Exhilarating Imagination
The world within connects us to something even bigger.
We use our imagination not to escape the world but to join it, and this exhilarates us because of the distance between our ordinary dulled consciousness and an apprehension of the real. — Iris Murdoch1
What is the purpose of the imagination? In our technologically complex, post-industrial culture, many of us might hold that the imagination is all about entertainment. We imagine worlds radically unlike our own: the “worlds” of Star Wars, Star Trek, Middle-Earth, or Narnia. Our children learn about imagination from Barney the Dinosaur, but Barney’s message has a sting to it: he encourages children to “use their imagination” but with the unspoken assumption that what we imagine is strictly make-believe.
This subtly reinforces the idea that only the measurable, empirical world “out there” is real, and whatever we might conjure up in the theater of our imagination is little more than a form of personal entertainment—not “real at all.” This, I suppose, is training our children to grow up to become happy consumers of the entertainment industry, but I fear that it leaves us less equipped, collectively, to rely on our inner landscape as a meaningful way to navigate the creative and spiritual challenges life might throw our way.
In contrast to our cultural assumption that the imagination is something used to avoid reality, novelist and philosopher Iris Murdoch understood that the imagination’s purpose is not to alienate us from “real life” but to help us be even more present to what is truly real. “This exhilarates us,” she observes, “because of the distance” between what is authentically real and the “dulled consciousness” that can shape a life of tedium and boredom.
If there is a distance between the imagination and what is real, it is only an imagined distance. In other words, just as we have imagined a great gap between the limitations of reality and the possibilities of the imagination, we can just as easily “imagine” our way back to an integral whole: a world where not only “imagination is more important than knowledge” (a saying often attributed to Albert Einstein), but the freedom of the imaginarium can help our spirituality to blossom, to access our meaning and purpose, and to create a future shimmering with hope and joy.
Murdoch, Iris. Existentialists and Mystics: Writings on Philosophy and Literature. Kindle Edition.