Is everything in the universe the product of our imagination?

Is Everything in the Universe the Product of Our Imagination? "The cause of all the blunders committed by man arises from excessive self-love. He who intends to be a great man ought to love neither himself nor his own things, but only what is just; whether it happens to be done by himself, or another."

~ Plato

You, me, the universe: everything in the universe in fact, is the act of the mind; a mental image; a fantasy; a fancy; and is the product of our imagination. Fancy and imagination both belong to the productive or, more properly, the constructive faculty. Both recombine and modify mental images; the one great distinction between them is that fancy is superficial, while imagination is deep, essential, spiritual. Fantasy in ordinary usage simply denotes capricious or erratic fancy, as appears in fantastic.

Thus, be it fantasy, fancy, or imagination, the mind is the aggregate of all conscious and unconscious processes originating in and associated with the brain, and the brain is the minds abode.

Future

The reading of the brain is what we perceive, as consciousness and sometimes, in our minds eye.

The mind is where the impostors called sanity and insanity reside, the distinction between the two being a fine thread - a thin line, the borders of which, like tide and fortune, are in a constant state of flux.

Most of us, most of the time, keep moving between sanity and insanity, for the two cannot be told apart unless such movement is extreme.

The human race is governed by, its imagination. The sorcery and charm of imagination, and the power it gives to the individual to transform his world into a new world of order and delight, makes it one of the most treasured of all human capacities. Our imagination is the single most important asset we possess. Our imagination is our power to create mental pictures of things that do not exist yet, and that we want to bring into being. Our imagination is what we use to shape our future.

Hence, in our own way, we are the creator. We generate countless predictions every day.

Our imagination is the source, tirelessly churning out mental pictures of what we will be doing in the future. "You create your own universe as you go along.

The stronger your imagination is, the more variegated your universe. When you leave off dreaming, the universe ceases to exist," said Sir Winston Leonard Spencer-Churchill, the British politician best known for his leadership of the United Kingdom during the Second World War.

All phenomena, the Buddha once said, are rooted in desire. Everything we think, say, or do - every experience - comes from desire. Even we come from desire. We were reborn into this life because of our desire to be.

Consciously or not, our desires keep redefining our sense of who we are.

Desire is how we take our place in the causal matrix of space and time.

Thus, imagination is the beginning of creation because we imagine, what we desire; we will, what we imagine; and at last, we create what we will. When we wake up from a dream, we realise that the dream was in essence, our creation; and was experienced only by our self, and by no one else.

Similarly, when we wake up from the dream of our present waking life, we will discover that it was merely a dream, or imagination, which was only our creation; and experienced only by our self and by no one else.

Experience

Likewise, since the entire world as we know it, is only a series of images that we have formed in our own mind, by our power of imagination; we have no valid reason to suppose that there is really such a thing as a world existing outside our mind or imagination. Therefore, we have no valid reason to suppose that creation is anything more than an act of our own imagination.

The ego is what makes us believe that we are real. The 'I' in us imagines this body to be real. Even though we may realize, by way of reasoning and analysis that, our body is not our self, and that this world is not real; so long as we experience them, we will continue to feel them to be real.

The same way as we feel that our body and the world that we experience in a dream are real so long as we are experiencing them.

The feeling that this body is 'I' and that this world is therefore real is so deeply rooted in us that it cannot be removed merely by any amount of reasoning, analysis or intellectual understanding. Therefore, from our own experience we can clearly recognise the fact that a world - whether this world that we now experience in the waking state or some other world that we experience in dream - appears to come into existence only when we imagine ourselves to be a body.

Thus, it is reasonable for us to suspect that this body, this world, and our experience of our self, of being this body and perceiving this world, are all a creation of our imagination, which functions only in our waking and dream state.

Satisfactory

Is the entire world, as we know it, only a series of images that we have formed in our own mind by our power of imagination? We have no valid reason to suppose that there is really, any such thing as a world existing outside of our mind, or imagination.While dreaming we are convinced that that dream world is real, and therefore we believe that it will continue to exist even when we stop dreaming; but when we wake-up, we understand that it was only a figment of our imagination, a dream, and that it therefore appears to exist only when we are actually experiencing that dream.

Likewise, though we are now convinced that this world is real and that it will continue to exist even when we are asleep, it is in fact only a figment of our imagination, and it therefore appears to exist only when we are actually experiencing it.

Just as our dream world ceases to exist when we are not experiencing that dream, so this waking world ceases to exist whenever we are not actually experiencing this dream that we imagine to be a 'waking state' - that is, when we are asleep, in another dream or in the state of death.

One day, a man called Malunkyaputta approached the Buddha and wanted that the Buddha explain the origin of the universe to him.

He even threatened to cease to be a follower, if the Buddha's answer was not satisfactory. The Buddha calmly retorted that it was of no consequence to him, whether or not Malunkyaputta followed him, because the Truth did not need anyone's support.

Then the Buddha said that he would not go into a discussion of the origin of the universe. To him, gaining knowledge about such matters was a waste of time because a man's task was to liberate himself from the present, not the past, or the future.

To illustrate this, the Enlightened One related the parable of a man who was shot by a poisoned arrow. This foolish man refused to have the arrow removed until he found out all about the person who shot the arrow. By the time his attendants discovered these unnecessary details, the man was dead. Similarly, our immediate task is to attain enlightenment, not to worry about our beginnings, or that of the universe; because only "mindfulness" can know, shape and free the mind and experience the Real, beyond mind.

A knife in the hands of a murderer kills life and the same in the hands of a surgeon saves life. Man should know the enormous power of the mind and use it "mindfully" to redeem the sorrow and suffering in the world and make the earth a true Garden of Eden, and not turn it into a Pandora's Box.

See you this day next week. Until then, keep thinking; keep laughing. Life is mostly about these two activities.

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