Tao Te Ching
Imagination
Imagination may be one of the least acknowledged forces of nature. A powerful influence fostering both clarity and delusion, both evolution and corruption; it generates both progress and decline, both science and superstition, both love and hate. It fathered both 250 years of European belief that millions of devils and witches roamed the earth causing calamities and tormenting humans; and, the artistic pinnacles of paintings, music, sculpture, and literature. It manifests as both hypochondria’s experience of illness that doesn’t exist as well as the placebo effect dissolving illness that does. How can we channel the immense power of imagination into a beneficial rather than a detrimental direction?
Imagination takes us to a road fork. One path leads to the world of illusion where we continually chase rainbows but only create more pain and suffering. The other direction takes us to the world of true creativity, authentic presence, and awakened awareness.
Schopenhauer describes the interplay between imagination and perceptions, how imagination flourishes when there are less perceptions. And how when we’re traveling, caught up in the busy intensity of our lives, and in visually stimulating environments; our imaginations take a vacation. He also notes however that imagination can only bloom in those private, dark, unstimulated moments when a great deal of material from the external world has already been gathered and stored in our consciousness.
See also Creativity.
Quotes (81)
“Would anyone fall in love if he had never heard or read about such a delirium?”
“"secret sewers of vice ... canalized in its flood of unimaginable thoughts, images, and pornographic words, revolting blasphemies [which] debases and perverts and degrades the noble gift of imagination"”
“Don’t recall, don’t imagine, don’t think, don’t examine, don’t control, rest.”
“Without leaving a trace, let mind and dharma become one and wander into the circle of wonder.”
“We are all meant to be mothers of God...for God is always needing to be born.”
“Since that mind has no cause and is not an object that comes into being, it does not abide in any finite way, is inexpressible, and transcends the realm of the imagination... It is not within the realm of the imagination, for it defies illustration or description.”
“Imagination leads man's life. If he thinks of fire, he is on fire; if he thinks of war, he will cause war. All depends only upon man's imagination; that he imagines wholly that which he wills.”
“Act in a crisis with calm, and act during a calm by thinking ahead of a crisis.”
“And, as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen
Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.”
“The imagination always jumps too soon and paints things in brighter colors than the real.”
“Men are linked with animals, these with plants, and these again with fossils which in their turn are connected with elements that sense and imagination represents to us as completely dead”
“The world of reality has its limits; the world of imagination is boundless.”
“The ripening of reason regulates the imagination. This is the work of years, and the most important of all employments.”
“The poet brings the whole soul of a man into activity, diffuses a tone and spirit of unity that blends each into each by that magical power we call imagination.”
“We learn to curb our will and keep our overt actions within the bounds of humanity, long before we can subdue our sentiments and imaginations”
“The more active the imagination, the fewer perceptions from outside transmitted to us by the senses. Long periods of silence and solitude nurture it, journeys, the bustle of life, and high noons of stimulation chase it far away.”
“I am certain of nothing but of the holiness of the heart's affections, and the truth of Imagination… My Imagination is a Monastery and I am its Monk.”
“Reason is intelligence taking exercise; imagination is intelligence with an erection.”
“All religion, my friend, is simply evolved out of fraud, fear, greed, imagination, and poetry.”
“The refuge of radiant awareness is closer, more profound, easier, and more wondrous than we can imagine.”
“...the imagination that reveals subtle actions inaccessible by any sort of lens, but tracked in that outer darkness through long pathways of necessary sequence by the inward light which is the last refinement of energy, capable of bathing even the etheral atoms in its ideally illuminated space.”
“What is imagination? Psychologists tell us that it is the plastic or creative power of the soul; but materialists confound it with fancy... Imagination, Pythagoras maintained to be the remembrance of precedent spiritual, mental, and physical states, while fancy is the disorderly production of the material brain.”
“An Englishman is a person who does things because they have been done before. An American is a person who does things because they haven't been done before.”
“To imagine a set of utterly strange and impossible contingencies and require the youths to give intelligent answers to the question that arise is reckoned the fittest conceivable way of preparing them for the actual conduct of their affairs in after life... to teach a boy merely the nature of the things which exist in the word around him would be giving him but a narrow and shallow conception of the universe”
“Be not afraid of life. Believe that life is worth living, and your belief will help create the fact.”
“The reinvention of daily life means marching off the edge of our maps.”
“We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.”
“I do not rush into actual work. When I get an idea I start at once building it up in my imagination. I change the construction, make improvements, and operate the device entirely in my mind.”
“It is a common mistake to avoid imaginary, and ignore the real dangers”
“Imagination is the only key to the future. Without it none exists - with it all things are possible.”
“Every great advance in science has issued from a new audacity of imagination.”
“Old age is like death in that some face it with indifference, not because they have more courage than others, but because they have less imagination.”
“Life holds hardly any interest except on the days when the dust of reality is mingled with magic sand—when some ordinary incident of life becomes a springboard for the imagination.”
“The only way to attack language is to attack it... there are no certainties, even grammatical ones... Every writer is obliged to create his own language, as every violinist is obliged to create his own 'tone'... they begin to write well only on condition that they're original, that they create their own language... only that which bears the imprint of our choice, our taste, our uncertainty, our desire and our weakness can be beautiful.”
“In order to understand fully the inner worldly order, one must imagine it as transparent, so that the primordial order is seen through it.”
“she still had that something which fires the imagination… that somehow revealed the meaning in common things… to make you feel the goodness of planting and tending and harvesting at last… It was no wonder that her sons stood tall and straight. She was a rich mine of life, like the founders of early races.”
“Spontaneous fantasies become more and more profound concentrating in abstract structures, 'principles,' true gnostic archai that create intuitive formulations that tend to be dramatized or personified.”
“Imagination is everything. It is the preview of life’s coming attractions. Imagination is more important than knowledge.”
“This struggle between reality and imagination had momentarily intoxicated my heart... By means of imagination I had obliterated reality, and I felt relieved... the ashes had turned back into an apple, and I was holding this apple in my hand.”
“We must unlearn our ideas about an unchangeable human nature and an omnipotent environment. There is no knowable limit to change or growth; and perhaps there is nothing impossible but thinking makes it so.”
“Imagination is the voice of daring. If there is anything Godlike about God it is that. He dared to imagine everything.”
“his heart was in a constant, turbulent riot.. For awhile these reveries provided an outlet for his imagination; they were a satisfactory hint of the unreality of reality, a promise that the rock of the world was founded securely on a fairy's wing.”
“The power of the creative imagination is not only merely content with observing the world as it is, accepting a given reality, but is capable of creating a new reality by transforming the inner as well as the outer world”
“every man's mind ought to keep working all his life long; every man's imagination should be touched as often as possible by great works of imagination... education ought to end only with life itself.”
“It is the essence of a symbol that its outlines should be shadowy. What has first been sifted through the intellect is unlikely to ensnare the imagination.”
“Rigor alone is paralytic death, but imagination alone is insanity.”
“Against the ruin of the world, there is only one defense—the creative act.”
“A sense of humor is incompatible with the complete acceptance of any dogma, any religious, political, or economic prescription for salvation. It synthesizes with curiosity, irreverence, and imagination.”
“We are so obsessed with doing that we have no time and no imagination left for being. As a result, men are valued not for what they are but for what they do or what they have - for their usefulness.”
“What sphinx of cement and aluminum bashed open their skulls and ate up their brains and imagination?”
“If you cannot or will not imagine the results of your actions, there's no way you can act morally or responsibly,”
“This is certainly our most remarkable human characteristic: imagination. Animals require actual physical stimuli to trigger their experience. A man can retreat into a book—or a daydream... Such a curious ability is far beyond the power of any animal.”
“our imagination does not create within its outlines but creates the outlines themselves... the things we thought were there are not things at all.”
“we constantly assume that there is a 'mystery,' something which we do not know—the meaning of life, the key to happiness—as long as we continue to look for a conceptual answer, there will always be areas of mystery”
“And all of the colors are black... It's just imagination they lack. Everything's the same back in my little town.
”
“The only deserts are deserts of the imagination.”
“From Ushikawa’s perspective, they were irretrievably shallow. To him, their minds were dull, their vision narrow and devoid of imagination, and all they cared about was what other people thought… completely lacking in… any degree of wisdom.”
“There are plenty of things in history that are best left in the shadows. Accurate knowledge does not improve people’s lives… The objective does not necessarily surpass the subjective, you know. Reality does not necessarily extinguish fantasy…”
“Imagine feeling completely satisfied and content with your life just as it is.”
“Imagination is not only the uniquely human capacity to envision that which is not, and therefore the fount of all invention and innovation. In its arguably most transformative and revelatory capacity, it is the power that enables us to empathize with humans whose experiences we have never shared.”
“Imagining a world creates it, if it isn't already there. That's the great secret of existence: it's supersensitive to thought. Decisions, wishes, lies—that's all you need to create a new universe.”
“Our perceptions are false. The objects of our perceptions are neither false nor true... Is the body real? Is there such a thing as a 'real' self or a 'false' self? The term no-self does not mean 'false self' yet it's not real in ways that we imagine.”
“Large numbers of strangers can cooperate successfully by believing in common myths. Any large-scale human cooperation – whether a modern state, a medieval church, an ancient city or an archaic tribe – is rooted in common myths that exist only in people’s collective imagination.”
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