P{ure Imagination
Art creates melodies that run through our minds when we wake up. It creates images that we dream about. It creates imaginary worlds that we see from our current existence. Art haunts our world with another.
That’s why it is so powerful. Art gets beyond our rational defenses. It gets seeded deep into our imaginations. There it almost breeds without our permission. It clones and spreads and before we know it, there is a mutiny.
Why is this melody stuck in my head? Why am I so drawn into this painting or that movie? What about this picture is so compelling? We don’t even know. Our rational mind can not figure it out. It may be that someone else is in charge for the moment.
Someone else is in our imagination. This imagination, fueled by great art, is given a certain power to take off and run with things. This may be scary but we can trust the informed, mature imagination, even though it does not seek our permission.
Our imagination is the ability to dream about a world that could be, to remove barriers that are not really there. It helps us see the enduring world that actually is, somewhere, just not yet. Imagination inspires vision!
Without vision, we are restricted to what is. We are forced into a limitation that is self-imposed, but one that carries the weight of universal banishment. If we see something as impossible. It is. We must strategically fight this false impulse.
Imagination always believes. It endures the insults that are expected for one who sees what others do not. Imagination is just that: the ability to see a world that does not yet exist. It is not science fiction, as much as it is vision, or the ability to see into a future.
Imagination, in this sense, is basically time-travel to that preferred future. It is the catalyst that gets us on the road there, a road that otherwise would not exist. We don’t create the road, we simply discover it is actually already there, but only as we allow ourselves to see that future end. Only then does it become visible.
Do you see it?
Of course, it is possible that our imagination gets out of line, so out of touch with life that it becomes a distortion of reality. But that is not really imagination at that point, it is disordered fantasy, or escapism. It is a dangerous avoidance of reality.
True imagination is not the ignorance of reality, but its full welcome and acceptance. It is seeing a life possible within reality, and only then, beyond it. Imagination sees a life fully realized, a current reality fully redeemed. It sees everything we think that life can become.
Some will reduce imagination to wishful thinking. They would be wrong. Imagination is something entirely different. At best, wishful thinking is imagination gone completely lazy (and is actually a total lack of trust in the creative will to believe out loud).
Pure imagination, rather, is beautiful, a ride into the truest forms of reality - the real stuff beyond what we can yet see. Everything that has been created came from someone’s imagination. We came from imagination. Life has always come from imagination. It is the beautiful gift of God that leads to life, even life eternal.
