The Imagination: a Tool for Development

Imagination is a window to the future. People who are stuck in their past, or the present, tend to close themselves off from development. They insist that things have always been done a certain way, and that is how they are going to be done. Change is anathema to them. They have little, if any, receptivity to progressive views, to new directions, to development off of their fixed ways of seeing and doing things. They even fight to maintain their status quo rather than face the reality that change is inevitable.

Those who take up spiritual development naturally have to be receptive to new influences and insights coming to them. They need to have the imagination that things can be different, truer, more beautiful, more harmonious, than what they see around them in the world. Imagination helps them see beyond the limits of the present darkness.

A disciple asks: “What is the function, the use of the imagination?

The Mother notes: “If one knows how to use it,… one can create for oneself his own inner and outer life; one can build his own existence with his imagination, if one knows how to use it and has a power. In fact it is an elementary way of creating, of forming things in the world. I have always felt that if one didn’t have the capacity of imagination he would not make any progress. Your imagination always goes ahead of your life. When you think of yourself, usually you imagine what you want to be, don’t you, and this goes ahead, then you follow, then it continues to go ahead and you follow. Imagination opens for you the path of realisation. People who are not imaginative — it is very difficult to make them move; they see just what is there before their nose, they feel just what they are moment by moment and they cannot go forward because they are clamped by the immediate thing. It depends a good deal on what one calls imagination.”

Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, Powers Within, Chapter III Imagination, pg. 31