WHEN IMAGINATION SWALLOWS BELIEF
APRIL 23, 2011. Imagination and belief are not completely clean categories. There are fuzzy places and obscure corners and overlaps. But essentially, a belief is hardened imagination. It is imagination that slowed down at some point in space and coalesced into a sense that THIS IS THE WAY THINGS ARE or THIS IS WHAT IS GOING TO HAPPEN IN THE FUTURE or THIS IS WHAT I MUST DO.
Cultures are based on beliefs. Most of the time, the beliefs are thought of as facts.
“The big spirit in the ground talked to us.”
This “fact” started out as a belief, which in turn was originally a piece of imagination projected by an artist.
As the civilization of Rome came crashing down, there were competing religious cults and groups who had all sorts of beliefs about gods…and these had started out as imaginative ideas flung out by poets. But now they were beliefs warring for supremacy as facts.
So in the chaos that was the fall of Rome, Constantine made his moves. He willed into being the new Roman Church and its doctrines, and that Church spread its influence far and wide. It eventually reached a point where its honchos ordered inquisitions, torture, confession, and death for those who dissented.
You can chart the course of a number of civilizations and find similar patterns.
There is one progression that hasn’t yet taken hold on planet Earth. The move from belief to imagination. In order for this to happen, people have to have as firm a hold on the consequences of imagination as they presently have on the consequences of belief. They need to see imagination as something quite powerful, not as a flimsy vaporous diversion from “reality.” No one is going to replace the rock of belief with what appears to him as an insubstantial haze.
Belief may be hardened imagination, but most people don’t see it that way.
If you’re driving a wagon drawn by three horses, and you’ve handled that vehicle for a long time and know it gets you from one place to another, you’re not going to leave it by the side of the road for a bright red Ferrari—if you don’t know what an ignition key is or what an engine is or what a steering wheel is. You’re going to have to become confident in your ability to drive the car and maneuver it. Then you’ll free the horses and get rid of the wagon.
In my series, TAKING IT TO ANOTHER LEVEL, I explained the obsession with What Exists. Well, belief is the underpinning for that obsession. Belief forms a map of What Exists.
Imagination, on the other hand, is a bird that leads you to new worlds. Actually, you imagine the bird and create the worlds. So this isn’t a minor shift. It isn’t a walk in the park.
For a century or more, science has been guiding the perceptual shift from matter to energy. Matter has been analyzed into particles and waves and space.
In similar fashion, we need a revolution that tracks solid belief into the lair where it came from—imagination.
The great thing about imagination is that it doesn’t carry the baggage of doctrine. It doesn’t require consent of others. It doesn’t demand followers who are ready to march into foreign lands and kill people who think along divergent lines.
It doesn’t depend on gene structure or any structure. It’s non-material, but it doesn’t found a church.
With imagination, you replace beliefs with the perception of what you’ve created. That perception becomes more thrilling and suggestive as time passes. In fact, it becomes the basis for a new set of beliefs…but you don’t have to make those beliefs into hard rocks of militaristic faith. Imagination, creation, new beliefs—they form a dynamic and shifting skyscape of power.
And WHAT EXISTS, whether on a physical or metaphysical level, becomes unimportant next to what you are imagining and creating. Priorities are re-arranged.
Finally, in order to employ your imagination, you don’t need to assume there is some “higher reality” outside yourself, from which you derive the power or permission or mandate to live through and by imagination. That is unnecessary. That is irrelevant. That, it turns out, is a form of postponement. A postponement of action.
If you see this clearly, you can then look around you and view the landscape of people and groups who are bound by their beliefs, which they take to be hardened facts. You can see the limits they have imposed on themselves, the conditions they have attached to their own existence, the systems in which they have become embedded, the circumscribed boundaries they have drawn around their own lives and their own potential.
The joke of that situation hits home.
You can call it a hilarious joke or a tragic joke or a sick joke or a crazy joke…but joke it is…and you don’t need to be a cog in its gears.
JON RAPPOPORT
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