Earlier today I woke up singing The Temptations song, It’s just my imagination and at first it reminded me of all the times I had been told to not be so imaginative. There are times that having an imagination can be positive and help us develop a deeper relationship with the Divine. There are also times our imagination can be harmful. One of these ways is when we use it to answer questions we don’t know the answer to. Rather than ask questions and seeking clarification, we imagine the answers. We begin to imagine what people are doing or saying. We imagine what they are thinking. Sometimes we even imagine what they are wearing, where they are sitting, and before we realize it we have created this whole story to answer a question we do not know the answer to.
This imagining becomes problematic when we stop realizing it is a story we have created and being to believe it is true. We no longer view this as a piece of imagination, but allow this story we have created to dictate and take over our lives. We imagine that everyone is like us. We imagine they think like us and feel like us and thus in our imagination they are as we make them out to be. Imagination in this manner is a form of over thinking.
So rather than invest energy in imagining the answers to questions we do not know, what if we imagined ourselves asking questions? What if we imagined ourselves seeking clarification? What if we imagined ourselves having peace because we had eliminated the drama from our lives? What if we imagined being impeccable with our word? Just for today, let’s imagine seeing ourselves seeing life as it is, without assumptions, without false beliefs, and without wasting energy.