Imagination is greater than knowledge: Do you dare to fly?

Sometimes I just sit down waiting for something to happen. Life can be so slow paced at times! So boring…I bet I am not the only one who has experienced this in this room.

I try to look for quick fixes to get the spark back...do my nails, scroll down in my social network feeds...Anything I come up with just doesn’t work. What is wrong with me? Why can’t I get out of this numb state? What am I?Abnormal? Deranged? Unbalanced?

Deep?

We try so hard to find that perfectly structured life with every answer, attempting to look away from problems and envying those who have the fewest. We believe in what we know. and we only know is what we can see, touch, feel. Rational thinking ties us down to the petty range of facts that we can actually see and measure, but it cuts us off our contact with reality… that dangerous place where things no longer fit perfectly like the pieces of a puzzle, quite the contrary...that place where we are exposed to those emotions we don’t enjoy such as fear, grief, pain.

We are taught to be afraid of danger, of the danger of pain, of the danger of grief. Nobody takes us to funerals. How many people take their children to funerals? Its just not part of culture anymore. Nobody takes us to the cemetery. When was the last time you had a family visit to a cemetery? So, though death is no longer a terrible mystery, a tragedy that requires courage and imagination, it has just become an inconvenient fact to be avoided.

I once read that we are a culture that has lost its fire and is devoted to facts. But what is it about facts that has us so trapped? Where did it all start? I remember we studied the age of reason and enlightenment. In History, maybe that’s where all ideas came, from worshiping facts and science and technology and just kept on growing for a couple of centuries. But it feels so artificial, so inhuman, maybe we need to connect more with other sources such as those cultures of the past that fed on emotion and intuition. For example you may have studied the Romantics. Authors who wrote about feelings and imagination, and lived lives full of feelings and imagination. Maybe we would need more of those, those who are not seduced by the illusion of control facts give us.

Once I had a Biology test on the cell. I felt hopeless.Thing is that I sat down to study and started crying. My sister decided to help me and instead of reading from this massive text book full of facts she started telling me a story. She said the key was to imagine it first. She compared the nucleus, which is the one in charge of directing all cell actions, with the boss of an industry, and just like that I studied for my test. I got an A. That was when I realized that imagination was the way I could translate facts and incorporate them as knowledge.

Oscar Wilde said “To live is the rarest thing in the world, most people exist, that is all.” So what would this mean? We can exist all our lives just dealing with facts, but can we live? Is that really living? We have no problem with fantasies, movies and so on because they don’t belong to the realm of what is real. But they are mostly a cheap substitute for real imagination, from deep within ourselves.

I won’t define knowledge nor imagination. I only want to share with you my hope. As we leave this room who knows? It might be imagination that saves us. A person who uses imagination is the one who can see beyond what is merely presented to us taking objects, ideas, emotions and concepts from reality and transforming them in order to present them to the rest of the world in a unique way which is accessible to us all. So imagination is not only greater than knowledge and not only vital to knowledge...it´s downright inseparable from knowledge. Imagination leads to questions. Questions lead to answers, and answers lead to knowledge. Imagination takes us beyond the realm of all known physical possibilities. Having imagination doesn’t mean that you are a poet; baking the best possible cake is imagination.

Teenagers today, unfortunately, often feel that they need to take substances in order to drift their minds away from reality. If parents and educators encourage them to fly with their imagination they’ll realize they won’t any need artificial and dangerous substances.

Imagination gives us wings to soar and fly well above and beyond past what we know, to dream of and bring to life what we can create ourselves. I have been flying for a while now...are you going to stay on the ground?