Imagination Compilation
Contents
What Is Imagination
… what is called imagination is a capacity to project oneself outside realised things and towards things realisable, and then to draw them by the projection. [1]
Our surface imagination is a selection from a vaster more creative and effective subliminal image-building power of consciousness. [2]
Imagination itself is in its nature a substitute for a truer consciousness faculty of intuition of possibility. [3]
The imagination is really the power of mental formation. When this power is put at the service of the Divine, it is not only formative but also creative. There is, however, no such thing as an unreal formation, because every image is a reality on the mental plane. [4]
When you imagine something, it means that you make a mental formation which may be close to the truth or far from the truth—it also depends upon the quality of your formation. You make a mental formation and there are people who have such a power of formation that they succeed in making what they imagine real. There are not many of these but there are some. They imagine something and their formation is so well made and so powerful that it succeeds in being realised. These are creators; there are not many of them but there are some. [5]
Imaginations that persist in the human mind, like the idea of travel in the air, end often by self-fulfilment; individual thought-formations can actualise themselves if there is sufficient strength in the formation or in the mind that forms it. Imaginations can create their own potentiality, especially if they are supported in the collective mind, and may in the long run draw on themselves the sanction of the cosmic Will. In fact all imaginations represent possibilities: some are able one day to actualise in some form, perhaps a very different form of actuality; more are condemned to sterility because they do not enter into the figure or scheme of the present creation, do not come within the permitted potentiality of the individual or do not accord with the collective or the generic principle or are alien to the nature or destiny of the containing world-existence. [6]
Our mind is an observer and user of actualities, a diviner or recipient of truths not yet known or actualised, a dealer in possibilities that mediate between the truth and actuality. But it has not the omniscience of an infinite Consciousness; it is limited in knowledge and has to supplement its restricted knowledge by imagination and discovery. It does not, like the infinite Consciousness, manifest the known, it has to discover the unknown; it seizes the possibilities of the Infinite, not as results or variations of forms of a latent Truth, but as constructions or creations, figments of its own boundless imagination. It has not the omnipotence of an infinite conscious Energy; it can only realise or actualise what the cosmic Energy will accept from it or what it has the strength to impose or introduce into the sum of things because the secret Divinity, superconscient or subliminal, which uses it intends that that should be expressed in Nature. [7]
Nature of Imagination
… our mind has the faculty of imagination; it can create and take as true and real its own mental structures: here, it might be thought, is something analogous to the action of Maya. Our mental imagination is an instrument of Ignorance; it is the resort or device or refuge of a limited capacity of knowledge, a limited capacity of effective action. Mind supplements these deficiencies by its power of imagination: it uses it to extract from things obvious and visible the things that are not obvious and visible; it undertakes to create its own figures of the possible and the impossible; it erects illusory actuals or draws figures of a conjectured or constructed truth of things that are not true to outer experience. That is at least the appearance of its operation; but, in reality, it is the mind's way or one of its ways of summoning out of Being its infinite possibilities, even of discovering or capturing the unknown possibilities of the Infinite. But, because it cannot do this with knowledge, it makes experimental constructions of truth and possibility and a yet unrealised actuality: as its power of receiving inspirations of Truth is limited, it imagines, hypothetises, questions whether this or that may not be truths; as its force to summon real potentials is narrow and restricted, it erects possibilities which it hopes to actualise or wishes it could actualise; as its power to actualise is cramped and confined by the material world's oppositions, it figures subjective actualisations to satisfy its will of creation and delight of self-presentation. But it is to be noted that through the imagination it does receive a figure of truth, does summon possibilities which are afterwards realised, does often by its imagination exercise an effective pressure on the world's actualities. [8]
Imagination itself is in its nature a substitute for a truer consciousness's faculty of intuition of possibility: as the mind ascends towards the truth-consciousness, this mental power becomes a truth imagination which brings the colour and light of the higher truth into the limited adequacy or inadequacy of the knowledge already achieved and formulated and, finally, in the transforming light above it gives place wholly to higher truth-powers or itself turns into intuition and inspiration; the Mind in that uplifting ceases to be a creator of delusions and an architect of error. Mind then is not a sovereign creator of things non-existent or erected in a void: it is an ignorance trying to know; its very illusions start from a basis of some kind and are the results of a limited knowledge or a half-ignorance. [9]
Source of Imagination
The source from which these imaginations come has nothing to do with the reason and does not care for any rational objections. They come either from the vital mind, the same source from which come all the fine imaginations and long stories which men tell themselves in which they are the heroes and do great things or they come from little entities attached to the physical mind which pick up any random suggestion anywhere and present it to the mind just to see whether it will be accepted. If one watches oneself closely one can find the most queer and extraordinary or nonsensical things crossing the mind or peeping in on it in this way. Usually one laughs or hardly notices and the thing falls back to the world of incoherent thought from which it came. [12]
Vital Mind and Imagination
By the higher vital parts of the nature I mean the vital mind, the emotional nature, the life-force dynamis in the being. The vital mind is that part of the vital being which builds, plans, imagines. [13]
… an unbalanced vital and a weak nervous system apt to follow its own imaginations and unruled impulses without any true mental will or strong vital will to steady or restrain it, and so at the mercy of the imaginations. [14]
This at once raises the question of the nature of Mind, the parent of these illusions, and its relation to the original Existence. Is mind the child and instrument of an original Illusion, or is it itself a primal miscreating Force or Consciousness? or is the mental ignorance a misprision of the truths of Existence, a deviation from an original Truth-Consciousness which is the real world-builder? Our own mind, at any rate, is not an original and primary creative power of Consciousness; it is, and all mind of the same character must be, derivative, an instrumental demiurge, an intermediary creator. It is likely then that analogies from the errors of mind, which are the outcome of an intermediate Ignorance, may not truly illustrate the nature or action of an original creative Illusion, an all-inventing and all-constructing Maya. Our mind stands between a superconscience and an inconscience and receives from both these opposite powers: it stands between an occult subliminal existence and an outward cosmic phenomenon; it receives inspirations, intuitions, imaginations, impulsions to knowledge and action, figures of subjective realities or possibilities from the unknown inner source; it receives the figures of realised actualities and their suggestions of further possibility from the observed cosmic phenomenon. What it receives are truths essential, possible or actual; it starts from the realised actualities of the physical universe and it brings out from them in its subjective action the unrealised possibilities which they contain or suggest or to which it can arrive by proceeding from them as a starting-point: it selects some out of these possibilities for a subjective action and plays with imagined or inwardly constructed forms of them; it chooses others for objectivisation and attempts to realise them. But it receives inspirations also from above and within, from invisible sources and not only from the impacts of the visible cosmic phenomenon; it sees truths other than those suggested by the actual physicality around it, and here too it plays subjectively with transmitted or constructed forms of these truths or it selects for objectivisation, attempts to realise. [15]
Thus the mind's imaginations are not purely and radically illusory: they proceed on the basis of its experience of actualities or at least set out from that, are variations upon actuality, or they figure the "may-be"s or "might-be"s of the Infinite, what could be if other truths had manifested, if existing potentials had been otherwise arranged or other possibilities than those already admitted became potential. Moreover, through this faculty forms and powers of other domains than that of the physical actuality communicate with our mental being. Even when the imaginations are extravagant or take the form of hallucinations or illusions, they proceed with actuals or possibles for their basis. The mind creates the figure of a mermaid, but the phantasy is composed of two actualities put together in a way that is outside the earth's normal potentiality; angels, griffins, chimeras are constructed on the same principle: some times the imagination is a memory of former actualities as in the mythical figure of the dragon, sometimes it is a figure or a happening that is real or could be real on other planes or in other conditions of existence… Again, when we look into the origin of mental error, we find normally that it is a miscombination, misplacement, misuse, misunderstanding or misapplication of elements of experience and knowledge. [16]
Different Types of Imaginations
Truth-imagination
Mental Imaginations Arising from an Ordinary Level
Luminous Formations and Dark Formations
Misuse of Imagination
Acts in a Random and Excessive Way Without Discipline
Giving a Form to Your Fears
Wrong Thinking and Illness
Imagination and Yoga
Imagination and Children
Practices
You Can Make a Marvel of Your World
...one must have a lively power of imagination, for―I seem to be telling you stupid things, but it is quite true―there is a world in which you are the supreme maker of forms: that is your own particular vital world. You are the supreme fashioner and you can make a marvel of your world if you know how to use it. If you have an artistic or poetic consciousness, if you love harmony, beauty, you will build there something marvellous which will tend to spring up into the material manifestation. [27]
Seek Beyond the Manifestation
For Writers
- ↑ http://incarnateword.in/cwm/07/6-july-1955#p40
- ↑ http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/21/memory-ego-and-self-experience#p15
- ↑ http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/21/the-cosmic-illusion-mind-dream-and-hallucination#p25
- ↑ http://incarnateword.in/cwm/03/power-of-imagination#p1
- ↑ http://incarnateword.in/cwm/07/6-july-1955#p25
- ↑ http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/21/the-cosmic-illusion-mind-dream-and-hallucination#p24
- ↑ http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/21/the-cosmic-illusion-mind-dream-and-hallucination#p22
- ↑ http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/21/the-cosmic-illusion-mind-dream-and-hallucination#p24
- ↑ http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/21/the-cosmic-illusion-mind-dream-and-hallucination#p25
- ↑ http://incarnateword.in/cwm/05/24-june-1953#p59
- ↑ http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/23/the-planes-of-our-existence#p10
- ↑ http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/28/the-vital-being-and-vital-consciousness#p20
- ↑ http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/28/the-vital-being-and-vital-consciousness#p16
- ↑ http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/31/accidents-possession-madness#p32
- ↑ http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/21/the-cosmic-illusion-mind-dream-and-hallucination#p21
- ↑ http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/21/the-cosmic-illusion-mind-dream-and-hallucination#p2
- ↑ http://incarnateword.in/cwm/09/3-september-1958#p7
- ↑ http://incarnateword.in/cwm/09/3-september-1958#p9
- ↑ http://incarnateword.in/cwm/09/3-september-1958#p1
- ↑ http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/28/the-vital-being-and-vital-consciousness#p18
- ↑ http://incarnateword.in/cwm/03/power-of-imagination#p1
- ↑ http://incarnateword.in/cwm/15/wrong-thinking-and-illness#p1
- ↑ http://incarnateword.in/cwm/15/wrong-thinking-and-illness#p23
- ↑ http://incarnateword.in/cwm/15/wrong-thinking-and-illness#p1
- ↑ http://incarnateword.in/cwm/03/power-of-imagination#p2
- ↑ http://incarnateword.in/cwm/05/30-december-1953#p3
- ↑ http://incarnateword.in/cwm/08/18-april-1956#p55
- ↑ http://incarnateword.in/cwm/07/6-july-1955#p38
- ↑ http://incarnateword.in/cwm/07/6-july-1955#p40
- ↑ http://incarnateword.in/cwm/07/6-july-1955#p42
- ↑ http://incarnateword.in/cwm/07/6-july-1955#p44
- ↑ http://incarnateword.in/cwm/07/6-july-1955#p32
- ↑ http://incarnateword.in/cwm/04/26-february-1951#p23