Imagination – Is it our Creation?

Nature never creates a vacuum in the mind. If one anxiety or worry is over, another anxiety immediately manifests. Mind can never become vacant. It has got infinite preoccupations.

Carefully mark the ways of the mind. It tempts, exaggerates, magnifies, evokes, unnecessarily alarms through vain imagination, vain fear, vain worries and vain forebodings. It tries its level best to divert you from concentration on your Goal.

Mind works havoc through its power of imagination. Imaginary fears of various sorts, exaggeration, concoction, mental dramatization, building castles in the air, are all due to this power of imagination. Even a perfect, healthy man has some imaginary disease or other due to the power of imagination of the mind. Much energy is wasted on account of imaginary fears. When his mind is fully occupied with the affairs of the war, the soldier does not feel any serious injury as a gunshot wound in the leg. He is not aware of the loss of a large quantity of blood also. He is filled with enthusiasm. He is not conscious of his body so to say for the time being.

When the excitement is over, when he sees some blood-spots on his clothing or when some of his friends points out to him the wound in the leg, he gets the consciousness. Then he is alarmed a bit. The power of imagination plays havoc now. He gets a collapse now. The power of imagination always exaggerates.

A man may have a little weakness. When he becomes your enemy, you at once exaggerate and magnify his weakness. You even superimpose on this or cook up many more weaknesses. This is due to evil imagination on your part. Whenever the mind of two friends are strained by ill-feelings, these minds begin to exaggerate and cook up things. Fault-finding increases. It is very difficult to get at the truth of the statements of these two broken friends with broken friendship. Their utterances are always colored by their inner feelings. The power of imagination does havoc now. Maya (Delusion) plays havoc through the mind and its power of imagination.

When your mind is deeply concentrated, period of two hours passes like five minutes. If the mind is distracted and wandering, half an hour hangs on as two hours. This is everybody’s experience. In dream also, many events that represent a period of fifty years take place within ten minutes. Time is but a mode of the mind. It is also illusory like the objects. Through the trick of the mind, one furlong at times appears to be a great distance and three miles at other times appear to be a very short distance. You ought to have noted this in your daily life.

Kalpana in the mind means mental creation or imagination. This is the real delusion. You will have to destroy these various imaginations. This is the aim of all the spiritual practices. Then you will be established in state of bliss.

Reference

Mind – Its Mysteries and Control by Sri Swami Sivananda