Human Imagination Can Change the World

Thoughts gleaned from poet, essaist, and Zen Buddhist priest Norman Fischer in his new book "The World Could Be Otherwise: Imagination and the Bodhisattva Path." I'm totally on board.

The imagination is powerful. It creates its own self-validating truth strong enough to effect inner and outer transformation. The Bible and other religious texts, folktales, myths, rhymes, poems, plays, novels, anecdotes, music, ritual, pictures, dreams — all imaginative productions rise up from the unconscious to expand the soul, to help us feel who we really are and what the world really is.

Imagination isn’t an escape from reality. Imagination deepens and enriches reality, adding texture, depth, dimension, feeling, and possibility.

The 21st century is busy and rough. For privileged people with demanding careers, social lives, families, and myriad interests, life is better than it has ever been. But it is also more difficult, more stressful and demanding. The possibilities for growth and accomplishment are dizzying: One must be more, know more, experience more, have more fun — and all of this at an ever-accelerating rate. It is hard to catch a breath.

The imagination doesn’t measure, devise, or instrumentalize. Its nature is to open, to mystify, to delight, shock, inspire.

For the majority of people, who do not enjoy such great expectations, the daily struggle to survive in ever more trying social and economic circumstances is relentless. The top 10% of the world’s population owns 90% of the wealth, leaving the other 90% scrambling to get by. More and more people simply cannot manage.

Privileged or not, we are all aware of the world beyond our households through the now ubiquitous news media, which has become our collective nervous system, twitching our attention with constant jolts of true and false information about political, environmental, economic, and social problems. This becomes the stuff of our psyches and our conversations. What will the future bring? What’s the world going to be like for our children and grandchildren? Will there be a world? Dread fills the air. Sometimes we feel it; mostly we don’t let ourselves feel it. It’s too much. What can we really do about it?

I concur with author Norman Fischer's conviction that the world could be, and actually is, otherwise — that its possibilities aren’t limited to the tangible, the knowable, the negotiable, to the data we are constantly collecting about practically everything measurable.

Data gives us the illusion that we know the world. But the world is more than we know. The imagination doesn’t measure, devise, or instrumentalize. It doesn’t define or manipulate. Instead, its nature is to open, to mystify, to delight, shock, inspire. It extends without limit. It leaps from the known to the unknown, soaring beyond facts to visions and intensities. It lightens up the heavy circumscribed world we think we live in. It plays in the deep end, where heart and love hold sway.

Spiritual practice is one of the key sites of imagination. Like Fischer, I don’t see a big distinction between spirituality and religion, as many do these days. To me, spiritual practice is simply authentic religion, connected to observance and experience, beyond ideology and belief. I realize this view is unusual. Many people in our time, having been brought up without any religion, naturally feel religion is weird, unnecessary, and old-fashioned. Many others shy away from religion because they were raised within a religious atmosphere that seemed dedicated to scaring them out of anything risky, joyful, or open, keeping them safely on the straight and narrow.

At its depth, this is not what religion is supposed to be doing. Religion is supposed to help us live more completely within our human imagination. In doing this, it provides a counterforce to the gravity of a human world that has always been full of trouble and strife. Karl Marx famously called religion the opiate of the people. But he also called it “the heart of a heartless world.”

Even at its worst, religion has a glowing coal of wildness hidden in its contemplative, mystical side — in texts, teachings, practices, and experiences that come from the uncharted expanses of the human imagination, religion’s heart and soul. The word “spiritual” evokes this essential and powerful side of religious life, the source of creativity, the spring from which the dreamers and visionaries of the world drink. I choose to retain the word and the idea of religion because despite their many sins, the great religions of the world contain a wealth of lore, languages, practices, and rituals that we can’t afford to jettison now, when we need them more than ever.