"What Is Now Proved Was Once Only Imagined" Part I

"This world of imagination is the world of eternity." William Blake
The Ancient of Days, 1794, Wikimedia Commons

"Logic will get you from A to B. Imagination will take you everywhere." Albert Einstein

"Imagination creates reality." Richard Wagner

"Imagination governs the world." Napoleon Bonaparte

To the above quoted luminaries - and the countless score of inspired souls down the ages, whether painter, plowman, and politician, soldier, suffragette, or scientist - the utilization of the imaginative faculty has not been merely to serve as an arena for the staging of lifeless day dreams, or the breeding ground for feverish delusions of grandeur. It was nothing less than the workshop of the mind, where grand thoughts and noble visions are forged by the fiery smith of belief into physical being. Whether it be in the fields of medicine, music, literature, science, art, and religion, all initial discoveries and subsequent advances were first conceived in the womb of disciplined, inspired imagination. For some, it was something yet grander. In the words of the visionary poet William Blake, "Man is all Imagination. God is Man and exists in us and we in Him... The Eternal Body of Man is the Imagination, that is, God, Himself."

Indeed, those intrepid visionaries such as Blake - who the incredulous masses and the dogmatic gatekeepers of the stunted status quo declare mad - have only articulated with forceful beauty the sentiment expressed by the inquisitive searchers of truth of all times:

"Mind is the Master Power that molds and makes, And we are mind. And ever more we take the tool of thought, and shaping what we will, bring forth a thousand joys, or a thousand ills. We think in secret, and it comes to pass, environment is but our looking glass." James Allen

Befitting her inherent ability of myriad manifestation, this creative force has donned many different masks throughout the ongoing run of Creation - God, Allah, Brahma, Yahweh, Tao, Fortune, to name but a few of her perceived forms - yet the Muse of Imagination has been ever present, working with deep thinkers of all ages, nations, races, and genders, bringing those things which are seen from that which is unseen.

The voices of glorious antiquity – East and West alike – sound their testimony to her ability, as directed by the current of individual, and in turn, collective human thought, to form "light and create darkness, make weal and create woe" (Isaiah 45: 7):

"The universe is change; our life is what our thoughts make it." Marcus Aurelius

"If we are not stupid or insincere when we say that the good or ill of man lies within his own will, and that all beside is nothing to us, why are we still troubled?" Epictetus

"All that we are is the result of what we have thought: it is founded on our thoughts, it is made up of our thoughts. If a man speaks or acts with a pure thought, happiness follows him, like a shadow that never leaves him." Buddha

“The more man meditates upon good thoughts, the better will be his world and the world at large.” Confucius (attributed)

Even the contents of the Christian Scriptures, when viewed thorough the illuminating lens of metaphor, parable, and allegory, stand in firm solidarity with the insight of the "heathen" experience:

"For as he thinks in his heart, so is he." Proverbs 23: 7

"You will also declare a thing,

And it will be established for you;

So light will shine on your ways." Job 22:28

"So Jesus answered and said to them, “Have faith in God. For assuredly, I say to you, whoever says to this mountain, ‘Be removed and be cast into the sea,’ and does not doubt in his heart, but believes that those things he says will be done, he will have whatever he says. Therefore I say to you, whatever things you ask when you pray, believe that you receive them, and you will have them." Mark 11: 22 - 24

"That is all well good," the doctrinaire materialist will say, "Yet nothing but fanciful philosophy! What does science have to stay of the matter?"

Ask, and you shall receive, to borrow a line. The miracles of science as demonstrated by her storied seekers have only verified the earlier observations of the ancients concerning the omnipotent and creative nature of inspired imagination.

There is the old story of August Kekule, the renowned German chemist known for his contributions to the field of theoretical chemistry, who discovered the shape of the benzene molecule via a day dream of a snake seizing its own tail (the ancient Ouroboros symbolizing regeneration; Carl Jung believed it to be a significant archetypal image). 

Frederick Banting, the Canadian physician who pioneered the use of insulin injection treatment for sufferers of diabetes (for which he won the Nobel Prize in 1923), had a dream instructing him to surgically tie the pancreas of a diabetic dog to stop the flow of nourishment. After performing the procedure as detailed in the dream, he discovered a connection between sugar and insulin. Further researches lead him to developing insulin as a drug treatment for diabetics.

The celebrated Nikola Tesla - the visionary behind smartphone technology, the alternating current induction motor, and a holy host of other ground breaking inventions – attested strongly to the role that concentrated and inventive thought played in his illustrious career:

"I am credited with being one of the hardest workers and perhaps I am, if thought is the equivalent of labour, for I have devoted to it almost all of my waking hours. But if work is interpreted to be a definite performance in a specified time according to a rigid rule, then I may be the worst of idlers. Every effort under compulsion demands a sacrifice of life-energy. I never paid such a price. On the contrary, I have thrived on my thoughts.”

Furthermore he said,"The gift of mental power comes from God, Divine Being, and if we concentrate our minds on that truth, we become in tune with this great power."

Thomas Edison, the Wizard of Menlo Park and Tesla’s rival in the fabled “Current Wars,” once remarked, "To invent, you need a good imagination and a pile of junk."

And, of course, there is the monumental paradigm shifting work of Albert Einstein, whose theory of relativity revolutionized the scientific view of the Cosmos from the prevailing Newtonian model to that of an expanding, four dimensional universe. Quoth the sage, "The true sign of intelligence is not knowledge but imagination." 

In light of Einstein's revelations - many of which came to light through his method of imaginative "thought experiments" - the field of physics has slowly begun to entertain and accept the idea - postulated by Idealistic philosophies like Hermeticism and Vedanta for example – of a central Universal Mind, animating and expressing itself in the multiplicity of physical forms manifest in the Cosmos, including humanity. Einstein, in his 1934 book The World as I See It, expressed his own sentiment as follows:

“But the scientist is possessed by the sense of universal causation… His religious feeling takes the form of a rapturous amazement at the harmony of natural law, which reveals an intelligence of such superiority that, compared with it, all the systematic thinking and acting of human beings is an utterly insignificant reflection. This feeling is the guiding principle of his life and work, in so far as he succeeds in keeping himself from the shackles of selfish desire. It is beyond question closely akin to that which has possessed the religious geniuses of all ages.”

Sir Arthur Eddington, prominent English physicist and one of the earliest supporters of Einstein's theory of relativity, posited in his 1928 book The Nature of the Physical World:

"The universe is of the nature of a thought or sensation in a universal Mind... To put the conclusion crudely — the stuff of the world is mind-stuff...The mind-stuff of the world is something more general than our individual conscious minds; but we may think of its nature as not altogether foreign to feelings in our consciousness... Having granted this, the mental activity of the part of world constituting ourselves occasions no great surprise; it is known to us by direct self-knowledge, and we do not explain it away as something other than we know it to be — or rather, it knows itself to be."

Eddington's contemporary, Sir James Jeans, believed likewise. From his The Mysterious Universe:

"Today there is a wide measure of agreement, which on the physical side of science approaches almost to unanimity, that the stream of knowledge is heading towards a non-mechanical reality; the universe begins to look more like a great thought than like a great machine. Mind no longer appears as an accidental intruder into the realm of matter; we are beginning to suspect that we ought rather to hail it as a creator and governor of the realm of matter..."

Stay tuned for Part 2 of this mind bending discussion, which will be posted next week!

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