It’s Just Your Imagination

Imagination is something that children appear to have in great abundance, but what we “imagine” that they are doing is, in my view, only one form of imagination. I think that we are all using forms of it most of the time. What a child seems to be doing, which adults also do, is to “bring possibilities to mind”. That opening into possibility is clearly innate in children. They seem to swim in a sea of it. Adults reach into that same expanse, using a familiar and long practiced way, to allow a particular type of imaginative flow to arise from it. It is still innate in us too. Artists do this type of accessing with more apparent ease than most of the rest of us. “What’s possible here?” does not always need to be asked. They simply open up, I imagine, to the space of possibility, just like children do.

But that is not the only flavor of imagination. Think about when you are listening to someone describing just about anything. You cannot have their experience so you are using your imagination in order to access some semblance of what they are describing. It’s an opening up of possibility too, but it is being directed by your sensings of the expressions of another. Listening, to any degree, will guide one towards the space from which those words and expressions are arising.

Now think about when you are describing your experience to someone. Moments after your experience, you are no longer having that experience. You are describing your memory of the experience. Remembering requires a reaching back and re-creating an experience that had been present. Re-creativity requires imagination. The farther in the past the experience was, the less tangible it tends to be so your ability to re-create it diminishes over time. But it can often be the case that if someone is truly tuned into you, their listening can re-presence the experience better than you can remembering it on your own. Their alignment with you can more precisely bring forth your original experience. In a way, it is being almost re-presenced through you, into and beyond them. Your re-creation touches their imagination.

Here’s another form. How often do you imagine how good, or bad, something might be? Phrases like “I was just wondering”, “I’m dreading” and “I’m looking forward to” are all examples of using your imagination. This seems to occur even if you are not deliberately imagining or wondering about it. There is often some anticipation occurring about the future, or maybe fretting over the past, though this may be on the edges of conscious awareness and spread out in many layers.

Creative intent is also a form of imagination. This does not have to be artistic. It can be as simple as intending to get somewhere on time, planning a work project, baking some new dessert or following a sporting event closely with the intent that your favored team wins. In each there is an imagined outcome that is preferred. There is the opening to possibility followed by focused intent. Like children, it is all about imagining and then, sometimes, creating.

When are we NOT imagining? Maybe only in pure un-languaged experiencing. Everything else just might have a component of imagination in it. It seems to me that all thought might draw upon the same energy of possibility. Perhaps we simply are imagination itself, searching for novel and wonderful experiences to have. And maybe the mind is just a mechanism to manifest some of what we’ve imagined so that we may have those experiences……and share them.