When I started my self-examination of everything I "knew" I committed myself to a search for reality. I wanted to know. I wanted the truth. But I found that in the absence of knowledge, I would just make things up. I would imagine answers to questions, solutions to problems, and visions of things beyond my view. The problem was that reality seemed to me to be stark, harsh, and barren as the Sahara. Every oasis turned out to be delightfully imaginary. I fought this for some time until I realized that our imagination was one of the key character traits we humans share. We imagine!
It has been said, and I believe, that animals live in reality, humans live in an enhanced reality created by our imaginations. We have the realities of our lives, our births, our struggles and triumphs, our health and sicknesses, our family, friends, and our enemies. We have the fortunate and unfortunate accidents, the weather, the seasons, the climate, and the geology and geography of our lives. We have the sky above us and the Earth beneath us. And over all this we imagine. We have stories, visions, art, music, science, and religion. We can see the reality of problems and imagine the solutions to them before we have actually created them. We have design, engineering, and planning. We create ideals, imagining a perfect world that may never be, but we continue to strive for it. We imagine justice for all, peace, love, and faith. We use our imaginations to look into the dark, to look beyond the here and now to a brighter tomorrow, and into the eternities beyond. We imagine!
Compared to Reality, our imagination is a rich fertile jungle, castles in the clouds, trees of life and knowledge. And many of our imagined things have been "realized." We live in the sky, fly in the stratosphere, have gone to the moon and peered into space and into the very foundations of the universe. We can travel much faster than humanly possible. We can cure diseases that killed millions before. We can turn on lights in our homes with the flip of our fingers, and then watch events from around the world in our evening news. We have libraries in the palms of our hands, and can see and talk to friends and loved ones around the world in real time. All because we imagine!
For billions of years reality was what existed, as I have said: Reality is what it is. Reality was what we had to endure. We simply had to live with it. We imagined a better world, but it was never within reach. A better place was only found after we left this world. We had to surrender to reality, and die, before we could actually find the world we imagined. But now we are actually creating and recreating reality. We have the power to create a heaven on earth. We can imagine it, we can build it, if we have the will to do it.
For a brief time I wanted to abandon the imagined to find reality, but found that I couldn't and I really didn't want to live in just the real world. I imagined too much more. The imagined is not reality, but it could be.
Imagine!
(Post script: In mathematics I learned how useful imaginary numbers were... there are many problems that can't be solved without them!)
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