Some crazy people think that there is a level of the imagination where we communicate and that what we imagine can be made real.
If you have ever had a sudden inspiration that someone you were thinking of and wanted to see would be somewhere and you then met them there as if brought by invitation then you have an inkling of what I mean.
We wander into events such as this without even thinking of them as bits of things that cannot happen which intrude into the world. I like the term coincidence to describe them especially when they seem so common. Well, common for some of us.
The idea is that the connection between the imagination and reality is a real and physical connection. We think imagining is something that our brains do.
But are we just our brains?
This makes sense if you think of the physical world as being an extension of this congress of minds rather then existing like some dumb thing on it’s own in a cold and brazen universe.
If you read about Milarepa who was a yogi who lived in Tibet quite some time ago, you will see that ancient magic is composed of two parts: visualization of something and the ability of the mind to focus entirely on it and make it real. That second part is something that can be developed through years of the practice of concentration: until the mind serves as a
device to create and abruptly make real.
Is this where Buddhist one pointedness of mind comes from?
But like a genie in a bottle or the magician's servant set loose on the world there is a catch: the creation does not stop there, and there are rules some of them hazardous to the health of the hapless practitioner. But I don't believe that these rules were put in place by some authoritarian power, but rather are the structural characteristics of creativity itself.
Even such an unmapped land as the imagination has contours, barriers and watchdogs that bite. Shooting oneself in the foot is an ancient human characteristic even before the invention of guns.
But the principal that imagination is creative physically has a broader sense for those of us less endowed than the musclemen of the long dead past: and a more natural and low key process.
There are those sleepy moments when thoughts flicker across the inner eye and each one is at once a feeling that communicates its level of comfort and pleasure: brightness, a gestalt of color, sky and perhaps a splash wind and water. Each also a glimpse into the texture of a day you believe is a day to come.
I would think that this is not the vision of what is real but not yet; this is the creation of what will come; a day or two like some construction project yet to be completed and made firm in the mind. We do this every day of our lives and think nothing of it.
If we are creating the future, what is it when we get there?
Well, real life: believed to be cast in concrete and unalterable.
If you have ever had a sudden inspiration that someone you were thinking of and wanted to see would be somewhere and you then met them there as if brought by invitation then you have an inkling of what I mean.
We wander into events such as this without even thinking of them as bits of things that cannot happen which intrude into the world. I like the term coincidence to describe them especially when they seem so common. Well, common for some of us.
The idea is that the connection between the imagination and reality is a real and physical connection. We think imagining is something that our brains do.
But are we just our brains?
This makes sense if you think of the physical world as being an extension of this congress of minds rather then existing like some dumb thing on it’s own in a cold and brazen universe.
If you read about Milarepa who was a yogi who lived in Tibet quite some time ago, you will see that ancient magic is composed of two parts: visualization of something and the ability of the mind to focus entirely on it and make it real. That second part is something that can be developed through years of the practice of concentration: until the mind serves as a
device to create and abruptly make real.
Is this where Buddhist one pointedness of mind comes from?
But like a genie in a bottle or the magician's servant set loose on the world there is a catch: the creation does not stop there, and there are rules some of them hazardous to the health of the hapless practitioner. But I don't believe that these rules were put in place by some authoritarian power, but rather are the structural characteristics of creativity itself.
Even such an unmapped land as the imagination has contours, barriers and watchdogs that bite. Shooting oneself in the foot is an ancient human characteristic even before the invention of guns.
But the principal that imagination is creative physically has a broader sense for those of us less endowed than the musclemen of the long dead past: and a more natural and low key process.
There are those sleepy moments when thoughts flicker across the inner eye and each one is at once a feeling that communicates its level of comfort and pleasure: brightness, a gestalt of color, sky and perhaps a splash wind and water. Each also a glimpse into the texture of a day you believe is a day to come.
I would think that this is not the vision of what is real but not yet; this is the creation of what will come; a day or two like some construction project yet to be completed and made firm in the mind. We do this every day of our lives and think nothing of it.
If we are creating the future, what is it when we get there?
Well, real life: believed to be cast in concrete and unalterable.
