Imagination Series: Essay no. 1

Essay no. 1

by Christopher Brown

The importance of imagination: when a child dreams for their first time of the waking of wonder while their body is very much alive, they experience the power of God's greatest gift. The storyteller's gift—imagination.

Unlike other gifts, this allows us to explore strange new worlds, seek out what is unknown and overall experience the power of creation.

The differences are that when God does it, the creation is made real, whereas man or woman only have—possess the power of mind. We may externally create our worlds bound within the confines of natural law, but are limited in our modes of childhood expression.

In preventing children from experiencing childhood, you do not allow them to make for themselves their own worlds. It is the worlds of great fiction that arise from great imagination or experience.

The pain of youth must be real enough to evoke a visceral expression of the external world. Our model building is only as good as our [capacity to imagine]. As a child, I swore off the world of grownups and other people to protect my imagination—its vividness.

People are so willing to pass off [their] 'fantasies' of youth for the 'models' of adulthood, only for them to discover if they search hard enough and long enough that those are the same—if, perhaps, built on a little more evidence.

Science is fantasies brought to life through mathematics and experimentation. The models we build are still childhood fantasies. The grand delusion of waking man is to believe they are something else—reality--for the only thing 'real' is the conversation(s) between people, everything else is a fantasy produced in the mind to make the external sensory input make more sense. We do not know what is really out there, beyond what we can talk about, describe and agree upon. We not even know if there is a 'real' world out there, or if the external is simply our false perceptions. Reality may in fact be very different then we can dare to imagine.

The child can understand this, why then can't the adult? Are we really so different?