Imagination

If the only sure truth is the experience of now, all else is faith.¹ If all our conception of reality is a product of the imagination, then faith must begin with belief in your imagination, its practical utility and mystical import.² Even elegant science, with its methods of observation and theoretical laws, is a work of the collective imagination.³ Our empirical experience is real, but our understanding of it is our handiwork. Practical utility and predictive power do not make ideas real.⁴ Only 7 is real. So we each must use our imagination to build our memories, and fabricate our self. Our unique echo of understanding, our own pattern.⁵ No one else understands the world the same way, feels existence the exact way, as anyone else. Even you are removed from yourself, one moment to the next.⁶ Each mind must build its own model, draw its own map, at every moment. No evangelism is possible, then, when you hold the experience of now to be your ultimate dogma,⁷ and the practice of imagining to be sacred.⁸ Each is free to believe in their own being, and to build their beliefs with their own imagination. There is no other way: answer your own unanswerable questions⁹ as best you can, or let them be.¹⁰ There are no answers to know. There is only you, now. So have faith in your imagination, and let others have faith in theirs.¹¹

1 Concluding Unscientific Postscript to the Philosophical Fragments, Søren Kierkegaard 2 “Truth is a matter of the imagination.” - The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula K. Le Guin 3 The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Thomas Kuhn 4 “It is perhaps just dawning on five or six minds that physics, too, is only an interpretation and exegesis of the world (to suit us, if I may say so!) and not a world-explanation.” - Beyond Good and Evil, Friedrich Nietzsche 5 “You have to take seriously the notion that understanding the universe is your responsibility, because the only understanding of the universe that will be useful to you is your own understanding.” - Terence McKenna 6 “No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it's not the same river and he's not the same man.” - Fragment 91, Heraclites 7 ather than a core propositional belief to be accepted, there is a primacy given to a singular experience: the mindful unity of being in the moment. 8 As in worthy of respect, devotion and adoration. 9 Avyakt (unspoken) in Buddhism refers to a set of common philosophical questions that Buddha refused to answer. 10 “Let It Be”, The Beatles 11 “The principle itself of dogmatic religion, dogmatic morality, dogmatic philosophy, is what requires to be rooted out; not any particular manifestation of that principle.” - “Civilization”, John Stuart Mill

1, 3.1, 4.6, 4.17, 5.1, 5.2, 5.5, 6.18, 7.x.y.11, 7.x.y.16

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Imagination

Have faith in your imagination.