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Imagination the creative power of the mind.

by Agata Dzierżawa
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Imagination creative power of mind power is a picture of Einstein's face with the face of a mickey mouse painted on it.

Imagination the creative power of the mind.

Manifesting is possible thanks to the creative power of the mind – your imagination. What is imagination? Another trait your brain evolved to help it predict the consequences of its behavior for its survival. Thanks to it, you can analyze various scenarios for your survival in your brain.


In this article you will learn:

  • what imagination is.
  • types of imagination.
  • the technique of active imagination to get in touch with your own soul.
  • how to improve your imagination.

It allows you to plan something, prepare, or secure. Imagination is a cure for anxiety, but it can unfortunately also be a source of anxiety. However, thanks to it, you can also practice your future experiences and thus get used to your anxiety. You can role-play in your imagination about public speaking, job interviews, or other difficult life situations to prepare for them. And also test different solutions to your problems. You can use mental pictures for real results. Thanks to your imagination, you can also think beyond what you already know.

Commonly, however, we understand imagination as creativity, or something fictional, illusion, something untrue. For example, we often say to children to calm them down: “Oh, don’t worry it’s just your imagination.” Such behavior causes us to downplay its role in our everyday life and program ourselves considering it as something unimportant or even worse.

Imagination is the cognitive process of the brain, but we use it not only to know the world, but also to create it.

Thanks to it, you can not only function better but also design (engineering), create culture and art, stories (fairy tales or fantasies), simulate new ideas, impressions, or fantasize. Your imagination sets the direction and the will maintains the vision until the creative will in you is transformed into an experience.

It allows you to recreate future experiences that have not yet physically had a chance to exist (creative imagination) or past (reproductive imagination) or past with imaginary changes.

It is the ability to recall or create images, as well as make dreams, plans for the future, or even daydreaming. Imagination helps to use knowledge to solve problems and is fundamental to the integration of experience and learning. It can be logical and disciplined, but also crazy and absurd.

Imagination is heightened by strong emotional tension.

Imagination has played a huge role in the evolution of thinking, inquiry, and research.

It flows from man’s intellectual aspirations to understand the world.

As Einstein said:

“Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited, whereas imagination embraces the entire world, stimulating progress, giving birth to evolution.” 

Albert Einstein “On Cosmic Religion: With Other Options and Aphorisms”, 1931

To learn about the world, a human usually takes information such as sound waves or light from the outside world with the help of their senses and finds meaning in them using memory and perceptual processes. In the imagination everything happens the other way around, images are created from memory.

Their source is your subconscious. This is most clearly seen in dreams when our minds create all of the virtual reality that we can experience while we sleep. Imagination is thus the ability to create and simulate new objects, sensations, and ideas in the mind without any direct input from the senses. Imagination is not limited to seeing images in the mind. It relates to experiences previously provided to it by all 5 senses. In this way, you can also imagine sounds, taste, smell, feelings, emotions, and physical sensations.


Imagination is the part of you that operates with images, myths, and stories.

It is innovative thinking and creative expression, but also your inner reality, a boundless realm, not defined by your senses or your mind. The term imagination comes from the Latin verb imaginari, which means “to imagine yourself”, which emphasizes its self-reflective quality. In its kingdom, you can find fuel for your journey and gifts of wisdom.

Sometimes, unfortunately, the imagination is disturbed by reason, especially when it is immersed in rationalism and considers only logic and analytical thought as the correct paths to the truth.

When you throw away your imagination, you cut yourself off from the riches that can fuel your creativity. You will limit your experiences and the way you perceive the world.

You can also share your imagination with others and develop it collectively.

Imagination can be divided into two types:

  • involuntary, passive, spontaneous (dream, fantasies, hallucinations, spontaneous insight and daydreaming)
  • and voluntary, active, guided (reproductive, creative imagination, dream of perspective)

State of inability to internal visualization, i.e. the lack of the so-called “Mind’s eye” is called aphantasia.

Imagination is also a gateway to another world.

Like the book that Bastian found, the protagonist of the film “The Never Ending.” A world full of symbols, metaphors and fantasies.

Plato believed that human imagination is the place of the influence of heavenly forces on man. He claimed that there are images in us that do not come from the knowledge of the material world, but that God or some divine force (pure intelligence, an angel) forms appropriate images in man, especially during dreams. Their content and message need not be understandable to whoever received them. He claimed that there is a need for an initiate who can analyze them and explain them to open the field most often to the prophecy, which is the ability to predict the future.

Imagination was therefore treated as an organ of the soul, thanks to which humanity could establish a cognitive and visionary relationship with the middle world. It mediated between human reason and divine existence, and thus united the consciousness with the unconscious. It was a bridge to the sacred.

Imagination enables your conscious mind to dialogue with your soul.

To find out, you can try the active imagination technique. This is the method that C.G. Jung is a Swiss psychiatrist and psychologist. He was inspired to create it by alchemists’ meditations on chemical processes and meetings of Eskimo shamans with spirits. It is a technique of using your imagination in a controlled manner to learn about your own subconscious and unconscious. A kind of meditation technique.

It consists of treating the image seriously and experiencing imaginative action as real, leading to specific consequences. The key to this technique is to keep your conscious mind from influencing your inner images as they develop. This technique can be used in the form of visualization, but also in artistic activities such as drawing, painting, plastic modeling, automatic writing, dancing, music, writing poems, letters, or keeping a journal, as well as crafts. It can be used alone or under the supervision of a therapist. Since the 1980s, this technique has been used, for example, in architecture and molecular biology.

This method allows the unconscious to communicate with the conscious. It works by encouraging the conscious and unconscious mind to communicate by directing our conscious attention to the depths of the unconscious mind.

What is the method of active imagination?

Calm your mind and start meditating, focus all your attention on some image. Don’t let your attention deviate from this idea.

This way you will make contact with your subconscious. Then you will lose your focus a little on your subconscious so that it starts to animate your image.

You will then be able to consciously begin narrating that image or start talking to the character in your image. Be as involved in this stage as possible because in the next step you will bring it to life.


In the next step, try to express this imagination by taking a piece of paper and writing or drawing, painting, or dancing everything you just experienced in the silence of your mind. Remember that the purpose of this process is not to create a masterpiece, but simply to make that unconscious image an artifact that you will decode in the last step. So it is important to create a record of this creation. So when you decide to dance, sing or play any musical instrument, record it.

Then take a break trying to distract your mind from this image and bring it back to normal reality. Once established, use your intellect to analyze your art. Try to find the message it contains. This is how you communicate with your own soul.

How to improve your imagination?

  • Observe the images that come to you spontaneously in conjunction with your feelings and thoughts.
  • Contemplate art and try to see yourself as part of it.
  • Read on. Read myths and tell stories.
  • Surround yourself with creative people, meet new people.
  • Try new things, experience, travel, try new dishes, change your perspective.


Imagination is a skill that takes us into the realm of abstraction. The fifth dimension of existence, a kingdom without shapes. It is a potential thanks to which we can change our reality, external world, and thus our whole life. It opens up worlds that may turn out to be our reality because it brings us closer to life in its entirety.

Imagination is a path to deeper realities. It opens us to the mysteries of the ordinary. Imagination is freedom. It allows us to come up with our version of the world. A world free from the past or the opinions of others. Therefore, let your imagination run wild and imagine. Imagine a better world. Like the one John Lennon sang about in his song.

Imagine there’s no countries
It isn’t hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion, too
 
Imagine all the people
Living life in peace
 
You, you may say I’m a dreamer
But I’m not the only one
I hope someday you will join us
And the world will be as one
 
Imagine no possessions
I wonder if you can
No need for greed or hunger
A brotherhood of man
 
Imagine all the people
Sharing all the world
 
You, you may say I’m a dreamer
But I’m not the only one
I hope someday you will join us
And the world will live as one


Source:

Active Imagination Technique: Essential Steps, 2019, envisionyourevolution.com, https://www.envisionyourevolution.com/analytical-psychology/active-imagination-technique-essential-steps/2432/

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