Imagination: Architect of Reality

Through the annals of history, all great minds - of poets, writers, philosophers, artists, athletes, statesmen, and scientists like Einstein - have cited the use of creative imagination as essential in bringing forth their respective visions into the material realm.

"Logic will get you from A to B. Imagination will take you everywhere." Albert Einstein

"Imagination creates reality." Richard Wagner

"Imagination governs the world." Napoleon Bonaparte

"I have fallen in love with the imagination. And if you fall in love with the imagination, you understand that it is a free spirit. It will go anywhere, and it can do anything." Alice Walker

To the above quoted luminaries - and the countless score of inspired souls down the ages, whether painter or plowman, soldier or suffragette - the utilization of the imaginative faculty was not merely to serve as an arena for the staging of lifeless day dreams, or the breeding ground for feverish delusions of grandeur. It was nothing less than the workshop of the mind, where grand thoughts and noble visions are forged by the fiery smith of conviction into tangible, physical reality. For some, it was something yet grander; In the words of William Blake, "Man is all Imagination. God is Man and exists in us and we Him... The Eternal Body of Man is the Imagination, that is, God, Himself ." 

Indeed, those intrepid visionaries such as Blake - who both the uninformed masses and the dogmatic gatekeepers of the stunted status quo condescendingly labeled "mystics" - have only articulated with forceful beauty the sentiment expressed by the inquisitive searchers of truth of all times:

"Mind is the Master power that moulds and makes,

And Man is Mind, and evermore he takes

The tool of Thought, and, shaping what he wills,

Brings forth a thousand joys, a thousand ills: —

He thinks in secret, and it comes to pass:

Environment is but his looking-glass." 

Befitting her inherent ability of myriad manifestation, she has donned many different masks throughout the ongoing run of Creation - God, Allah, Brahma, Yahweh, Tao, Fortune, to name but a few of her perceived forms - yet the Muse of Imagination has been ever present, working in tandem with earnest, expansive minds to bring "into existence the things that do not exist" (Romans 4:17). 

The voices of glorious antiquity sound their testimony to her ability - as directed by the current of individual, and in turn, collective human thought - to form "light and create darkness,

make weal and create woe" (Isaiah 45: 7):

"The universe is change; our life is what our thoughts make it." Marcus Aurelius

"If we are not stupid or insincere when we say that the good or ill of man lies within his own will, and that all beside is nothing to us, why are we still troubled?" Epictetus

"A happy life consists in tranquility of mind." Cicero

"To the mind that is still, the whole universe surrenders." Lao Tzu

Even the contents of the Christian Scriptures, when viewed thorough the illuminating lens of vivid psychology allegory and metaphor, stand in firm solidarity with the insight of the "heathen" experience:

"For as he thinks in his heart, so is he." Proverbs 23: 7

"You will also declare a thing,

And it will be established for you;

So light will shine on your ways." Job 22:28

"So Jesus answered and said to them, “Have faith in God. For assuredly, I say to you, whoever says to this mountain, ‘Be removed and be cast into the sea,’ and does not doubt in his heart, but believes that those things he says will be done, he will have whatever he says. Therefore I say to you, whatever things you ask when you pray, believe that you receive them, and you will have them." Mark 11: 22 - 24

"That is all well good," I can imagine the doctrinaire materialist scoffing, "Yet nothing but abstract theory and fanciful metaphysical musing! Hard, empirical evidence if you please, dear sir!"

Ask, and you shall receive, to borrow a line. The miracles of science as demonstrated by her storied prophets have only verified and reinforced the earlier observations of the ancients.

There is the old story of August Kekule, the renowned German chemist known for his contributions to the field of theoretical chemistry, who discovered the shape of the benzene molecule via a day dream of a snake seizing its own tail (the ancient Ouroboros symbolizing regeneration; Carl Jung believed it to be a significant archetypal image).  

The celebrated Nikola Tesla attested strongly to the role that concentrated and inventive thought played in his illustrious career:

"I am credited with being one of the hardest workers and perhaps I am, if thought is the equivalent of labour, for I have devoted to it almost all of my waking hours …

"The gift of mental power comes from God, Divine Being, and if we concentrate our minds on that truth, we become in tune with this great power."

The Wizard of Menlo Park, Thomas Edison, without whom we would quite likely still be reading by candlelight, remarked, "To invent, you need a good imagination and a pile of junk."

And, of course, there is the monumental paradigm shifting work of Albert Einstein, whose theory of relativity revolutionized the scientific view of the Cosmos from a static Newtonian model to an expanding universe. Quoth the sage, "The true sign of intelligence is not knowledge but imagination."

In light of Einstein's revelations, the field of physics has slowly begun to entertain and accept the idea, long held by the esoteric philosophical schools, of an ever evolving and expanding Universal Mind that animates and sustains all creation, of which humanity as a portion of can access through use of the mental faculty. Sir Arthur Eddington, prominent English physicist and one of the earliest supporters of Einstein's theory of relativity, posited in The Nature of the Physical World:

"The universe is of the nature of a thought or sensation in a universal Mind... To put the conclusion crudely — the stuff of the world is mind-stuff... The mind-stuff of the world is something more general than our individual conscious minds; but we may think of its nature as not altogether foreign to feelings in our consciousness... Having granted this, the mental activity of the part of world constituting ourselves occasions no great surprise; it is known to us by direct self-knowledge, and we do not explain it away as something other than we know it to be — or rather, it knows itself to be."

Eddington's contemporary, Sir James Jeans, believed likewise. From his The Mysterious Universe:

"Today there is a wide measure of agreement, which on the physical side of science approaches almost to unanimity, that the stream of knowledge is heading towards a non-mechanical reality; the universe begins to look more like a great thought than like a great machine. Mind no longer appears as an accidental intruder into the realm of matter; we are beginning to suspect that we ought rather to hail it as a creator and governor of the realm of matter..."

Weighty testimonials by any standard, from a plethora of epochs and fields, attesting to the immeasurable - no, infinite - capacity of the mind, once grasped by all of Mother Nature's children, to effectively achieve harmonious accord with those invisible yet palpable forces around us, with which we live, move and have our being. With the reality altering findings furnished by science, the words of the Psalmist cease to be the stuff of mere poetic fancy:

"I said, “You are gods,

And all of you are children of the Most High..."

Though humankind, so beautifully slow in its understanding, still pays fealty to the primacy of the "real" world of sense, and remains shackled, like Prometheus of old, to the rock of "Fate";

"But you shall die like men,
And fall like one of the princes.” 

But it is only so because we believe it so. The philosophes of both past and present have boldly tread the ground and lighted the path; it remains for each of us to cast the dye and venture forth across our own Rubicons. Whether we are crowned with the champion's laurel wreath or share in Caesar's ultimate fate depends upon our steering of the rudders of thought.

Only through experiment in the laboratory of shall we discover, as related in Khayyam's learned verse,

"I sent my Soul through the Invisible,

Some letter of that After-life to spell:

And by and by my Soul return'd to me,

And answer'd "I Myself am Heav'n and Hell:"

Heav'n but the Vision of fulfill'd Desire,

And Hell the Shadow from a Soul on fire."

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