by O.Grimstad

Created on: March 23, 2009   Last Updated: February 25, 2010

I am an idealist who see imagination as a fundamental aspect of reality, which unfortunately is a view not to talk too openly about today. Imagination is commonly defined as a failure to observe reality correctly in our materialistic paradigme. I take the chance of speaking outside of my closet here, though.

Our modern western way of thinking is built around the idea that there is a primary reality outside of us, with its inherent patterns and laws of causality that has eventually evolved in our naturalistic experience of imagination. I can't deny this aspect of reality since I do experience external causality restraining my imagination in time and space. I am currently sitting in front of my PC screen writing an article for Helium, in the physical shape of an advanced primate. While sitting here my imagination may take me to distant places in other times, though. It may even give me a feeling how it is to be there and then, but whatever is happening here and now dominates my experience. If I am hungry my day dream may involve food, and if somebody calls me for dinner I'll stop daydreaming and go to eat.

Tonight I will fall asleep, and have a much stronger experience of my imagination: It will be my primary conscious focus. Believing it to be my exclusive reality will give me the opportunity of experiencing feelings, ideas and beliefs strongly. I may, for instance, experience the existential fear of dying in spite of lying safely in my bed. This is possible because of believing the projected objects and world of the dream to be outside of me. If I realize they are not I will have a "lucid dream", and not be able to take the dream events that seriously anymore. I then stop projecting my feelings back into a reinforcing feedback loop of interdependence. I will be aware that the dream events depend on my imagination in other words.

Back to the "real" here and now: Our primary collective and cultural focus of conscious experience has been on local causality and objectivity as outside of our imagination. But this perspective has been increasingly meeting paradoxes lately. What seemed to be independently outside of us can't really be seen that way in science. There is interdependence. An object depends on an oberver and vice versa, and what seemed to be local has holistic aspects as well. The observation of any photon brings a whole world of interdependence from potentiality into actuality, for instance. Some believe that such holistic aspects of reality make it more correctly to see our world as a hologram rather than the earlier Newtonian clockwork model. I share that view.

My view is not least based on my own experience of reality. Even though I do experience objectivity and causality outside myself I also see aspects of reality that demands explanations in underlying dimensions. My imagination seems to be an interdependent part of reality, like in a dream. I can't see any good reasons for reducing imagination into anything less just to conform to a more traditionally accepted way of thinking. Some materialists claim the older paradigm to be the only rational and scientific one, but I also fail to see such claims as more than a conservative interpretation in defence of personal beliefs and posision. Both religious and atheists tend to reinforce their own beliefs in a polarized debate, failing to see that the views may not necesarily exclude the other.

In short, it seems to me we're in the process of waking up into seeing ourselves as the creative cause for our existence in this world as much as cause of it.

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