Imagine...

The human species prides itself on its imagination. As far as we know (mostly because we do not communicate with them), no other species has the ability to imagine like we do. We have credited most of our significant achievements on being able to imagine things that would have seemed impossible.

Merriam-Websters defines imagination as the act or power of forming a mental image of something not present to the senses or never before wholly perceived in reality.The truth however is that imagination is wholly influenced by what we know of our reality, of what experiences in our lives have informed us about the world we live in, about what is and is not possible. When we imagine, we have a reference beacon very much in the reality. That is why we imagine aliens with a humanoid appearance; with a head and a torso-like structure ending in appendages. When we imagine heaven, it is the most beautiful manifestation of nature we can recreate from what we have seen or heard or read. If you close your eyes right now and imagine the place you most want to be, chances are it will bear striking resemblance to a picture you have seen on TV, on the Internet or in a magazine somewhere. We consume so much information, solicited and otherwise, that it is practically impossible to think of something which does not have a basis in our reality. Our art forms, even though they might involve tremendous imagination on the part of their creators, also reflect a familiar consciousness.

I recently watched the movie, Close encounters of the Third Kind. Even allowing for the 30 years that have passed since this movie was made, what struck me most about it was how we all were (and still are) restricted by our imagination. Extraterrestrial life exists? Sure and it looks almost like us, has attributes like us like music and touch and yes, just like a human facing a strange situation or a stranger, the first reaction is to fight. Whether it is in the design of the next generation vehicles (which will still have wheels and have contact with the ground) or a superbly made movie like Up, we are very much restricted by our imagination.

When a child is young, two or three years old, it begins to comprehend the world around itself. It does not have enough data about the world to imagine events based on "real" facts. That is why a 3 year old can have tea parties with 5 dolls and 2 horses while engaging in pleasant conversation with all of them about the flying dragons. This does not seem impossible to the child's mind. That is real imagination. As the child grows older, we encourage the child to use her imagination in her studies, to think creatively and "out of the box". But when she does that, she is reminded that though it is very creative, the answers to the questions have to be arrived at, using a conventional and hence, effective method that has been favored over the years. In essence, the imagination of that child gets systematically culled as she grows into an adult in our society. By then, the exposure of that child to the "ways of the world" has happened in its entirety and try as any teacher might, that child can only think so much out of the box. There is no escaping the box from then on.

Albert Einstein once said, “Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand.” How many of us can separate knowledge from imagination? Aren't we all the prisoners of our knowledge-tinged imagination?