The Crisis of Imagination
by Robert Moss
The greatest crisis in our lives is
a crisis of imagination. We get stuck, and we bind ourselves to the wheel of
repetition, because we refuse to reimagine our situation. We live with a set of
negative or confining images and pronounce them "reality." We do this because
we let ourselves get trapped in a particular version of the past or in a
consensual hallucination. We do it to cling to the familiar, not daring to give
up what we are or have been for what we are meant to become.
The crisis of imagination is
pandemic. The 9/11 Commission rightly pronounced that the horror of the worst
terrorist attack in American history was "a failure of imagination." With only
a few exceptions, those responsible for security could not imagine a terrorist
group executing a plan as bold and horrendous as attacking major targets on
American soil with hijacked American planes.
Yet the plan had been "in the air"
for years, and it was certainly dreamed by many people who had no other access
to information about it. In the fall of 1998, a New York woman shared with me a
terrifying dream she could not understand, in which American planes were
attacking targets on American soil, in Washington, DC, and elsewhere.
To address our challenges, we need
to draw on extraordinary sources of information and invest our energy and
attention in a form of active imagination that dares to re-vision everything. To be citizens of the world (to
quote Marcus Aurelius) we must cultivate sympathetic imagination, which
is what allows us to understand the feelings and motivations of people
different from us. The ability to imagine one's self in another person's place
is vital to healthy social relations and understanding. A sociopath signally
lacks this ability.
To bring peace and balance to our
world, we require historical imagination, by which I mean both the ability to
claim what is helpful from the past and the faculty for spotting alternatives
to a particular event track — past, present, or future.
Winston Churchill was a
master of historical imagination, and his ability to navigate through the worst
crises of the twentieth century was intimately connected to his ability to
imagine the consequences of choosing differently at any turning. When he
studied the past — most notably in researching his biography of his ancestor
the Duke of Marlborough — he was constantly investigating what might have
happened had different choices been made, and drawing the lessons. When he
considered the future, he not only demonstrated extraordinary prescience
(writing in the 1920s, he forecast weapons "the size of an orange" that could
destroy cities), but he seemed always to be tracking alternate possible event
tracks.
As Isaiah Berlin wrote of him in Winston Churchill in 1940,
"Churchill's dominant category, the single, central organizing principle of his
moral and intellectual universe, is a historical imagination so strong, so
comprehensive, as to encase the whole of the present and the whole of the
future in a framework of a rich and multicolored past."
Whether the issues are in our world
or our personal life, the practice of imagination requires claiming a creative
relationship with the past. There is an image from Ghana that springs to mind.
It shows a strange bird looking over its shoulder. This symbolic bird is called
Sankofa, and its role is to remind us to bring from the past what can heal and
empower us — and dump the rest.
Practicing Imagination
One thing we want to reclaim from
the past is the wisdom of the child mind. The practice of imagination begins
with making room in our lives for the child who knows it's okay to "make things
up" and knows this is fun.
When asked why he was the one to
develop the theory of relativity, Einstein said: "A normal adult never stops to
think about problems of space and time. These are things which he has thought
about as a child. But my intellectual development was retarded, as a result of
which I began to wonder about space and time only when I grew up."
Mark Twain insisted, "No child
should be permitted to grow up without exercise for imagination. It enriches
life for him. It makes things wonderful and beautiful."
Whatever age we have reached, we
all need a daily workout, and a place to go, in the real world of imagination.
Keep working out, and you'll
remember that, as poet Kathleen Raine wrote beautifully, "Imaginative knowledge
is immediate knowledge, like a tree, or a rose, or a waterfall or sun or
stars."
Build your home in the imagination
strong enough, and you may find it is the place of creative birthing we all
long for, the state of mind Mozart evoked when he said:
"I can see the whole of
it in my mind at a single glance.... All the inventing and making goes on in me
as in a beautiful strong dream."
This article was excerpted from the book:
 The
Three "Only" Things: Tapping the Power of Dreams, Coincidence, and Imagination
by Robert Moss.
Reprinted with permission of the publisher, New
World Library, Novato, CA. ©2007. www.newworldlibrary.com or 800-972-6657 ext. 52.
For More Info or to Order This Book (hardback),
paperback (June 2009), or Kindle edition.
More books by this author.
About the Author
Robert Moss was
born in Australia, and his fascination with the dreamworld began in his
childhood, when he had three near-death experiences and first learned the ways
of a traditional dreaming people through his friendship with Aborigines. A
former professor of ancient history, he is also a novelist, journalist, and
independent scholar. Visit him online at www.mossdreams.com.
Other articles by this author.
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