Musings on the Imagination.

Most of the posts on MazReal read as meaningless drivel, maybe inane musings and possibly downright laughable childish crap or even silly willy [sic] and I agree with all of it. They are. But they are based on one important thing that is seriously lacking today and that is the use of the imagination.

This is what I think is happening here and as semi-retired/retired people we hopefully have time to think and muse and use our minds in more esoteric, individual,inward  ways than just thinking of ideas to get through every day and wake up the next. These are the things that the majority of people on this planet have the misfortune to think on, how to get through the day and live. 

Think about it, we live in a period of history where nothing miraculous really happens ( I am not alluding to bread and fishes and raising Lazarus and healing lepers) and we have no geniuses. We have no Gandhi, no da Vinci or Michelangelo, no Freud, Karl Marx, Newton, Descartes, Shakespeare or Milton. All these people had ideas that to todays generation would have been thought of as downright fanciful or ridiculous or even dangerous. Most of them belonged to secret societies of one form or another wherein one was positively encouraged to explore really deep into the imagination. So deep in some cases they experienced death.

Today I am willing to say we have no imagination. We have lost the ability or the will to go deeper into our consciousness and think crazy thoughts, stupid ideas, ridiculous musings because we believe in a matter-before mind philosophy where governments purport to do our thinking for us. It's better for them. They believe they will get no dissent from men and women who have the imagination to think and thereby rock the boat and if they do come across such people who formulate dissent or weird ideas, they quickly nip them in the bud - 

Anna Politkovskaya, Tianenmen Square, Arab Spring Syria - you know the rest
even down to such things as of lack of government art funding thereby stifling debate from artists with too much time on their hands.

We are living in a scientific-materialistic universe where there is no room to be mad, to take of your clothes and roll in mud and stand on Speakers' corner in Hyde Park and rant. We think of those people as lunatics. However anyone who did that in the era of our grandparents would have been thought of as lucid or maybe thought of as a genius and maybe what crazy things they did say actually had deep meaning. Our consciousness is different from our heirs. Although it is probably more liberal and sympathetic and conscious of class, race, gender, less respectful of authority, more commercially motivated and all those good ideas. But go back to our great grandparents and our consciousness would be very different. Continue backwards and soon you will come to a time when we all lived inside our heads in a dreamworld like the aboriginals of Australia.

What I am saying is that we have lost the ability to use our imagination. Many geniuses developed it to produce what we have today in philosophy and medicine and physics. By and large the people who have most changed history have not been the great generals and politicians but artists and thinkers. An individual sitting alone in a room giving birth to an idea can do more to change the course of history that Napolean on the battlefield.

In a mind-before-matter philosophy there is the excitement in thinking. It is not just what we say or do but what I think that affects our fellow humans. The leaders tell us not to ask the big questions, just get on with it. They mistrust the imagination and associate it with fantasy and illusion but by using the imagination we got Leonardo da Vinci, Shakespeare and Mozart. Where are the like of those people today?

Imagination is the key.


Amen.


Christ, I eventually got that of my chest. Time to go back inside my head. Ta Ta.




Now we can get back to silly things like sexy men's underwear and Marlene Dietrich on a bike in big clothes using her imagination to the extreme. (bet she's never placed her superstar ass on a bike saddle in earnest)