Printed in the Summer 2024 issue of Quest magazine.
Citation: Keene, Douglas "Veiwpoint: Imagine That!" Quest 112:3, pg 10
By Douglas Keene
National President
Imagination. What does that bring to mind? Something wonderful, mysterious, spectacular, or escapist? Or possibly a delusion, a trick, wishful thinking, or something false? Like so much else, It depends a good deal on our nature and nurture.
Imagination is often contrasted with the reality that we perceive through our senses, that which we refer to as the “real world.” We can invoke our imagination to reach beyond our senses for creations, relationships, abilities, and a vast array of applications.
H.P. Blavatsky addresses this concept: “Imagination is . . . one of the strongest elements in human nature, or in the words of Dugald Stewart it ‘is the great spring of human activity, and the principal source of human improvement . . . Destroy the faculty, and the condition of men will become as stationary as that of brutes.’ It is the best guide of our blind senses, without which the latter could never lead us beyond matter and its illusions. The greatest discoveries of modern science are due to the imaginative faculty of the discoverers” (Blavatsky, Collected Works 12:133‒34).
Although Blavatsky indicates that imagination distinguishes us from the “brutes,” our younger siblings in the animal kingdom also demonstrate creativity, although what type of imagination they might have, we can only speculate.
Some scholars believe that classical mythology is based on a combination of history and imagination, used to tell tales and teach lessons to a preliterate society. The divine and semidivine entities that inhabit these myths, both good and evil, are often thought to be products of imagination, and yet the message they convey is much more tangible.
Imagination, whether waking or sleeping, whether conscious or unconscious, is absolutely essential to creativity. All works of art need to be imagined before they can be manifested, even through more palpable media such as architecture and photography. In order for a work of art to exist, it needs to originate in the mind and imagination of its creator. From the plays of Shakespeare to modern dance to the silicon chip, all phenomena were first created in the human imagination.
Where does this imagination come from? Where does it live? Immanuel Kant has written: “Imagination is a powerful agent for creating, as it were, a second nature out of the material supplied to it by actual nature.” But this view—that imagination is derivative—is classically more Western, especially from the eighteenth century on.
In Theosophy, it is noted that imagination can be generated from images in the astral and mental worlds, which often operate largely independently from the physical. In, Annie Besant writes: “Impressions made on the mental body are more permanent than those made on the astral, and they are consciously reproduced by it. Here memory and the organ of imagination begin, and the latter gradually moulds itself, the images from the outer world working on the matter of the mental body in forming its materials into their own likeness” (The Ancient Wisdom, 2d ed., 154).
Children tend to be particularly imaginative, as they are not yet fully adapted to the physical and social governance that the more mundane, concrete world teaches us. Eleanor Roosevelt is noted to have said, “The greatest gift you can give a child is an imagination.” Indeed children seem to come by imagination naturally if their elders can avoid suppressing it. Theosophy teaches us that children may be more in touch with the astral world and other higher vibrations, and that they gradually lose the ability as they become older and more grounded in the physical dimensions of life.
At times, imagination can be equated with dreaming. This is often in the context of unrealistic expectations, such as ideas that one may become a U.S. senator or one’s team may win the World Series. The response “you must be dreaming” denotes misplaced confidence (at least in the opinion of the listener) regarding the imagined outcome of a particular challenge. But the analogy should not be dismissed too quickly. According to Theosophical teachings, nocturnal dreams may, like the imagination, be rooted in nonphysical aspects of ourselves but are no less real than our day-to-day world, although they are generally less accessible.
There are numerous examples of scientific discoveries that were preceded by vivid dreams. Niels Bohr envisioned the structure of an atom during sleep. James Watson dreamt of a spiral staircase that led to discovery of the double helix of DNA. Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity was based on elements of his vision during sleep. Mendeleev’s periodic table of the elements was essentially presented to him during a dream. Thomas Edison felt that his creativity could be enhanced by napping. He would intentionally fall asleep with a ball in each hand; when one fell to the floor, it would wake him, and he could more easily recall images from his twilight state, which might lead to a solution for a problem he was working on. More recently, Larry Page had a nocturnal encounter as a student at Stanford University that led to the basic infrastructure for Google.
The well-known Theosophical text At the Feet of the Master, written by a young Jiddu Krishnamurti, was largely given to him by the Master Koot Hoomi during sleep. Charles Leadbeater gives an account of this: “Every night I had to take this boy in his astral body to the house of the Master, that instruction might be given to him. The Master devoted perhaps 15 minutes each night to talking to him, but at the end of each talk He always gathered up the main points of what He had said into a single sentence, or a few sentences, thus making it an easy little summary which was repeated to the boy, so that he learnt it by heart. He remembered that summary in the morning and wrote it down” (Leadbeater, Talks on the Path of Occultism, 1:24).
There is yet another role for imagination: it is needed to advance our own spiritual awareness and unfoldment. If we rely only what is known through our sensations and logic, we are extremely limited in being able to expand, elevate, and apprehend other states of consciousness. We need imagination to lift ourselves beyond the known, to embrace the unseen, and to understand ourselves. We need to have a vision of the universe and our place in it in order to open our higher nature. Our deeper insights may be called imagination initially, but ultimately they lead to recognition of our true being and the unity of all life.
Imagination can be our closest associate and our most enduring friend. We will never outgrow it, we never need to surrender it, and it can never be taken from us. With this faculty, we can envisage new worlds, transport ourselves in time, accomplish great feats, witness historical events, soar to new places, visit lost loved ones, and endless other possibilities. Just imagine.