Unleash the power of your imagination

Sometimes knowledge is our worst enemy. That may be hard to believe at first but if you think about it you will realize that it is absolutely true. You know that certain things are possible and certain things are not. These things frame what your limitations are, literally defining what you can and can not do.

Have you ever seen one of those cartoons with Bugs Bunny or the Roadrunner character where they just walk out on to thin air or trot across the ceiling for a scene or two? But when Yosemite Sam or Wile E. Coyote try to do the same thing they fail due to the laws of gravity and physics. Someone comments on it and the reply is that the other guy could do it because he never studied law.

Now this is an extreme case that is kinda funny and would never work in real life but there are a lot of real events that work exactly that way. There are hard set limitations that you can not do anything about. Without oxygen you are going to die. That's a fact. Written in stone right? Or is it? It is.
Unless you figure out what it is that oxygen does for your body and find some other way of providing that thing. OR find some way of making it so that your body can continue to function without that thing.

See most limitations are not real.They are statements that are only true if you can not change the circumstances that they deal with that cause them to be true. They are simply challenges that have yet to be solved. A healthy mind or group of minds using the power of their imagination given enough time can solve any problem.

Think about this. The people that often come up with the best and greatest solutions to our problems are younger minds. People who have not been firmly indoctrinated in the beliefs that define what can and can not occur accomplish things that we know are not possible. Their solutions often work because they were not aware of the obstacles that others see in solving the problem.

The way most people try to solve problems is by starting with the limitations of circumstance and attempting to jam ideas into the box so to speak. The way creative problem solvers solve problems is the opposite. They just look at the goal and work backwards wondering how to get from the goal to where everyone else is.

It is not that their thinking is outside the box. It is that they are often not even aware of the existence of said box.

Inside the box thinking is like we could do this if we could get past this thing. But this thing is in our way. We can't do much about it so we're kinda screwed. It is signified by a lot of "if onlys" or "it's too bads"

Outside the box thinking is more like what if we did this or that or worked it from this angle. Using your imagination has a lot more "what ifs" and "why don't wes"

And as always it comes down to choice. You always get to choose whether to use the power of your imagination to drive yourself on to success. Or you can choose to let obstacles get in your way.

There is no problem that you cannot solve with the power of your mind. So why don't you? Let go of what you know to be true and free your imagination. Test things that would work if known limitations did not exist and I guarantee you will be surprised with the results.

Fear of the dark

There are a great many things in life that do not make sense to me. Most of them have to do with a thing that I see in others that I do not see in myself. Fear due to being surrounded by a lack of light is one of those things.

I do not understand this. Nearly half of the world is covered with it at any one point in time. It's mentioned or shown just about everywhere in books, movies,television shows, and songs. Why are so many people afraid of the dark?

For most people, it seems that fear of the dark is really a fear of not knowing what is out there. Or in other words, when we can not see what is happening we invent or imagine things to fill in the gaps. We superimpose our thoughts onto reality, literally taking something that is inside our head and planting it firmly within the darkness. People that do this are using their imagination in an unhealthy deconstructive way.

It seems to me that positive rational thinking people, that deal honestly and logically with the world would not have any reason to imagine monsters of any sort in either the light or the dark. Maybe I am wrong, perhaps there is no connection.
But I am not afraid of the dark. Or of the things that go bump in the night. I prefer darkness. Here in Florida, due to the heat, nighttime is often the only time where being outside is even remotely bearable, especially in summer.

I enjoy sitting alone outside, after sunset, feeling the air around me begin to cool, surrounded in a cloak of darkness, silently listening to the cries of birds, the buzzing of insects and other animal sounds, watching people scurry along, hurrying to be indoors. The darkness is a welcome home and a familiar friend. For me, it is comforting, relaxing and peaceful in a way that day time can never be.

I have been alone in the dark, in enough different places throughout my life that if there were monsters hiding there, somewhere, I think I would have seen them. Darkness is the natural condition just about everywhere that the light of the sun is not currently shining. Yet we treat the darkness as unnatural. It is true that there are dangerous things in the darkness, but no more so than there are in the full light of day. If we do not fear the light we should not fear the dark, for one is simply a lack of the other.

My son who just turned three is not afraid of the dark either. In fact, late in the evening he will often turn the lights out so that we can play with his toys in the dark. Studies show that between two and six is often when this fear begins due to a drastic increase in the use of the imagination that occurs in this time frame. I will observe carefully to see if this happens with him, though I have a suspicion that it will not. It is not in my nature to be afraid in general and from what I have seen so far, I think it may not be in his either.

Imagination

By rather serious minded people it is often called cloud gazing or staring at your belly button. They say, your imagination will not get you anywhere. It is a waste of time. You need to pay attention and stay focused.

Perhaps those very same people have not ever heard of inventors like Thomas Edison or the Wright brothers. The Wright brothers gave us the ability to travel across the country in just a few hours. Edison invented hundreds of different things including the light bulb, the phonograph, the motion picture camera,the voting machine and nickel-iron batteries, just to name a few.

Other people with great minds have used their imagination to take those ideas and turn them into things that we use everyday. Cellphones, movie theaters, cd players and rechargeable batteries would not be if not for people who came after Edison looking at the world and imagining how they could make it better. Without imagination we would not have many of the modern conveniences that people are so strongly attached to. Things that we often take for granted are the direct result of people who dared to dream of a better way.

People used to believe that the world was flat and if you sailed too far you would just fall off. If not for Christopher Columbus and other like minded dreamers there would likely have never been English colonists settled on the east coast of what we now call America. Christopher Columbus believed that the world was round. He could imagine it even though so many in his day could not. He believed that he had sailed around the world to India which is one of the reasons why native Americans are called Indians. It turns out he was right about the world being round, he just hadn't sailed far enough to reach India.

If certain people living in America had never suffered under the harsh tyranny of the English king and imagined a way to make things better, the United States of America would never have been created. We would still be a colony under British rule. If the leaders of our newly forming country had not used their imaginations to compare the life they had with the life they wanted, the Declaration of Independence could not have been written and neither could the Constitution.
Every successful business started out at one time as a vision in the mind of the potential owner of such a business. And what is a vision but a fully fleshed out plan that one imagines.

Nothing worthwhile ever gets done without first there being a plan formed in the imagination of the one who ends up doing that worthwhile thing. It is important to note however that imagination alone is not enough. One must also have the passion, the drive to see through the plan that they have dreamed up.

Dreaming is the key to unlocking our power of creativity. Imagination, backed up by personal action is how we transform the world we have into the world we want. So, while listening to a lecture may not be the most appropriate time to daydream, I say to you, ignore those who say that imagination is useless. It is in fact one of the most useful tools with which a person can be equipped.