Imagination: the Power that Civilization Forgot
What might we become if we honored our dreams again?
Human beings are extraordinary creatures. From our humble, Earthly origins, we have achieved incredible feats. We've accomplished things no other creature on Earth has done. We've harnessed the power of fire. We've allied with countless plants to create medicines, poisons, and extraordinary foods. We've created technology allowing individuals to speak across many lifetimes through the written word. We've revealed the power of sound, creating musical arrangements that inspire deep emotions and transcendent experiences. We've harnessed electricity, we've invented the internet, and we have even traveled to the moon.
We are right to be in awe of the incredible achievements we have created. We have been granted some extraordinary and wondrous capacities by the mystery of creation. How incredible that we were able to imagine such marvels into being. Yet, it appears to me that we have become impoverished as of late. At this current moment in history, it seems our imagination has faltered. At a time when we most need to imagine new possibilities, it seems we are still strangled by the narratives of our recent past.
It’s interesting to think about the way our current culture treats the imagination. Of course, there are those who honor the imagination: artists, writers, musicians, poets. Though even then, it seems as if the imagination has been relegated to a narrow range in human life—as if the value of the imagination is merely aesthetic. Our culture values, above all, rationality. A common phrase to hear nowadays is to say something is “just your imagination.” Translation: “don’t pay attention to that, it doesn’t matter.” This trivializing of the imagination may seem normal to us, but it has not always been so.
There was a time when imagination was celebrated as the enormous gift that it is. It is imagination that ultimately gave birth to all the extraordinary feats that I mentioned above. Before any of these feats were achieved in our physical realm, they were first enacted in the realm of the imagination. One must have first imagined what fire might do for us. One first imagined the idea of the written word. Entire generations were captivated by the imagined possibility of one day traveling to the stars. One must wonder, then, what our imagination is captivated by now
.
Ironically, we seem to have imagined the very end of our evolutionary journey. We have arrived at this disenchanted, reductionist view of our place in the world. We view ourselves as the pinnacle of creation, head and shoulders above all else. Not only does this place walls between us and the more-than-human world, but it also asserts that our evolution has come to a halt. We are already complete. Such an idea is patently absurd to any person who deeply witnesses the ever-emergent, transforming processes of nature. Yet, our civilization is firmly set in that trance. There is little room for imagination. We are at an imaginal dead-end.
Paradoxically, this is fertile ground for the imagination—if viewed as such! Beyond the end of this story, is a fertile emptiness waiting for us. If you think the emptiness is vacant, I invite you to go sit for five minutes in a quiet, dark room. If you truly attend to the silence and the darkness, countless images will spring forth, creating kaleidoscopic patterns in the darkness. The imagination revels in such environments. There is no such thing as “nothing” so long as imagination exists. In a moment like this, where there is “nothing” before us, the imagination has more creative power than ever. In this time, we can imagine an entirely new way of being.
However, we must do away with this idea that the imagination is insignificant or worthy only of games. It is our duty at this moment to resurrect our imagination and honor its central influence over our lives. The imagination is far from being the inconsequential distraction that it has been cast as in our disenchanted culture. Rather, it is the engine of creativity. The imagination literally creates our lives.
Older cultures were more conscious of the creative power of the imagination. Complex mythologies were imagined by these peoples—stories by which people organized their lives. It seems like they knew the power of the stories they told, just as they were aware that it was their imagination that birthed them. We live in a culture that is de-mythologized. Despite what you may think, this doesn’t mean we no longer live within a mythology. Rather, it means we have made our mythology invisible. We have decided that our culture is more enlightened than those that came before. The world we live in isn’t just some story. The world we live in is real.
The irony of this is palpable. We imagine ourselves as separate from Nature even as she fills our lungs with each breath. We imagine ourselves as the pinnacle of creation even as we continue to grow and evolve. We imagine ourselves as countries, envisioning boundaries that are completely invisible from space. We imagine ourselves as purely physical beings even as the mystery of consciousness eludes all scientific study.
What could these things be other than mythology? They constitute a story that we inhabit and organize our lives by. This, in itself, is not a problem. It seems humans can only live through a mythology. Though when we live this mythology unconsciously and forget our ability to imagine a new one, the old mythology becomes a cage. We forget our creative power and we find ourselves entrenched in a story that we no longer wish to live.
It is time for us to re-mythologize our lives.
I’ll tell you: the only reason I am here writing these articles is because of the power of my imagination. I have been visited by dreams, visions, and mythologies that have guided me to begin this work. In these imaginings, I have contacted other beings who have invited me to share this with you. It would have been easy to dismiss any of these encounters as, “just my imagination,” though to have done so would have been to dismiss their power. I don’t know if these are “real” beings out there in some other realm or simply manifestations of my mind. Though it doesn’t really matter. When I engage with them honestly, they impact me deeply. They have guided me to share this with you.
To even share such an idea is a dangerous act in our culture—this is why I haven't revealed the deeper content of my dreams. What older cultures would have venerated as a vision our culture now denigrates as “just a dream.” To share what I've experienced, would be to risk being viewed as crazy or to have people attempt to reduce these moving images to an empty fantasy. This is how deeply we have abandoned our creative power. Yet, this power is available to all of us.
I encourage you, though, not to give in to those societal pressures. There is power in a dream, there is power in a fantasy, there is power in a vision of the world. It is a wild power, totally unpredictable. This is probably why our culture is so apt to dismiss it. We continue to do so at our own peril. It is frighteningly easy to strip the power from a dream.
On the other hand, though, dreams have tremendous power when surrendered to and witnessed fully. It was through a series of “thought experiments” that Einstein devised his theories of Special and General Relativity. Carl Jung, one of the great forefathers of modern psychology, said all his theories were seeded by a series of “fantasies” he experienced in his 30s.1 It was through narcoleptic visions that Harriet Tubman was able to avoid hunting slave-owners and their bloodhounds and guide slaves to freedom.
Any one of them could have denied their own imagination and thus denied the world of their tremendous gifts. Who knows how many others have denied such gifts in precisely this way? What gifts lie within you waiting to be revealed by your imagination? What tremendous possibilities are waiting to be birthed into being by your humble and present attention?
Perhaps if we all surrender to our dreams, we will understand these words by the wise poet, William Stafford:
Suddenly this dream you are having matches
everyone’s dream, and the result is the world.
Let us imagine the world together.
He mentions this in his autobiography: Memories, Dreams, Reflections and you can read about the experiences themselves in the recently published Red Book
This piece blew me away! You have put your finger on what is ailing with our civilization, at this point about to destroy the very source of our life together in our thoughtlessness and in our self-centered "rationality." Thank you, Dan! You are a prophetic voice in the desert!
Ruben Habito