What do you see when you close your eyes? Some say darkness in jest, although there’s a seriousness in-between the lines. It’s a trifling matter anyway: to what advantage is there inhabiting that private world? But lately I think it means everything.
With your imagination, there isn’t any need for words. There’s nothing to yield to. There’s no one to answer to. There’s everything to express. And just as you create you can take away too. What’s unnoticed is how it is linked, for who you imagine yourself to be is who you become. Yet most don’t bother to harness that.
People are impressed with how real their dreams feel, and yet dismiss imagination holding the same essence. A gateway to what and who and why you become. Don’t you find the cultural meme of “waking up” counterintuitive — a swift binary step as metaphor is our best descriptive. Seems absurd. It’s a process, isn’t it? Imagination as the tool of the Mind, animating your pool of knowledge and perception. It hardens, stores, refines beliefs. Yet it can also craft new ones, synthesize from old. It is a companion to the Mind, which alone has to discern which is worth taking in and which is worth discarding, no matter how much Imagination provides in opposition. The Mind clarifies which is Belief, and Imagination plays with those labelled as.
Belief is tech. In no battle would you stab yourself before engaging. And you wouldn’t ever purchase a blender that has reviews of malfunctioning. Nor would you grab a spell that paints with your blood on the mirror “you are a horrible person.” Yet people let their Imagination refine, everyday, equivalent beliefs that do these very things. Why?
The mind accepted these harmful things as belief, and I suppose you get used to everything hurting, so you don’t bother to drop them. I would argue that people get attached to their misery, to protect the mind’s decision. It’s a process to dispose of the blender; you paid a lot for it (in time). And I think it’s also because imagination as a tool takes time to harness; most just let it run on autopilot because they’re already dealing with improper discernment from the mind, that which they can control and unify with imagination to usher in new reality.
So in a plea they admit is because they have observed themselves and this is the result. To yield their perception entirely to things as they are, instead of what you craft them to be. The blender is meant to be, they resolutely state. In that plea they state they’re simply observing reality and accepting its findings: they are sick, stupid, ruined, abandoned, hopeless. They’re just being “honest” about their state of affairs. Yet these things are useless perceptions. And just as the Mind gives them to the imagination to refine them, it can refine the opposites (which the Mind may introduce) to replace them, to encourage the Mind to toss the old: these beliefs don’t have permanent residency.
You got to this state to begin with, and so you can exit, Imagination as gateway. The blender can go. Along with the other beliefs that contribute to your dilapidated state. It may take some time to drop it off at the dumpster, to discern which to keep and which to toss. It may take some time to fill the void with enhancing orbs before your next quest. But it’s a possibility and can be accelerated through Imagination, a jungle to eat that which is hostile, just throw it in (through your mind). You got it, and now you’ll leave it (with some heartfelt sorrow of closing a book, but maybe with some relief soon after, maybe ecstasy, if you have enough imagination and a Mind that’ll harness it).
As much as one wants to state there’s a permanent reality, there are many parts of this reality we just won’t see, and are deceived into perceiving particulars all the time (like love on the big screens). The Senses, our bridge between Mind and reality, act as accomplice to betrayal all the time. But the bridge is useless in itself. It’s the guardian holding post at the other end — your Mind, Imagination at its table — that discerns, concludes, reacts, refines (through imagination) in a constant self-referral process of past experiences, beliefs, etc. Everything that happens and everything said and everything you reacted with and everything you thought after had to be discerned upon its merit, caused from previous discerned beliefs. How it integrates into your understanding, your lattice structure. It’s easier to just let go. With an uncultivated mind, the Senses reign.
Most default to majority rule. Those who do not have a strong mind cannot handle the jeers; reality seems evermore rigid under the thumb of the Other and so they avoid anything that’ll stress their weakened imagination, mind. Censor culture exists because people are unable to entertain that which they disagree with; they’re so deep into defining their way of life and what truth is by other’s assertions, instead of the rigid flow of their own mind. Living dolls, hard to cut strings. Standing on your own comes with the process of leaving behind the feigned comfort before you were tossed for fuel of the fire, that which warms rulers.
So, if imagination is the conveyer belt within our constructs of reality (and reality evolves through the constructs upon its rubber), then we can say imagination precedes reality, or at least needs to be harnessed upon preconceived Beliefs before properly discerning incoming truth and fiction (like this delusion of love that gets passed around) and weaving in your birth-right of bliss as the central mental state. Before seeing the wolves’ ugly teeth. Before becoming that ugliness you despise and yet invaded you. Watching people slowly twist into a fashion you never thought was possible until their spine snaps from the collectively-built foot above.
Imagination. The greatest gift, really, if one learns to appreciate it. It is how you paint and edit and explore knowledge, synthesize unknowns, cultivate intuition. Sometimes I grab a random airing show in that deceptive pursuit of “something new” even though it rests in me. Although people sometimes genuinely did the work for us, in refining Belief through grand displays of collaborative imagination, there’s still a lot of noise to sift through. You still have to discern, and strength of discernment comes from working on what you already got in your inventory, I think. Because as I’m watching sometimes I can’t help but feel the strings reattaching themselves to sterilize my imaginative capacity, to throw me into the cage of isekai, to render my mind limp. Clearly this isn’t it.
Span your own tale, state what is — you are as much of a creator as them and up above. A steady companion Imagination will always be. Your gateway and opium factory.