This is the last XL post in our series on the Imagination. I hope you’ve enjoyed the ride, and enjoy this final installment.
Stay tuned for a new XL series called “Sage Advice,” which we will unpack timeless advice from the Sages of the Talmud in a shorter, quicker-to-read format.
Click the button below if you want to start from the beginning of the Imagination series:
If you just want the executive summary of what we’ve said so far, here it is:
The imagination is arguably the most powerful faculty of the human mind. The person who can capture the imagination of others can rule nations and international corporations.
However, the power it grants over others bespeaks of its power over us. Our conscious and unconscious indulgences in our imaginations since childhood, have left most of us captive in worlds of fantasy and illusion, deep into adulthood, which naturally block us from living in reality.
“The rest is commentary,” as they say.
We still have a vital point to clarify:
While unconscious fantasizing tends to lead us down a rabbit holes of convenient lies, away from inconvenient truths, there are countless examples of the imagination being used — not just harmlessly — but to accomplish feats that the abstract intellect is completely incapable of on its own.
Albert Einstein is oft-quoted as having said that “imagination is more important than knowledge.” Although he clearly was not advocating for the sort of modern mental meandering of the ignorant, he was making a case for using the imagination to open possibilities that the more linear, logical mind is otherwise incapable of seeing. He credits his imagination as the tool that allowed him to think outside of the box of Newtonian and Galilean physics and Euclidean geometry.
Visualization, a form of meditation, is a technique reported to be incredibly helpful by athletes, combat soldiers, public speakers and entrepreneurs. It puts their imaginations to use to prepare their minds and bodies for realities they have not yet lived, but certainly will.
Mental imagery has also been demonstrated to be essential for the memorization of large amounts of information using the ancient Greek system of loci or “memory palaces,” as has been chronicled and employed by Josh Foer in his fantastic book Moonwalking with Einstein, in which he covers and later wins the U.S. Memory Championship using his imagination.
There’s also an inescapable theological point to make here:
It would make zero sense that God granted us the boundlessly creative force that is the imagination for it to merely serve as an impediment to grasping reality.
There must be ways to use its power for the good.
Interestingly, although the classic Italian commentary on the Torah Rav Ovadiah Sforno identifies the Snake in the Garden of Eden as the very personification of the imagination, the Talmud bemoans the curse of the snake as the loss of the “greatest helper” a person could have ever asked for.
How might we rewire our imaginations for good while protecting ourselves from its harmful fantasies?
One of the most captivating Torah teachers of the 20th century was Rabbi Yitzchak Hutner.1 He was known for his unique combination of classic Talmudic genius, with a sense of majesty, gravitas, emotion, and drama.
In a seminal discourse on the imagination, he paints a picture of the trappings of the imagination side-by-side with how it might be properly use.2
The first thing he does is lay out a schema of the human mind:
One the one end of the human being are his senses that experience the world through sight, hearing, feeling, smell and sound. Raw sensory experience is vivid and vibrant, but the problem is that it’s all-consuming. When one is experiencing something, it’s hard to think about anything other than the thing he is experiencing at that moment. This is why, to concentrate, we usually need some form of sensory deprivation. (The mad genius, existentialist philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein is said to have done the opposite — he would escape to the front row of movie theaters to get himself to stop thinking using the sensory over-stimulation of movies.)
On the other end of the human mind is abstract intellect. The intellect, although cold and abstract, has the comparative advantage of being free to think about anything and everything. Unlike the senses, the intellect is completely unbound, but totally lacks the vibrancy of the senses. Ideas alone, even if true, are not “sexy.” This is why videos are more viral than pictures, and pictures more viral than text.
In between the intellect and the senses, sits the faculty of memory and imagination, which serves a bridge that connects the two.
When we are children, and our intellect is still relatively undeveloped, the imagination begins to store snapshot “images” from our senses, known as “memory,” and will start to conjure up these images — freely stretching them, distorting them, and recombining them to serve the child’s desires, fears and emotions.
HOW does the imagination manipulate what the otherwise objective “camera” of the eye captured?
By unconsciously siphoning the growing powers of the intellect.
WHY does the imagination do this?
Because the kid wants things!
Here’s an easy example: if you ever find your child scaling your kitchen cabinets using an elaborate system of stools and brooms, he has used his imagination to get what he wants (hidden candy in the cupboard) by putting together images he had previously seen and stored in his memory.
While the imagination may seem innocuous in children, as we grow up, if we don’t learn to actively control our imaginations, we and up habituating our intellects to be unconsciously in the service of our desires and fears, thereby distorting our perception of reality all-day and everyday with us barely noticing.
Frighteningly, teenage fantasies will persist deep into adulthood as our neural pathways form and harden over time.
It is this exact dynamic that the Torah instructs us to avoid with the mitzvah of “not straying after our eyes — לא תתורו אחרי עיניכם.”
This is one of the “6 constant mitzvot” that apply at all times.
If we are not proactive in stopping ourselves from ogling images we shouldn’t see, we are passively reinforcing our fantasies, and these fantasies will necessarily govern our behaviors.
But it can’t stop with merely stopping the flow of freedom of the mind in the direction of the senses. We must reverse the flow of the imagination.
Instead of our minds passively serving our desires through our senses, we must train our minds to proactively use our senses to serve our intellects — to make real what would otherwise remain sterile and abstract.
This is one of the secrets of life.
The reason people walk away from Tony Robbins seminars with their lives changed is not because he said things they’ve never heard, but because he helped them feel truths they’ve always known intellectually, but never felt viscerally and emotionally.
Using the imagination is critical in the study of “Mussar,” Jewish works of character development. The emotions do not grasp the logic of the intellect until it is translated into the sensory language of life. This is what the Shema means it instructs us to place the words of Torah “upon our hearts” (as opposed to “in” our hearts). We cannot change our emotions directly, but we can manifest what we think using our imaginations, so that our emotions actually respond. Otherwise the emotions remain inert to our aspirational abstract thoughts.
If we think about it — and use our imaginations to visualize it — we will see that all of Judaism constantly employs the imagination in this way.
Judaism does not shy from sensory experience — it embraces worldly experience to experience God Who otherwise would remain a distant, philosophical entity.
Just one example:
Eating is a rich multi-sensory experience of sight, sound, smell, taste, and feeling, but just as one picks a fruit off a tree, or worse, off a supermarket shelf, one can easily detach the experience food from the experience of Hashem. To rectify this problem, the Sages instituted blessings of food (berachot). Before we eat a nectarine, we hold it in our hands, and mentally connect our otherwise abstract notion of Hashem as “Creator” and “King of the Universe” to the tangible, explosive experience of biting into a juicy nectarine, and the true blessing that emerges is the enrichment of our sense of Hashem and relationship with Him.
Judaism is not a religion of ritual. Judaism is a system of psycho-social technologies that connect the many parts of the self — the intellect, senses, imagination, desires, and emotions — to have the full experience of life.
It is the original augmented reality.
Here’s a more personal portrait if you can manage with Jewish jargon.
Pachad Yitzchak: Pesach §70