Just for fun now, imagine a black cat sleeping on a white pillow, the surprise of cool water as you dive into a pool or the taste of one of your favorite foods. Or pretend that as you are reading this, you are feeling light as a feather, lighter and lighter, so light that you are beginning to lift slightly out of your seat. Can you see it in your mind’s eye? Can you feel it? As you do this, you are engaging your power of imagination.
The imagination may be one of the most valuable capacities that humankind engages with. I say engages with here because I don’t believe it is just something we humans do. I believe it is a function of the universe that we participate in. We imagine, but we are also being imagined.
Beyond its usual definition -- the ability to conceive something that does not physically exist -- the imagination does seem to affect, or even determine, what we notice in everyday life, and what we notice plays a big part in how we perceive or even construct our reality. The imagination is often dismissed as daydreaming or fantasy, but the imagination may be much more active in creating our experience of the world than we realize. Of course, we use our imaginations all the time to create, to speculate, to imagine ourselves and our world differently, and when these imaginings are manifested as inventions, as art and as new ways of thinking and being, we can grow and evolve. But it is more.
In his book, Lost Knowledge of the Imagination, writer Gary Lachman defines it this way: “The imagination is simply our ability to grasp reality, or even, in some strange way, to create it, or at least to contribute in its creation.” Beyond daydreaming or simple fantasy, “the real work of the imagination,” Lachman writes, “is to make contact with the strange world in which we live and to serve as both guide and inspiration for our development within it. It is the way we evolve. Imagination presents us with possible, potential realities that it is our job to actualize.” This is certainly not what most people would say when asked what the imagination is.
Indeed, Michael Murphy has said that if he were to write The Future of the Body today, he would add the capacity of imagination to his categories of supernormal functioning. Like the other capacities he describes, the imagination can be developed, and has a wide range of expression, from simple daydreaming to a supernormal kind of empowered imagination that can have real physical effects in the body and world.
As we usually think of the imagination as a function of our mind, which many of us believe is locked in our skull, it can be hard to believe that it can have physical effects both on ourselves and the world around us. However, there are plenty of reasons to believe that it can and does. Consider the well-documented -- but still mysterious -- placebo effect, where belief in the benefit of a medical treatment can trigger a healing response in the body, even though it is a sham treatment. In some cases, the patient is even aware of this, and it still works. Consider also Dean Radin’s many experiments on remote mental influence that seem to confirm our capacity to influence each other, or objects, with our attention and intention. Jess Hollenback takes us further down the rabbit hole in his book Mysticism, Experience, Response, and Empowerment. Here he coined the term “empowered imagination” to describe an advanced form of the imagination that is supercharged with intensely focused thoughts and desires, frequently accompanied by mystical states of consciousness. This type of imagination is said to be able to affect the outer world, changing or even giving rise to physical objects.
Given examples like these, we might want to take the imagination more seriously. It can give us access to information and energies otherwise unavailable to us, and when fueled by need or desire, it can be a powerful vehicle to manifest our intentions for our lives. Through the imagination, practice and focused intention, we can redesign our bodies and minds. “Not only ourselves, but the world becomes what we imagine it to be,” writes Lachman in The Lost Knowledge of the Imagination.