is in letting it out to play more often that we begin to open to our creativity, by letting our logical left take a rest for a while that we find what was always there in us.
Remember to Dream
If we allow ourselves to dream, to play, to just let our minds to be free ,e, no labels, no judgment, no pressure, no expectation we will find the gift that was always ours. It was never lost, just forgotten.
Fear
Take it slow! Sometimes if our dreams or hopes are too big we open the door and fear rushes in, closely followed by a tidal wave of other emotions, we become over whelmed, then a sense of impossibility has taken hold along with our logical fact finding mind that tells us it is impractical or an impossibility or worse, pure fantasy. Its often the fear of failure that will stop us beginning anything, and that fear of failure is also generated by our imagination. So take it slow, enjoy the process, don’t rush it.
Open the Door, Just a Crack
Start by opening the door just a crack. Dream big, start small. Take it a step at a time and in bight sized chunks. But begin it. Begin it now!
Create Create Create
We create all the time, it is now time to set yourself free to create to your hearts desire. By this I mean, what is it that your heart truly desires? It is not usually to acquire things, the heart yearns to express, be it love or an express that love through creating something.
1. To cause to come into being, as something unique that would not naturally evolve or that is not made by ordinary processes.
2. To evolve from one’s own thought or imagination, as a work of art or an invention.
3. To cause to happen; bring about; arrange, as by intention or design: to create a revolution as in sustainability movement; to create an opportunity to ask for a raise.
So what do you want to create?
Is it to bring something into being?
Is it to set your imagination free and invent something?
Is it to rearrange your organisation and run it along sound and true lines?
Is it to recreate your life in a new way?
Is it to finally write that book?
Is it to run your household effectively?
Is it bring that bright idea down and design some new invention?
Is it to make your life full and productive while living with cancer?
Is it to fully live your life and explore the depths of your potential?
Whatever it is for you to create, begin it now! There is something in the heart of our beings that longs to express, set yourself free and allow your heart to sing. For the Art of Creative Living encapsulates the creativity of the soul, and fosters a new vision and a new approach to life experience and expression, it portrays wonder and beauty and can be expressed iny our everyday life and puts you firmly in the driver’s seat.
So go forth with joy in your heart and create, create, create!
Unwrapping Your Imagination Exercise
The technique of the ideal model is based on the freedom for you to influence your own destiny. Images can either imprison us or limit us, or we can use them to actuate our greatest wishes. The powers if the imagination are immense and things unfold powerfully if we let them. The imagination is a great gift and this exercise is designed to help unwrap it.
Preparation
- Vividly imagine a chosen goal, or an ideal you, or embodying some concept
- Choose a quality you feel will be helpful at this time in realising your goal, ideal, life purpose etc. For example: love, strength, purity, understanding, joy, peacefulness, unity, compassion, power, or confidence. Be sure this is clear before you begin the next step.
- The following meditation/visualisation should take 5 to 10 minutes and can be performed on more than one occasion.
Meditation
- Now sit comfortably and close your eyes. Take 3 deep breaths slowly in your own time. Allow your body to become still, your emotions to calm and quiet, and your mind to stop racing. Allow your breath to soften, to become quiet and rhythmic.
- Imagine yourself as already having the quality or qualities you have chose, in the highest degree of purity and intensity you can imagine.
- Allow this image to take shape in detail.
- a. See the look in your eyes expressing the quality, your physical posture, your facial expression. (The image may not be very stable in the beginning; it may be fuzzy, or appear and disappear in flashes. Even so, it will exercise a powerful influence on your unconscious.)
- Hold this image in your mind for a few moments, encouraging it to increasingly express the quality you have chosen. Really feel it. Feel it come to life in you.
- Imagine walking into this image and becoming one with it – something like putting on new clothes. As you merge with the image, feel its quality becoming part of you. Imagine how it feels to possess the maximum degree of this quality. Feel you body pervaded by it. Feel it penetrating each one of your cells, flowing in each vein, filling your whole body. Imagine this quality permeating your feelings, your way of thinking and your motives, your speech, your actions.
- Imagine yourself expressing in one or several situations of your everyday life, more of this quality than you previously have. Imagine these situations dynamically and in detail.
- Then in your own time open your eyes and begin to draw, write freely, or write a few key words that express your experience of your unwrapped gift of being your ideal.
