Imagination Education

For all paeans to imagination, imagination is an under-rated and misunderstood faculty of mind. Here's how it looks to me. For those who imagine otherwise I suggest we define our terms. Imagination is a self-generated perception: no more, no less. 

We live in a universe that is as it is whether we have an idea about it or not, and our sensory perceptions enter the brain as electrical stimulations from physical contact with a co-existing universe. To understand the assembly of these stimulations into the mystery of experience would be to understand the nature of life itself. As yet no one has stepped forward with this information. Creative imagination is a subset of the primitive faculty of memory. A huge survival advantage is to that creature able to compare and contrast the shapes of previous experience. These “shapes of previous experience” exist only as thought-forms. As the ability to harbor these thought-forms grew with advances in the shape of the brain, imagination emerged as a faculty of Mind. It is quite a breakthrough when you think about it. It is all molecular action-reaction up to the emergence of experience. Experience is more than the sum of its parts, and is the only new thing in the universe; when experience assumes a thought-form something that never before existed has come into being. Thought-forms exist physically as shapes of electrical activity in the tissue of the brain, and I suspect that the same idea would occupy a similar shape in the tissue of any brain that entertained it. 

That we can control our thoughts is a clear demonstration of some small primacy that mind has over matter. The fact that we can not create an idea for which we do not posses the necessary thought-forms, lays bare the extraordinary importance of education. The less we know, the greater our freedom to pin the imaginary tail on the inconceivable donkey.