Imagination can Knock Your Socks Off© Copyright 2005 by John L. Waters. All Rights Reserved
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Imagination can Knock Your Socks OffJohn L. Waters June 3, 2005 ©Copyright 2005 by John L. Waters. All Rights Reserved ------------------------------------------------------ Imagination can Knock Your Socks Off Imagination can knock your socks off. Even after you have put your socks and shoes back on, imagination can cause you to see, hear, or otherwise sense something that isn't actually present. For example, a stone appears to be a human head. The Moon appears to be a giant round cake of green cheese. An Angel appears and dictates a poem. A dark-faced man appears to be sinister. He holds up a short stick and you think it’s a gun. Every building you see houses a conspiracy. All these and other wonders exist in the realm of pure imagination. The truth is that imagination can knock your socks off so that you go barefoot the whole rest of your life. We know that the imagination process is real, and an imagined object becomes real as soon as what is imagined is rendered into a physical form that is perceptible to other people. In this way a composer plays music that he imagined in his head. An author writes out a poem that he has thought out beforehand. A person paints a picture that he has imagined. The physical body makes real what the mind imagines. Oftentimes, however, a person imagines something that he or she can't create all alone. For example, in solitude an architect imagines a new city. The architect can draw up plans and build a tiny scale model, but hundreds of people must work together to actually make real the city the architect has imagined. So, too, the composer of a symphony must get dozens of musicians together before anyone else can hear all the voices he hears in his own private imagination. Therefore each person who has imagination must sell his or her idea to other people. Imagination by itself isn't enough! People become violent when they are beset upon by too many problems and irritations. Because of this, when nature is violent, people imagine there is a personality or God behind nature or that nature has a human face. This imaginative idea of a God behind nature caught on, and imagination has adorned this GOD with many other attributes. In time even certain men became identified with God. Today the idea of God is marketed to millions of innocent children daily. Although there are many variations on the theme of Who or What God is, no alternative idea is presented to innocent children. For years, even decades, naïve people get steeped in only one teacup. The Idea of God is still used to explain a prodigy. For example, consider a smart but naive young man who spends twenty years going to school trying to remember thousands of facts and rules sold to him by bigger, older professional people. The innocent boy is often humbled by his own ignorance and he feels totally inferior. Suddenly, however, at age twenty-three the young man is transformed into a gusher of original ideas! His mood is greatly elevated, and his sense of shame and humility is gone. Sensing his natural ability, the young man goes to the Temple and engages the respected Holy Men in discussion. Old friends and family are surprised, even shocked and dismayed by this young man's sudden emergence from his usual shyness, withdrawal, and obscurity! The young man is labeled an arrogant upstart! Someone or something has ignited the dry sticks of his hidden potential. But with such originality, and such nerve, the man never can sell his talent. People are set in the old ways of thinking they learned when they were little. In fact, no record even exists that the inspired young man ever lived. No person ever got the point. Do you? To a child who has a lot of imagination, stones become heads and voices come out of them. Trees dance in the wind and sing. New songs come from the imaginative child, even if no one else sings them. Imagination is very hard to sell. Many people say that the imagination isn't real. School children are so busy trying to learn and practice what their teachers are pushing at them, that an imaginative child gets rejected. Later, however, in a prodigious and unexpected uplift in mood, the unusually timid young man experiences himself. It's not likely, however, that other people will accept him as a real person. They just never get the point. Nearly every child grows up to live in imitation of some respected teacher or exemplary family member. Today’s child goes to school for decades and learns facts and rules. Even in “the arts” fads and fashions force a student to produce work that earns a grade or is acceptable to an agent, publisher, or marketer. Originality, however, forces the imagination to produce works that don’t sell… art that isn’t considered “real art,” music that sounds “old fashioned” or “out of style,” useless” inventions, or writings that the agents or the editors say “aren’t sexy enough.” In episodes of elevated mood, the non-imitative and unusually creative person rises to new heights of confidence and productivity. The take-off point is being happy, feeling free, and feeling life the way life was before all the facts and restrictions came down like an avalanche and buried the young person alive. One has to “become again as a little child to enter the Kingdom of Heaven” as Christ said. After enough rejection the talented person may even imagine that he is the Second Coming of Christ. Most children are able to pack in all the facts and rules, and become expert in some long-established discipline. Many children are talented in memory work. They manage to remember faces, names, and rules of conduct, sociability, and faith. They learn all the popular jokes and other stories. They go to church and bow to the Holy Image. They have some imagination, but not enough imagination to live in a different world, and never wear shoes again. The unusually talented person, however, can’t function in memory alone. Imagination makes stones into heads and the heads talk and sing. From the original man up in the heavenly estate of himself new poems, new songs, and new ideas of other kinds originate as from the mythical “God the Creator” Himself. Indeed, the original man is rather like Jesus Christ. The original man was and remains Adam or else is some prodigy who is known by a different name. He simply isn’t able to be a copy-cat ape. In every large school there are unusual children who have great difficulty measuring up to the social standards. Some subjects are simply too difficult for them. Some wonderful talent undermines their conventionality. They are more imaginative and original than retentive. A child like this feels intimidated, inadequate, and withdrawn. Only in a “manic episode” will this child turn into a dynamo of energy and show his or her special talent. But in our society, people sic the medical establishment on a person who is having a manic episode. Such a dogged person will go through life without ever showing his true self, his full talent, and his natural joy. Today many people get up on a high horse and joust with windmills. They try to prove God exists or they try to justify their agnosticism or their atheism. All the while they shoot off their arrow-pens so wildly they don’t even hit the target let alone penetrate the gold. Moses, Christ, and other prodigies were simply original persons whose talent made them unable to accept false ideas. Mania and imagination propelled these talents into high orbits of thought and action that no one else could follow. Joy was at the heart of it because in a depression a man can’t function. Nevertheless, modern psychology and psychiatry are down in the pit of hell screaming in the flames of the old terrorist mindset: “You’d better forget your ideas and conform or we’ll put the pharmacological screw on you or we’ll just shoot you dead.” It’s the same old mentality that served Hemlock to Socrates and nailed Jesus to a Cross. 1:45PM Friday, June 3, 2005 John L. Waters
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