This past Sunday’s liturgy involved the confession of misuse of intellect and imagination. My mind has been working underground on that generic idea since, and with luck, here we have a post.

As a child, I could not stand scary movies. (As an aside, I couldn’t stand the suspense of mystery novels either!) I could never walk up the stairs to my room, or from the basement– I’d have to run. Fear. A compulsion that ghosts or scary things were after me. If it was dark, and if I had my back turned, then they were there! I’ve called it childish and irrational, and tried my best over the past 15 yrs to keep my cool, with limited success.

In another vein, the past few years have made me aware of my disinterest in fantasy novels or movies.. Fantasy as in sci-fi or anything with gnomes, fairies, unicorns, orks, trees that walk or talk (no matter how many boulders they throw), wizards, etc. No LOTR or Narnia for me.

As for exhibit ‘C’ toward my non-standard imagination, my childhood was filled with two things: Dinosaurs and Legos. (Note the glaring lack of comic books like most boys). My childhood was not taken over my narrative or storyline of any sort. I still don’t read novels like many adults do, be it Harry Potter or Ted Dekker (Here’s to you Tim!). Rather I was caught up the the amazement of the granduer of dinosaurs, of the reality of another time, and of construction and interworkings of pieces of any sort– stretching them to their limit.

My imagination was non-narrative, but instead, constructivist and ideological, if not mechanical. Any wonder why I now take interest in contental philosophy? Sure I enjoy logic, but I’m not a pure analytic in my approach. I like considering the large ideas at play within the masses.. perhaps my world is a world of lego-men after all!

But tonight after watching a zombie-filled movie, as I walked from shadowy room to shadowy room in the winter dark, I was struck by this idea of imagination: My mind is strong, and it seems to project the non-real into reality. My mind is unable to make monsters appear before me and others like true wizardry, but for all intents and purposes, my mind is overactive enough to make me believe )behave) as if I could be attacked out of nowhere.

Take this into another realm.. many have trouble with depression, OCD or even trusting others. Is this simply a matter of having a strong, overactive mind projecting issues and concerns into one’s reality which are not? A matter of having the mind “push back” instead of simply being a tool to process and understand? Imagination running wild of a new sort?

Or again, all the ideologies in the world, from Democritus’ atoms, Descartes’ reality, Kant’s Phenomenology, Hegel’s history, Modernism’s dream, Christianity’s hope of a New Heaven and Earth, Nirvana, even Hindu castes.. these are all strictly in the category of imagination. The one difference would be whether any one of these dreams were to pan out. Just because something is unseen does not make it imaginary, but as well, to live in a presumed imaginary world which ends up being reality, that would not be so foolish of the faithful.

And precisely the point: the faithful trust that reality is more in line with their imagination than what is commonly held. This can lead to discrepency over the logical outcome of lifestyles given what is or is not included and prioritized in the ideology. This idea of faithfulness is also consistent with the requirement to “remember the dream.”

A Disciplined mind.
Something I don’t hear mentioned often is disciplining the mind. Discipline, in general, is spoken of, perhaps only in reference to one’s will or perhaps emotions, but training one’s mind to swap between reality and imagination would seem to be of use, for avoiding mental illness, as well as keeping faithfulness.