Imagination is a Power of Formation

Most people tend to respond to life circumstances and opportunities based on past experience, training, education and any guidelines or rules they have imbibed from their past, all combined with their basic outlook on their lives, their desires, their needs and their circumstances. We can say that they are focused primarily on the past and the present. They do not attempt to develop the power of imagination to any degree, as they do not see how it ‘fits’ their day to day lives. They tend to repeat habitual patterns and live their lives and carry out their responses along pre-determined, and highly predictable lines.

There are others, however, who value, and utilize the power of imagination. Imagination can take several forms. It can be ‘inventive’ to develop advancements, progress or otherwise potentially foreseeable steps forward in a progression. In that instance, it is more an extension of the use of reason and the logical intellect to assess what “next steps” may result from a present that is based on a sequential series of past steps. Progress in this case is based on incremental development and the use of imagination is focused on trying to understand the trajectory and line of development.

Another type of imagination is essentially a process of visualization of what we would like to see as a result of some activity. Thus, runners are asked to visualize the running of their race, so that when the actual event takes place, they already have a formation in their minds. This type of imagination also has a role in healing. The ‘placebo effect’ is very much based on the imagination of the individual anticipating they are getting real medical support for a condition from which they are suffering, and that imagination actually sets processes going in the mind and body to undertake the necessary healing. It is claimed that the ‘placebo effect’ accounts for as much as 30% of the results in studies that utilize a placebo; yet we can also speculate that even for those who get the active drug, a considerable amount of the actual healing is due to this same effect working in conjunction with the drug’s specific action.

When we refer to imagination, however, we primarily refer to the ability to envision something that does not exist and is not simply a “next step” in a sequence, but something new and unexpected. People have watched birds fly and dreamed of flying. They worked to understand the principles of aerodynamics, air currents, lift and gravity, and forward momentum, etc. Eventually this led to the development of numerous forms of machinery we use for flying, airplanes, dirigibles, rocket ships, helicopters, and even personal jet packs, with further advancements sure to follow. Similarly, someone envisioned landing on the moon at a time when there were no technological capabilities that would support that idea. Eventually, however, that imagination led to the development of a space program and the moon landings that have occurred.

Imagination may be a fanciful recombining of elements that ordinarily do not belong together; it may be a vision that an individual has that leads to some creative result. Nikola Tesla described how he saw the vision of the alternating current motor and later was able to realize that in a practical form. He similarly was able to envision wireless communication, wireless transmission of energy, protective shields, etc. that clearly represented an advanced use of imagination.

The Tibetan Buddhist tradition makes considerable use of imagination through training of practices in visualization that aid the practitioner in the achievement of the spiritual intention in their own lives and experience.

When we envision a world of peace, a world of harmony, a world of sharing and caring, we are practicing another form of imagination that differs from the reality of the external world as most human beings experience it. As more people undertake this form of imagination it gains power of effectuation so that at some point in the future, we shall have overcome the forces of darkness and division that destroy, pollute, breed separation and hatred, and create thereby massive suffering, wars, mass migrations, and terrible, painful diseases and deaths due to pollution and other mismanagement of our lives, collectively, on this planet.

The Mother writes: “Imagination is a power of formation. In fact, people who have no imagination are not formative from the mental point of view, they cannot give a concrete power to their thought. Imagination is a very powerful means of action. For instance, if you have a pain somewhere and if you imagine that you are making the pain disappear or are removing it or destroying it — all kinds of images like that — well, you succeed perfectly.”

“There’s a story of a person who was losing her hair at a fantastic rate, enough to become bald within a few weeks, and then someone told her, ‘When you brush your hair, imagine that it is growing and will grow very fast.’ And always, while brushing her hair, she said, ‘Oh! my hair is growing, oh! it will grow very fast….’ And it happened! But what people usually do is tell themselves, ‘Ah! all my hair is falling again and I shall become bald, that’s certain, it’s going to happen!’ “

“And of course it happens!”

Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, Powers Within, Chapter III Imagination, pg. 26