Imagination is Everything

 

The elusive yet crucial truth is,

Imagination is everything! And Einstein, when asked the place imagination holds in the universe, wasn’t being metaphorical when he said: “Imagination is more important than knowledge.”

But like it’s often said: when the purpose of a thing is not known abuse is inevitable. Over the course of time, the word imagination has been used to connote different abstract experiences such thought, dream, hallucination, fancy. We go as far as describing a man of brain as a man of imagination. Some other times, we ask a man to use his imagination: meaning that he may need to do some deep reasoning.

However, all these descriptions do not, in a tangible expression, describe what imagination is. Imagination is the metaphysical material of vision. According to Neville Goddard, “It is the very gateway of reality.”

Man is a troglodyte, limited and bound by his senses and instinct like the rest of other animals, without the use of his imagination. Consider, for illustration, an English woman who was poverty stricken and bedridden for many years as a result of malnutrition. One day a friend of hers was visiting and noticed a framed document on the wall in her bedroom. This friend then asked the woman, “Is this yours?”

The woman, without hesitation, said it was and explained how she comes to posses the document. Prior to her sorry state, she’d worked as a maid in the household of an English nobility. She said excitedly, “Before lady so-and-so died, she gave that to me as a parting gift. I served her for nearly half a century. And I’ve been so proud of it because she gave it to me. So I had it framed; It’s been hanging on the wall ever since she died 10 years ago.”

Her friend requested, on her consent, to have the document examined. “Oh, yes,” said the woman who never learned to read. “Just be sure to see I get it back.”

Having acquiesced to her friend’s request; they had the authorities examine the document. To their utter surprise, they were told they had been looking for it. It was a bequest. The English noble woman had left her maid a home and money.

This woman has in-stall a treasure of riches, but her health was being threatened by malnutrition. She also has, in her name, a good palatial home, but lived in a rented run-down apartment on Harms Street next to poverty alley.

As pathetic as this woman’s story is, so it could also be said of a man who doesn’t know the incalculable value of his imagination, abuse therefore, is an understatement. As William Shakespeare remind us: “We, ignorant of ourselves, beg often our own harms.” In other words, with imagination man can perceive more than his senses can discover.

The worlds richest mine is imagination. And from it come the excavation, extraction and idealization of every vision, and the manifestation of every material substance.

Creative geniuses have utilized imagination as a tool to capture their thoughts. They spend disproportionate amount of time mentally visualizing their visions and ideas before impressing them on canvas sails, realizing that imagination is the fuel of creativity. The Italian polymath Leonardo da Vinci, on many occasions, would stand for hours facing a plain wall or a canvas-sail capturing his thoughts in his imagination before painting. He is said to have invented many mechanical contraptions some five hundred years ahead of his time simply by appropriating and harnessing the power of imagination. Some of his priceless works including The Mona Lisa, The Last Super and the Vitruvian Man were considered as the most famous works of art ever made.

Also, the American singer, songwriter, pianist and composer Ray Charles in an interview was reported as saying: “The songs I heard in my imagination are so real that I don’t need musical instruments to compose them.” In 1975, he was inducted into the American Academy of Achievement. His song “Georgia on my mind” was made the official state song of Georgia. Charles had thirty seven Grammy Awards nominations to his credit, of which he won seventeen of out of them; and in 1987 he was awarded the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award all by harnessing imagination.

In no uncertain terms, imagination has been described, from the pen of certain writers, as creativity propellant. Small wonder that, author Sara Deeter quipped: “I truly believe that imagination is one of the most powerful-and important-forces on the planet. It lifts our hearts, minds, and spirits; it is the driving force behind the magnificence...”

Your mind can be likened to a Rubik’s Cube. To get the coloured parts in alignment, your imagination must be the rotating mechanism. Put slightly differently, your imagination has the capacity to fit pieces of information together, that you already have, to form a vision or an idea.

In his book “The Uncommon Sense of Applied Psychology,” C. W. Chamberlain corroborates this view when he wrote the following lines: “The building of a trans-continental railroad from a mental picture gives the average individual an idea that it is a big job. The fact of the matter is, the achievement, as well as the perfect mental picture, is made up of millions of little jobs, each fitting in its proper place and helping to make up the whole. A skyscraper is built from individual bricks, the laying of each brick being a single job which must be completed before the next brick can be laid.”

It is almost totally uncanny how our imagination makes the seemingly impossible to be possible. Some years ago Readers Digest published an article of an experiment on the power of imagination: a class of high school basketball players were divided into three separate groups; the first group was told not to practice shooting free throws for a period of one month. The second group was told to practice shooting free throws in the gym every afternoon for one hour for one month. While the third group was told to practice shooting free throws in their imagination every afternoon for one hour over a period of one month.

After the end of one month, the first group with no practice at all, lost form and slipped from a 39 per cent to a 37 per cent free throw average. The second group who practiced in the gym for one hour increased from a 39 to a 41 per cent average. But the third group who practiced in their imagination every afternoon increased from a 39 per cent to a 42.5 percent average.

Now the question is how the third group improved their free throw average from simply practicing in their imagination than from actual practice? The answer is both simple and obvious: in their imagination they saw themselves netting every single shot!

I remember a couple of years back; I was a salesman for a multinational company. Before I engage a prospective client about my product, I’ll take some few minutes to imagine the final outcome of our conversation. Usually, I’ll see myself positioned at a certain angle, demonstrating in a certain way or performing a certain action whilst talking to the client. And almost immediately after this mental exercise I’ll then proceed to meet with the client, and act exactly what I saw myself doing in my imagination. To a great degree, nine times out of ten it turns out to be the exact outcome I’d imagined. Why? Because my imagination knows what to say, how to act and what to do to achieve desired results. It knows how to make visions happen!

“Visualization,” as Earl Nightingale put it. “Is a force of incalculable power!” Man have, today, pierced hole on the earth’s atmosphere and landed on the moon because he first visualized himself walking on the moon.

Invariably, what can be visualized with copious emotion can be realized. There is the story of a young man in the early 50’s who accepted a sales position in an automobile parts company in America. He had only a third grade education, had no training, whatsoever, in selling and had never read a book in his life on sales.

The vice president of the company asked the area manager in charge of the location where the young man was assigned to market the product, saying: “How come you hired this fellow without any college education nor training in sales? We have graduates from university of Oklahoma and graduates from Houston who have the required skills and training for the job, and have applied, but they were not shortlisted for the position.” The area manager replied: “Sir, the young man talked me into it. And I figured out, if he can convince me into hiring him, then he can talk folks into buying the product.”

Over the course of time, this young man sold so much products that his salary was more than the president of the company. He was recommended for the position of overall sales vice president; and gave sales seminars across America without reading a book on sales.

At one of the seminars, he was asked by one of his many admirers, without any slight accent of sarcasm: “What is the secret of your success?” The young man replied, “My secret is four points. Believe in your product; see yourself in your mind’s eye selling the product; see your clients buying the product; and act in accordance to what you see in your mind’s eye and your belief.”

It is no surprise that the young man in the story nearly always see himself selling the product in his mind’s eye  that is, his imagination, and act the course of what he sees because imagination mixed with emotion create reality.  

Napoleon Hill described in his book “Think and Grow Rich” two forms in which the imaginative faculty functions the synthetic imagination and creative imagination. He went a step further in saying: through the synthetic imagination one may arrange old concepts, ideas or plans into new combinations by merely working with the material of experience, education and observation. While through the creative imagination “hunches” and “inspirations” are received to form new ideas.

It doesn’t take a genius to know that one can develop any of these two imaginative faculties more than the other. The great leaders of business, sales, politics and academic became great because they developed either one of these faculties of imagination. You too can join the likes of these great leaders when you develop and use effectively your imagination.