Imagination
“For all the mirrors you see,
You think of them to give you the truth.
For all the things you imagine,
You question whether your mind lies to you or not…”
Picasso once said “Everything you imagine is real”, yet to the mind of every man, everything ever thought of that mimics the perception of others and is the only truth accepted to oneself. Every string of thought aligning with nothing ever learned or seen is ruled out as insanity, delusion and imagination.
To whom would one call when such insanity calls out every morning, every night, and every single moment when this plague of imagination is what we consider something left to be a dream but not actually achieved, something left to reside in the deepest corners of subconsciousness but not at the tip of the tongue. For the ancient Greek philosopher, Plato, in his book The Republic explores the two dynamic forces of the human mind. He presents the Allegory of the Cave, where he distinguishes between the world of appearances which can be symbolized as the shadows on the wall i.e., reality; the world of forms which is the ultimate reality. For Plato, imagination or phantasia can mislead us from the true essence of reality, which can only be grasped through reason.
The characteristics by which we define imagination and reality contrast each other at every moral and in every science. Reality is concrete in its form supported by evidences; it is what and how we make sense of everything.
Philosophically, imagination can be explored as a spirited force that transcends the boundaries of reality and logic offering insights into the nature of consciousness and our own ability to conceptualize the unknown from what we know already. It is the imagination which finds pattern of the chaotic influx of data.
Contrasting the thoughts of Plato, Aristotle, another Greek philosopher, in his work De Anima took a more empirical approach, asserting that imagination plays a crucial role in knowledge acquisition. For him, imagination is rooted in reality but serves as a means to abstract and conceptualize. While Plato distinguishes reality and imagination as two different entities, Aristotle explains imagination as the faculty that helps us to visualize and recall experiences, bridging perception and intellect to form grounds for a new reality and proves them to be dependent on each other.
If we take the work of both philosophers into consideration, we see that imagination is based on human perceptions and the ethos or to put it more bluntly, the spirit of reality lies in the concrete foundations of human perceptions. Thomas Acquinas too emphasized on the formation of reality by the cognitive process occurring due to imagination. He viewed imagination as a bridge between the sensory world and intellectual understanding, crucial for moral and spiritual development.
But reviewing the works of such philosophers raises considerable controversy. To disapprove Acquinas, René Descartes famously doubted the reliability of sensory perception, suggesting in Meditations on First Philosophy that imagination could lead us astray. His method of radical doubt seeks to find indubitable truths, implying that imagination, while valuable, can be deceptive.
Imagination is considered the “sleep of reason”. It expands the boundaries of the human mind and does not align with anything that can be proved and the things that can’t be proven are not meant to be reasoned with. The conclusions that build reality are formed by reasoning and intellectual understanding. So, if imagination is the basis of reality, how come it is considered to be abandoned by reason itself?
The answer of the question lies in the evidence provided by reality itself and the question asked by ones who dare to imagine. What makes the nature of reality imperious? What makes it more dominant on the minds of those who dare to imagine?
Reality in itself is not static. With time it undergoes changes and shifts. What right now is reality was once formed out of something belying and something bête noire, something once imagined. Reality can be taken as a mountain, thousands of years for its formation: billions of dust particles for its formations. Proving reality is as tedious as disapproving. For it to be formed, several perceptions of thousands of the human mind find common ground which ultimately build the universally accepted laws of the land but to disapprove it you have to take it down stone by stone and how do you take a stone down? Easy, you imagine. When you start doubting the common ground you survive on, the mountain starts to lose you as a part of it.
As you imagine all the ways to speculate the formations of the background, your doubts are influenced on to others as well who to start to take the mountain stone by stone. You find the faults in the structure of it which raises more questions as to what would be the right fit to hold the arrangement. You conceptualize about all those things that can replace the alignment you will disrupt once you take a stone down and again let your imaginations take over to find reason for everything. With time you do not remain alone and you find beliefs combine to form a new formation; stronger and more reasoned and ultimately structures a new reality.
From literature to the modern sciences, nothing once existed. Nothing started out as a part of reality.
Even stars once were understood to be considered to symbolize something different from what we know now. Somewhere around 2000 BCE, roots of astrology originated by the hands of the Babylonians who developed an early system of celestial observation, correlating the movements of celestial bodies with terrestrial events. They created the zodiac, dividing the sky into twelve sections, each corresponding to a constellation. In the 4th century BCE, astrology found its way to the Greeks who influenced astrology with Greek philosophy to establish a systematic approach that influenced both astrology and astronomy.
Astrology in the medieval era hit the world with a force as renowned scholars, such as Ibn Sina (Avicenna) and William Lilly, produced works that combined astrology with other sciences. Lilly’s Christian Astrology (1647) served as a comprehensive guide, further legitimizing astrology among practitioners.
There was common ground between them all, but then someone dared to imagine otherwise.
Figures like Johannes Kepler, who initially supported astrology, later sought to reconcile it with emerging scientific methods. The 17th century brought significant advances in the scientific method, particularly through figures like Galileo Galilei and Isaac Newton. Their focus on empirical observation and mathematical principles led to a decline in the acceptance of astrology as a scientific discipline. The development of modern physics and astronomy, along with the discovery of laws governing celestial bodies, further undermined astrology. The heliocentric model, championed by Copernicus, Galileo, and Kepler, showed that celestial bodies operated independently of human affairs.
Astrology while still practiced is not the universally accepted law of the land as it fails to protect itself from the claims of the scientific community.
Reality does not stand forever; it is meant to fall at the hands of our imagination and built by our imagination as well.
So, for all those who think themselves to be insane, delusional and unrealistic, I hope you find it in yourself to stay on this path for the eternity of your life. Imagination is abandoned by reason for a reason.
It is not mean to be chained. It is not meant to be extinguished.
For the fire of it leads you to find reason.
It leads you to a new purpose. A new spirit.
A new reality.
By: Avni Chaturvedi
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