IMAGINING A HIDDEN TREASURE
APRIL 22, 2011. Let me start with this.
A belief is something you imagine when you really need to, when you’re desperate.
If you’re not desperate, what you imagine is art.
Okay?
From that point of view, it doesn’t matter whether what you’re imagining is real or made up. It serves you. It gets you through a tough period.
Or how about this? An artist says, “All my inspiration to paint comes from three entities who exist in a secret dome on Mars. They feed me ideas…”
In that case, a person is imagining things that help him to imagine things.
Here is another one. A person with a serious disease is told there is a blue cloud a thousand miles above Earth. The cloud emits healing rays. He is further told to feel and experience these rays coming all the way through his body and down into the ground.
He does this every day. What does he do? He imagines the cloud, the rays, and the rays coming down through his body healing him.
But he doesn’t see this as imagining. He believes the cloud is there. He believes the rays are there and that they heal. He believes the rays are entering his body.
And lo and behold, after a few months, his symptoms go away.
What is this all about?
Believing is a form of imagining.
It’s not the only form.
Here are some words that denote various forms or levels of imagining/creating:
Pretend, believe, invent, assume, consider, wish for, improvise, hope, worship, pray, wonder, envision…
However, life as we ordinarily accept it on planet Earth makes distinctions between these concepts. And there are differences. But there is also the common thread and major feature called imagining.
Let’s do a thought experiment. I’ll describe several situations in which imagining/creating results in a phenomenon. You decide to what degree people will accept the result as real. Grade these situations along that guideline.
One: over a period of six months, a patient diagnosed with a serious heart condition, who takes no medication, imagines (believes) that an angel is healing that condition. After six months, all tests indicate the person’s heart is now completely healthy.
Two: a flying saucer lands on the lawn of the White House. A figure steps out and extends his hand. His hand is empty. Suddenly, a vertical pile of 40 gold bricks appears resting on his hand.
Three: in the Gobi desert, there is a metal ball lying on the sand. All over the world, a chosen group of a million people simultaneously imagine the ball is levitating. The ball rises from the ground to a height of six feet and hovers there for an hour.
Four: A man walks into Times Square. He is holding a small black box. His hair, which is brown, turns black. Then it turns red. Then it turns blond. Then it turns gray. Then it turns white.
Five: A boy stands in the middle of a busy street in Chicago. He points at a parked car. It levitates to a height of 16 feet, hovers there for a minute, then gently lowers back down to the ground. The boy does this with eight cars.
I won’t try to give a definitive grading scale to this experiment. I do think the healing of the heart condition, though, would be the easiest for most people to accept.
In other words, through cultural “preparation,” people can be convinced to accept certain paranormal phenomena without too much trouble.
I also think the ball-in-the-Gobi-desert idea has received sufficient prep to allow a large number of onlookers to accept it as real, and accept the notion that a collection of people thinking the same thought can cause extraordinary things to happen.
I’ll dare to suggest something else. Maybe all of these events would be easier to accept—by certain groups of people—than the proposition that God is an imaginary construct.
For most people on planet Earth, when you present them with IMAGINING versus BELIEVING, there is no contest. They will say that belief is so much stronger than imagining. For them, imagining is just an idle toy for children.
If you stuck them with exchanging BELIEVING for IMAGINING, they would feel deprived, shortchanged, naked, at a great disadvantage.
But what would happen, in the playing out of Earth culture, if, somehow, IMAGINING rose and rose in status far beyond the status of BELIEVING?
If that flip occurred, you might hear a person proudly say, “I had this very serious disease. Terminal. So I imagined there was a crazy pink lizard floating inside a castle in the clouds who could change into a dancing jaguar, and the jaguar could inject me with an energy that scoured my body and got rid of all the immune insufficiencies…and boom, my disease was gone!”
And everyone would understand and feel pretty good about the imagining.
Someone would write, “Back in the old days, we had quite a system. Belief was the most important thing. Can you imagine it? That’s a joke. Anyway, we were sold on believing. Then we gradually woke up and realized believing was a form of imagining. Wow. What a day that was. It was a relief, let me tell you. From that moment on, we could imagine without limit. And we started producing some amazing effects. We still do, of course. It’s quite a world now, wouldn’t you say?”
Yes. Remember, back in the old days, when one person would say to another, “You’re not imagining the same thing I’m imagining, so I’m going to have to kill you.” Well, he didn’t say it that way exactly, but we know what he meant.
JON RAPPOPORT
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