Imagination - what can it do?

It happens many times. When we expect too much out of something, we get disappointed with the actual thing. Be it a movie that our friends praised a lot and told us that it is a “must see” or a dish that was said to be “to die for” at a restaurant. Or even a car that was supposed to be the “dream machine”. I have myself felt this on many occasions and of course I have heard this from many people. So when we expect a lot, what we get in reality does not meet the expectation and we are disappointed. And that is because we use our rich imagination when someone describes something as “too good”. Imagination wins over reality every time.

Similarly, when you get into something with no expectations or really low expectations, you are many times very pleasantly surprised to find that you actually don’t dislike it as you expected. In fact sometimes you actually like it – it may even become your favorite.  This is because you have either used your imagination to expect something really bad or not thought about it, not used your imagination at all.

So does this mean its better not use one’s imagination? No, I don’t think so! No, of course not! How can one advocate not using one’s imagination?  Imagination has given us so much.

Imagination of many great men has been the cause for many scientific discoveries and inventions; imagination of other great people has made them create beautiful paintings, wonderful sculptures and amazing melodies that would sooth our soles. Even capturing those melodies in tapes, records or CDs has been possible only because some scientist, some technician first imagined capturing them and preserving them. And if not for the imagination, what would we have in name of literature?

Actually, anything and everything that is good and is of any meaning has its origin in someone’s imagination. Of course, we can’t deny that imagination can also be cause for hatred and actions based on hatred. Imagination can also be cause for overindulgence sometimes and for ravaging of nature.

So obviously imagination itself is not enough to decide whether a person will be good or bad. And just imagining things will not do anything for a person. Just imagining things is called day-dreaming, living in a dream world. On a daily basis all of us are imagining something, about something we want to do, something we wish to see, something we want to happen, someone we would like to meet or something we want to eat. And of course it can be very enjoyable to just sit around and imagine things. But as we all know, just imagining does not do anything for our progress or growth. It does not do anything for our own good, forget someone else’s good or progress.

Imagination gives us wings – it gives us our dreams. Not only the dreams which we dream in our sleep, for those too come from our imagination, but the dreams you dream in wakeful awareness. The dreams that make one want to become a scientist or an artist. But to turn this dream into something real and meaningful, you need to firstly apply your thinking to the imagination. While the imagination itself is one type of “thinking”, one needs to apply a different type of thinking, a more logical thinking which takes into account ground realities and can define what your “aim” has to be for your dream to come true, can break it down in smaller steps if required and can come up with a sort of an equation of how to start with what you have and how to reach your goal.