Adopting better imagination

Among other gifts, man is endowed with the ability to imagine. It is with this power of imagination that all innovations and inventions have become a reality pushing the world from the primitive stone-age to the modern and developed age of science and technology.

The power of imagination has indeed heralded a life of convenience and luxury with high-tech computers, sky scrapers, supersonic jets, sleek mobile phones, 24/7 entertainment and countless other gizmos for amusement. Yet, we see that all this progress has had another side to it. It has also brought with it a hitherto unknown set of evils and challenges for the human race.

Global warming, depletion of natural resources, loss of natural habitat, new-fangled illnesses, war, exploitation and absence of a harmonious life, just to name a few, plague the contemporary world. Why is it, that man's use of his imagination has not been an unmixed blessing and how can man adopt his imagination for a more balanced progress?

Taking clues from the insights of great thinkers, for a more harmonious and progressive development, man's use of his imagination ought to be revelatory and in-depth in nature rather than an outrageous and unidimensional one. For, it is only in this kind of imagination that the human mind can empathise and feel one with all others whose experiences one may have never had or shared.

The broader use of imagination aids men in learning and understanding without having to experience themselves.

With this power of human imagination to empathise, collective action can be taken to uplift neglected children, the underprivileged members of society, the oppressed, the physically challenged, the sick and suffering, the ailing environment, animals treated with cruelty and such drowning issues of society.

All men who have made much contribution towards the building of a more balanced and harmonious world have been people who could direct their power of imagination to think themselves into other people's places.

Evangelising the idea of adopting a revelatory imagination for the welfare of oneself and the world at large, celebrated author and philanthropist J K Rowling exhorts to the scholarly, "If you chose to use your status and influence to raise your voice on behalf of those who have no voice; if you chose to identify not only with the powerful but with the powerless; if you retain the ability to imagine yourself into the lives of those who do not have your advantage, then it will not only be your proud families who celebrate your existence but thousands and millions of people whose reality you have helped change.

We do not need magic to transform our world; we carry all the power we need inside ourselves already; we have the power to imagine better."