Sources of the Higher Forms of Imagination

How does imagination work? Why do some people seem to have a large amount of active imagination and others very little?

All kinds of formations are active in the vital and the mental domains. For those who have the receptivity and the aware connection to either of these realms, there is an interchange that takes place. They receive intimations from these realms. Powers or formations that want to take a physical form, that want to manifest in our complex world of Matter, Life and Mind, exert pressure and thereby become known to the receptive individual. For individuals with the most receptivity, who are least bound by the existing forms active in the world, new insights, ideas and visions become active. There are various levels of interaction and intensity that can express themselves through the receptive individual. We then describe these individuals as visionaries, artists, inventors, people who see ‘over the horizon’ of our present situation.

A disciple asks: “How is it [disciplining the imagination] done?”

The Mother observes: “Imagination is something very complex and manifold — what is vaguely called ‘imagination’.

“It can be the capacity for seeing and recording, noting the forms in some mental or other domain. There are artistic, literary, poetic domains, domains of action, scientific domains, all belonging to the mind — not a very high and abstract mind, a mind above the physical mind which, without our knowing it, pours out constantly through the individual and collective mind to manifest in action.”

“Some people, through a special faculty, are in contact with these domains, take up one formation or other that is there, draw them to themselves and give them an expression. This power of expression is different in different people, but those who can open themselves to these domains, to see things there, to draw these forms towards themselves and express them — either in literature or in painting or music or in action or science — are, according to the degree of their power of expression either very highly talented beings or else geniuses.”

“There are higher geniuses still. They are people who can open to a higher region, a higher force which, passing through the mental layers, comes and takes a form in a human mind and reveals itself in the world as new truths, new philosophical systems, new spiritual teachings, which are the works and at the same time the actions of the great beings who come to take birth on earth. That is an imagination which can be called ‘Truth-imagination’.

“These higher forces, when they come down into the earth-atmosphere, take living, active, powerful forms, spread throughout the world and prepare a new age.”

“These two kinds of imagination are what could be called the higher imaginations.”

Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, Powers Within, Chapter III Imagination, pp. 26-27