Man’s most valuable asset is ‘imagination’.
Albert Einstein famously said, “Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world and all there ever will be to know and understand.”
Imagination is basic to our internal lives
Imagination is possibly one of the earliest human abilities and may have preceded language as a medium of thought by thousands of years. Even when we were primitive creatures we probably visualised and pictured within our minds.
It’s through imagination that we go beyond the restrictions of reality and mentally simulate situations and ideas not perceived by the physical senses. It’s an innate human ability to visualise in the mind’s eye what doesn’t exist.
As a medium, imagination is a world where thought and images are nested in the mind to “form a mental concept of what is not actually present to the senses.”
Myths are founded by imagination
Richard Cavendish a scholar of mythologies of the world, writes, “Myths are imaginative traditions about nature, history and destiny of the world, the gods, man and society”.
So, myths, legends and folklore are inventions of man’s imagination. Man’s mind forms and manipulates images, propositions, concepts, emotions, sensations and other cognitive constructs including belief, desire, emotion, memory, supposition, and fantasy.
Ancient myths are generally founded by imagination and intuition rather than objective evidence. Myths identify and help explain human propensities and natural phenomena with the actions and attributes of gods in a primordial past. Brittanica ~ https://www.britannica.com/topic/myth
Mythologies, legends and folklore
The basis of mythology are legends and folk tales.
. Legend is an unsupported fictional and ancient story that cannot be proven or confirmed, which is handed down orally and continues to evolve through time.
Legends usually inspire a slew of interconnected stories that become folklore which are eventually written down and passed on as epic poems and literature.
. Folklore, typically passed down by word of mouth, are fairy tales, fables, folk stories, tales of legendary heroes and how they deal with the events of everyday life; how they overcome crisis and conflict. Folklore are stories that are carried forward by constant retelling. Folktales have no author – they emerge from the culture of the region and are often written down to preserve the stories of a particular community.
. Mythology is a collection of myths or stories about a specific person, culture, religion, or of a group with shared beliefs.
Myths are symbolic, traditional narratives which usually cover whole cycles of tales about human origin and ancestry and the world of gods.
Some legends, folklore and myths supposedly relate actual events that are connected with religious belief and tell us how the world was created, how humans came about, and the origin of God.
Myth is a folklore genre consisting of narratives that play a fundamental role in a society, such as foundational tales or origin myths. Myths are often endorsed by secular and religious authorities and are closely linked to religion or spirituality ~ Wikipedia
Karen Armstrong, in her dissertation on Myth, explains, “a peculiar characteristic of the human mind is its ability to have ideas and experiences that we cannot explain rationally. We have imagination, a faculty that enables us to think of something that is not immediately present, and that, when we first conceive it has no objective existence. The imagination is the faculty that produces religion and mythology. … All mythology speaks of another plane that exists alongside our own world, and that in some sense supports it. Belief in this invisible but more powerful reality, sometimes called the world of gods, is a basic theme of mythology”
Perception and reality
Humans have this unique ability to create things from scratch from thoughts in our heads.
Reality is real. It’s what you can see with your eyes, touch with your hands, taste with your tongue, smell with your nose, hear with your ears. Reality is what you can pick up and show another person and say, “Here, look at this.”
What is not real – Our brains have the capacity to our own convincing realities. We find it easy to believe our own perceptions. Our own personal, emotional and intuitive perceptions are so persuasive that we often deliberately choose to assume that perception equals reality.
Faith, belief systems and cults, sects, doctrines
There are nearly 4,000 recognised faiths around the globe. However, almost 75 percent of the people follow one of the five main faiths which include Buddhism, Hinduism, Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. https://www.cnbctv18.com/world/world-religion-day-2023-history-and-significance-15661981.htm
Faith and Belief
Faith and belief are often considered the same, but the words are not interchangeable, they’re quite different in reality.
Our beliefs are things we take to be true based on our logic and experiences. It is the set of truths that we accept intellectually. Belief accords with reality.
Faith, has the added idea of trust and commitment. Faith is to “hold something to be true despite, or indeed because, all of the evidence is against it.”
Beliefoften refers to the concepts of mental agreement – an intellectual acceptance of facts.
Faith refers to wholehearted commitment when we make choices based on a belief, and when we act on our belief, integrating it into our natural behaviour without thought or doubt.
Oxford professor of philosophy Mark Wrathall says, “It is commonplace to treat belief and faith as synonyms . . . but there are important differences, faith involves reliance and trust, and it endures in the face of doubts, whereas belief is simply something we take to be true. I can have faith in things or people without a corresponding belief, and I can believe things that I don’t have faith in”.
Imagination is considered “a power of the mind”
George Bernard Shaw said, “Imagination is the beginning of creation. You imagine what you desire, you will what you imagine, and at least you create what you will.” Therefore, imagination is the most powerful force in human lives.
It can only be imagination that conceives of ‘that which is not’
What else but imagination could have conceived of the idea of ‘that which does not exist’.
It could only be imagination that could fashion a non-being out of nothing.
What else but man’s imagination can conceive of a non-entity that is everywhere and within everything at the same time.
It could only be man’s imagination that makes this ‘non-entity’, this ‘being that isn’t’ into an all seeing, all-powerful ‘non-being’, with no corporeal existence that still rules corporeal minds and bodies.
It could only be man’s imagination that makes this ‘non-being’ give shape to populations and supply inhabitants to Earth, out of nothing.
It could only be man’s imagination that could create a non-being/non-entity that has not only created the whole universe, but macro-manages the whole universe with an all-seeing eye, and also micro-manages the thoughts and actions of every creature on Earth, … or as man has decided, … the universe.
It could only be man’s imagination that could pledge allegiance to, and pledge love, fear, loyalty and worship to ‘that which is not’.
It is only imagination that could think up the idea of a life after death, or an eternal life after death that is much more important than the life one is living now, a safe haven, a sanctuary for humans and animals), be it in the form of a heavenly place that one goes to, or, as rebirth and reincarnation.
It is imagination that creates myths and stories that keep ‘that which does not exist’ positioned at the forefront of our minds so that ‘That which is not’ is palpably real.
Imagination as a force for peace
Peace in the world is a goal for our imagination. We could create our own fairy tales, fables, legends, folklore and myths about how peace can be brought to our world – a world without prejudice against others of different regions, faiths, languages and territories.
Our imagination could create worlds (our own world) where there is fairness and justice to all; where there is an absence of preconceived judgments or opinions about others, where we don’t other, others, and don’t treat people individually and collectively as intrinsically different or alien from ourselves.
Our own imagination could create a world of peace and contribute to peacebuilding in places affected by conflict; and justice, nurturance, integrity, and concern for others, which could become folklore written as epic poems and literature.
Our imagination could be the foundation for peace, if peaceful coexistence is what we desire, we could imagine it and create what we will.
Pratap Antony is a Passive activist. Active pacifist freelance thinker and writer. Writes on ecology and environment, social justice and pluralism, management ideas and issues and music: western classical, jazz, and Indian classical dance.