“People sometimes recognize that the content of their thoughts defines the limits of their reality; but they rarely notice that these thoughts also give rise to a SPACE that is limited and holds them in check.” – The Magician Awakes, Jon Rappoport
Jon Rappoport – I call it new because it still has not been given its proper due. Imagination is beyond “subject matter” or “content” or “knowledge” or “systems” or “philosophy” or “metaphysics.”
Imagination is not something you pursue, like a lost mine or a species of plant never seen before. Imagination is not an object.
It can solve problems. It can dispense with a problem altogether. But imagination is not a solution. It isn’t a method.
Imagination is already there in every person, as a potential. To put it in a slightly different way, imagination comes into being the moment you want it. Even more accurately, perhaps, imagination is imagining. It’s an action. When you want to take that action, you can.
What imagination invents is, of course, different from person to person. Why? Because there is no pre-set pattern. There is no “final answer” at which imagination arrives.
A painter can say, “This painting is the embodiment of everything I’ve been reaching for,” but if he think that means imagination has served its function and can then fold up and dissolve, he is mistaken.
Where does imagining happen? That’s an interesting question. Many years ago, an old acquaintance of mine told me the following amusing story: A painter of horses felt she had come to the end of the line because she wanted to paint large horses on large canvases, but she was convinced she couldn’t picture the large horses because…imagining was taking place in her brain, and her brain was small.