On your planet you have an animal called a bear. It is a large animal, sometimes larger than you, and it is clever and has ingenuity , and it has a brain as large as ours. But the bear differs from you in one important way. It cannot preform the activity you cal imagining. It cannot make mental images of how reality might be. it cannot envision what you call the past what you call the future. This special ability of imagination is what has makes your species as great as it is. Nothing else. it is not your ape-nature, not your tool-using nature, not language or your violence or your caring for young or your social grouping. it is none of these things, which are all found in other animals. Your greatness lies in imagination.
The ability to imagine is the largest part of what you call intelligence. You think the ability to imagine merely a useful step on the way to solving a problem or making something happen. But imagining it is what makes it happen.
This is the gift or your species and this is the danger, because you do not choose to control your imaginings. You imagine wonderful things and you imagine terrible things, and you take no responsibility for the choice. You say you have inside you both the power of good and the power of evil, the angel and the devil, but in truth you have just one thing inside you - the ability to imagine.
This is a passage from the novel Sphere by Michael Chrichton. I read this when I was very young, and it has remained with me from that time.
I could blabber about the glory of Sphere for quite some time... but this article immediately lulls me to remember inside the Sphere. Apart from the beautiful descriptions and literary prowess Michael Crichton clearly displays, the concepts of this book really resonated with my own views on imagination. I think there is something gloriously unkharmic about the power of imagination to mold fate (if fate is indeed malleable (:). By unkharmic, I mean concepts of luck, divine intervention, or other external and ethereal forces changing one's future; concepts I find preposterous. But this Crichton captures elegantly a world bound only by human decision and imagination. It appreciably resonates with Nietzsche's "will to power" concept; which I think makes humans all the more sexy. I really appreciate the choice of passage in this article!
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