Pagan Blog Project: I is for Imagination!

This was my most fun post to do so far. :)

When my friends and I were about middle school age, we discovered Wicca. This led us into a whole slew of experimental things: spells, rituals, scrying, meditation, but the most vivid, fond memory I have of this point in our lives was past life regressions.

We would sit there in the dark at sleepovers, bathed in candlelight, and Person A would lay her head on a pillow, Person B would sit and stroke the forehead of Person A, and Person C would hold her hand, helping to ground Person A. B would then talk A down into a trance, open doors, and ask questions about who the person is, what's going on around them, etc.

The friends who thought it would be dumb were always the ones who got really into it, and pulled past lives out of their psyche that they simply could not have made up. They always wowed themselves. Others would be skeptical, and say, "Well, how do you know I'm not just making this up?"

This is where the notion of imagination comes in. When you are past-life regressing, scrying, divining, astral-projecting, are you just making it up, even if you think or worry that you might just be making it up? I know I have a hard time quelling the skeptic in me. You may just think you're imagining things and that what you're experiencing isn't truly real.

I have two approaches to answer this issue, based on the same principle, however, to bridge the gap between imagination and reality. First: are they so different? If you are imagining something, who is to say that the thing you are "imagining" is not real? Define real. Define imagination. You probably said something like, well, real things are tangible things you can feel. Desks are real because you can feel them. Smells are real because you can smell them. The problem with this is that reality doesn't equal tangible, necessarily. Emotions aren't primary physical (even though they induce physical responses) but they are real. Ideals are real, such as beauty, justice, truth, even though the definition thereof may vary from person to person. Just because something isn't tangible doesn't mean it isn't real.

Everything that happens to you happens in your mind. Tangible things are really inside your head: your hand physically touches the desk, but your mind is what feels the desk, through the conduit of your brain. Shoot some Novocaine into your hand, and you can touch the desk all you want, but you can't feel it because it's not making its way to your mind.

Therefore: what is in your mind is real to you. Your mind defines your own reality. Some realities are shared: you can touch a desk together with someone else. Other realities aren't shared: perhaps you don't like desks and the other person loves desks; how you feel about things is a part of what defines reality. This is a different reality for you, but each reality is equally valid.

Therefore, again: anything you imagine is real... possibly only to you, albeit, but still real.

Second argument: Let's say you spend some time on the Astral plane and hanging out with some faeries, and you come back to the physical plane and disbelieve the entire thing, dismissing it as, "Oh, that wasn't real, I just must have made it all up inside my head."

BUT who is to say that reality does not impress itself upon your memory and imagination? Who is to say that you have that much control to make up such a rich environment yourself? Is your imagination really yours? Or do you draw the things you imagine from things that already exist, that already happened? Is it even possible to imagine something that doesn't exist? Imagine a color that doesn't exist. Imagine a shape that doesn't exist. It's almost like you can't imagine something without it existing, or at least with the idea of it existing.

So next time you're imagining something wishing it were real, who knows? Maybe it is, somewhere.

Love,

<3 Sapphire Orchid <3