An ode to the imagination.

Great, grand, innovation. How the mind works wonders. Beginning with that which is not, and making it real. How we voyage into the unknown. From an armchair, eyes closed, the mind lifts off. Rocket thrusters cannot compare to mental clusters – great ideas exploding from within.

Sitting still the mind traverses the multi-verse. I sail the cosmos within.

I am a tourist in a vast, complex construct of a magnificent mind. I play the part with wonder – the spectacle, a special ability to comprehend the majestic. I gasp as the universe unfolds before me.

I am a traveller. My mind takes flight. As dark is the night the mind brings light.

I sit and wonder about the meaning of my life. Is it objectively true that we are here to accrue virtue? Or is has my imagination got the better of me? If the universe lacks objective truth, is there still value in my self-defined truth? Is it even possible to know objective truth? I think not. I think this is where faith comes in.

And so this becomes an examination of my values. Why do I value what I do? How have I come to value virtue without proof? But! Virtue has proof. I know the feeling that it imbues. I feel generosity as a levity. I feel kindness as rewarding in itself. So if that is true, then I do not require an objective proof.

Kindness for the sake of kindness. It does not need to be validated by god. It is a choice, moral character serves the whole because it is best for the whole. It helps me sleep at night. But why? Why does an ethical code help me sleep? Is that something I’ve just convinced myself of? Or is it something true?

My mind takes off. It imagines a reality that defies logic, existing non-linearly. It postures an ultimate reality which is beyond the construct of the space-time perspective of the human being. And the irrationality of that does not bother me in the slightest. But it seems absurd, and I acknowledge that. How can I believe something, so firmly, that is outside of proof itself? The very notion of a reality which cannot be proven because our greatest tools, as humans, are inadequate.

How does one encounter the timeless? And doing so, how does one prove it?

What proof exists of the non-linear domain? How can anyone accept something that lacks quantifiable proof? Again, faith in the experience I’ve had – first hand.

There is an experience that I have where the mind relinquishes its desire to grasp. Relinquishes the desire to contain, explain, and capture. It is like an animal tracker, running through the jungle with a net on a stick trying to trap a cloud. It swipes, with pin-point precision only for the cloud to dissolve, escaping effortlessly. But when the tracker stops, not trying to capture, it observes, witnesses the life that it participates in. Trying to catch the reality it will always escape. This is the way I come to understand life.

And so I give up the need to know, and instead of knowing the truth I feel the truth. But the empiricists will never know what the rationalists intuit. And so here I’ve discovered that I am a rationalist. My experience has led me to believe in things, which I cannot see. (I may have missed the point on that one)

The imagination conjures realities that go beyond the senses. It conjures the idea of the infinite that the senses, being finite, can never truly experience. The senses will only grasp the fruits of the tree, but never the eternal tree.

The senses must then be used to infer that which is beyond the senses, that which allows the possibility of existence. Such a leap is difficult, understandably so, for people who need proof, and I see how there is no way out of that, that is without a complete ejection from the empirical ride. Instead, I began to understand the entire perceivable world as proof of the timeless, all-pervading truth.

I live comfortably in this world.

My mind takes me on adventures through the infinite. It is a brilliant tool that constructs within the finite. The material brain and the immaterial mind. How majestic. How we straddle the line between the astral and the atomic. We are positioned so beautifully. We are scientists and artists.

I suppose that is what my art does. Aims to express the ineffable. That which strikes you with awe and wonder.

I leave you with a quote, ‘to those who understand, no explanation is necessary. To those who do not, no explanation is possible.’