Imagination is such a powerful tool through which we can either create or destroy our life. It is a potential that exists in each of us. According to Osho, Imagination is getting into an attitude so deeply that the very attitude becomes reality. It is a force, energy and the mind moves through it. When the mind moves through it the body follows.
In mental chess, players imagined the board and the play, keeping track of the positions. Anatoly Sharansky, the Soviet human rights activist, used mental chess to survive in prison. Sharansky, a Jewish computer specialist falsely accused of spying for the United States in 1977, spent nine years in prison, four hundred days of that time in solitary confinement in freezing darkened five-by-six-foot punishment cells. Political prisoners in isolation often fall apart mentally because the use it or lose it brain needs external stimulation to maintain its maps. During this extended period of sensory deprivation, Sharansky played mental chess for months on end, which probably helped him keep his brain from degrading. He played both black and white, holding the game in his head, from opposite perspectives an extraordinary challenge to the brain. After he was released, with the help of Western pressure, he went to Israel and become a Cabinet minister. When the world champion Garry Kasparov played against the prime minister and the leaders of the cabinet, he beat all of them except Sharansky. ~ The Brain that Changes Itself
The moral of the above story is mental practice is an effective way to prepare for learning a physical skill with minimal physical practice. Experts don't store answers in their memory. Instead, they store strategies and key principles in their long term memory. They have immediate access to these key principles, in times of need, as if they are stored in their short term memory. Developing such skills requires decades of concentrated effort.
Logic will get you from A to Z; Imagination will lead you everywhere. Albert Einstein
Everything is created twice. Initially, it is created in the mind and then in reality. Human beings are born with an incredible gift of imagination. No physical laws can be applied to it. Through imagination, anyone can go to any corner of this universe. It is impossible for an artist to create art without imagination.
Creating art requires two steps:
Build a prototype using imagination.
Transform the prototype into reality.
If creating art needs such simple steps then why doesn't everyone become an Artist?
Only fools expect a prototype to work perfectly for the first time. When a prototype is transformed into reality some things do work and others don't. Stamina is needed to overcome the obstacles. Unless an artist persists in his efforts to make it work, it is very difficult to create art.
Imagination is like a muscle. I found out that the more I wrote, the better it got. Philip Jose Farmer
The purpose of the imagination is to break the patterns of the mind which look at reality in a certain way. Imagination is destroying them and a new reality is revealed. An effort is needed to destroy the patterns of the mind then only we look at unpatterned reality. Unpatterned reality is the only reality.
The human brain is highly plastic not elastic. There is a difference between plasticity and elasticity. Elasticity means when the stress is removed, an object will revert back to its original shape. For example, on releasing force, the rubber band will move back to its original shape. Plasticity means when stress is removed object won't move completely to its original shape. There is a slight difference between the new shape and the previous shape. Some reorganization occurs to its neural structure which is unlike the case with elasticity.
In The Brain that changes itself, Norman Doidge explains about Imagination Vs Doing:
One reason we can change our brains simply by imagining is that, from a neuroscientific point of view, imagining an act and doing it are not as different as they sound. When people close their eyes and visualize a simple object, such as the letter a, the primary visual cortex lights up, just as it would if the subjects were looking at the letter a. Brain scans show that in action and in imagination many of the same parts of the brain are activated. That is why visualizing can improve performance.
Most of the time we are not aware of what we are thinking or imagining. We start imagining some negative events which occurred in our life. Imagining a negative event will change the neural pathways of our brain. Our perspective about life will become more negative which further makes us think about more negative events. Hence a vicious cycle starts. It is very important to break that vicious cycle otherwise we will become more and more depressed.
If negative visualization is detrimental to us then positive visualization is very helpful for us. How? Imagine some positive events in your life. It will change the neural pathways of your brain which will help you to see life in a more optimistic way. Now the virtuous cycle starts.
We are born pessimistic and an effort is needed for positive visualization.
Imagination will often carry us to the worlds that never were, but without it, we go nowhere. Carl Sagan
I have read a story about Tibetan lama in The Book of Secrets. A Tibetan Lama was standing naked in a temperature below zero degrees Celcius. Standing naked at such a cold temperature will kill us but this man is perspiring. I was completely taken aback by reading that story. How is this possible? Actually, this Lama was imagining a very hot temperature around him. He is imagining in such a way that the very imagination becomes reality for him and his body follows his imagination. That is why he is perspiring in such a freezing temperature.
A similar experiment is done by Drs. Guang Yue and Kelly Cole. They showed that imagining one is using one's muscles actually strengthens them. The study looked at two groups, one that did physical exercise and the one imagined doing exercise. [...] At the end of the study, the subjects who had done physical exercise increased their muscular strength by 30 percent, as one might expect. Those who only imagined doing the exercise, for the same period increased their muscle strength by 22 percent. The explanation lies in the motor neuron of the brain that program movements. During these imaginary contractions, the neurons responsible for stringing together sequences of instruction for movements are activated and strengthened, resulting in increase strength when the muscles are contracted.
The only freedom we have in our lives is the freedom of choices. What we choose will change the course of our lives. Awareness is needed to recognize the negative loop and to come out of it. An effort is needed to visualize positively so that we can view our life in a positive light.
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