Imagination
by Al Harris

There was a man that had a dream. A light beam was talking to him, and told him its secrets. It spoke of the speed of light. Of mass. About how everything is related to everything else. How there is only energy, in all its different forms.

When the man awoke, he had the theory of relativity. It was only in later life that Einstein wrote he discovered his theory in a dream. He couldn't very well tell that to his scientist colleagues, so he wrapped his theory up in a logical, left brain manner. But to this day, few understand what he said.

Everything is energy. You and I are energy. Our cars are energy. The food we eat is energy. Our thoughts are energy.

Einstein said: "imagination is more important than knowledge." When the other kids in his elementary school were passing mathematics, he failed. Instead, he daydreamed. His mind roamed the vast distances between the stars, to outposts where only thought can go. He was practicing his ability to think outside the usual confines of logic.

Dr. Edward De Bono, one of the foremost proponents of engendering creativity, asks: “How will you discover new thoughts, new combinations of ideas, if you rely only on what you already know?” To discover something new, you must venture in your imagination to the vast reaches beyond the stars, as Einstein did.

Yet to tread beyond your normal habits is threatening. It scares the mind, which says: "New ideas are not familiar to me. They’re not comfortable. They don't fit into a category I already know. What will others think? What will my neighbors say when they find out I don't do things as they do; that I don't think the same as them?

The witch hunts of Salem were a result of such fear. Fear that people were different. Yet if we are to advance we have to ignore that fear. One of the few survivors of the World War II concentration camps was Victor Frankl. When asked how he kept his balance, he said his captors could take everything away from him but his choice of how he was feeling or chose to feel. He too was talking about imagination.

Imagination may begin as the product of fantasy, but it paves the road of reality. It is the blueprint for your house. It's the seed from which giant fir trees grow. It's the invisible around which the visible wraps itself, clings to it, and takes shape. It's only later when we see those shapes, we realize they first took form in the imagination.

Imagine what you can do, if only you imagine.

Copyright @2000 Al Harrris