Imagination Can Help or Harm Depending on the Intention Behind Its Use

Every great power that humanity discovers and wields in the world has both its negative and its positive side. It can either be utilized to destroy or to support, benefit and create. For example, humanity has harnessed the use of fire. Fire can burn down the house, or it can cook one’s food. Rocket technology can be used to create weapons, or to explore the solar system. Certain medicines can be used to poison an individual.

This truth about the powers of the external life also applies to the inner powers that we develop and wield as human individuals. Each emotion has the power to uplift or to oppress. We can either encourage growth or destroy the opportunity for growth depending on the mood, energetic stance, emotional vibration and the thought we harbor about anything we think we are, we do, we should be, or we can do. Much of the trauma that individuals suffer is due to harsh words and energy that they internalize from others, and then accept that about themselves. Emotional bullying is one such misuse of the power of emotion for instance.

On the level of the thought, we can either think of positive things or negative things, positive growth, or we may simply focus on our limitations, our inabilities, our weaknesses and deficiencies and use that line of thought as an excuse for inaction or, even worse, for taking up things we know to be counter to our ultimate goal.

The same thing works with respect to the power of imagination. We can imagine all the possible negative consequences of something, we can imagine darkness, despair, destruction, and become not just pessimistic, but fatalistic about our own lives, as well as about the future of humanity. How many people today imagine that we have created for ourselves a doomsday scenario, whether nuclear weapons, greed, pollution, climate change, or even alien invasions or catastrophic meteor strikes! Yet, we can also see that there are signs of real progress in a number of areas, more and more people are paying attention to achieving a change of consciousness that can harmonize and solve the crises we are facing, and that the fact of the crisis is a sign of the pressure of Nature for humanity to change and evolve beyond the limitations that have created these crises. For these people, the glass is ‘half full’ rather than ‘half empty”.

The Mother writes: “The imagination is like a knife which may be used for good or evil purposes. If you always dwell in the idea and feeling that you are going to be transformed, then you will help the process of the Yoga. If, on the contrary, you give in to dejection and bewail that you are not fit or that you are incapable of realisation, you poison your own being.”

Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, Powers Within, Chapter III Imagination, pg. 34