Albert Einsteen. Photo: Unsplash
During an interview, Albert Einstein once said, “imagination is more important than knowledge”.
Nobody could refute the fact that that our imagination is a massively potent faculty. It’s capable of producing both good or bad outcomes in our lives. It’s the stimulus for beauty and creativity, amazing inventions as well as caring actions and deeds… yet, in some minds it’s also where everything negative and horrifyingly unwholesome is conceived.
Researchers have discovered that when you are relaxed, thoughts or pictures focussed on, in your mind, with vivid imagination and emotion, are stored in your brain as reality. Your subconscious mind cannot differentiate between something you have experienced and something you have vividly imagined. In fact, imagined experience is proven to have much more impact than actual experience.
It’s interesting how this principle was developed as a technique for improving results and performances of athletes, skiers, football players and many other sporting stars. As an early pioneer of VMBR (Visual Motor Behaviour Rehearsal), champion golfer Jack Nicklaus imagined and rehearsed every shot in his mind before he physically hit the ball.
The Bible has incredible insight into the power of imagination. Our thought-life, what we believe, and what we agree with, prescribes much of what happens to us in life.
“As a person thinks in their heart, so they will be…” is often quoted from the Book of Proverbs.
A true story about a railway worker in Russia illustrates the power of imagination. He accidentally locked himself inside a refrigerated boxcar. Such an event would naturally be considered unsurvivable without rapid intervention. Unable to attract the attention of anyone outside, this man resigned himself to the thought that his fate was sealed as he anticipated slowly freezing to death.
As he felt his body becoming numb, he began recording the story of his approaching death in sentences scribbled on the wall of the boxcar.
“I’m becoming colder…” “Still colder now.” “Nothing to do but to wait…” As it became harder to breath, he felt sleepiness come over him.
“I am slowly freezing to death…half asleep now.” “Can hardly write anymore.” Finally he wrote, “These may be my last words..”
And they were. Opening the boxcar they found him dead. The temperature of the boxcar was only 13 degrees Celsius. That’s cool, but it’s way too warm to freeze to death. The refrigeration unit was out of order and there was no physical reason for the worker’s demise. There was plenty of air – he hadn’t suffocated.
He was the victim of his own illusion. His mind convinced him that surviving the ordeal was impossible and his imagination confirmed the process of imminent death. The power the mind has over the body can produce effects which are almost unbelievable.
Discovering a love and security that releases our minds from plaguing, anxious uncertainty and expels tormenting imaginations totally changes everything. Where’s that found? Words penned by the inspired Biblical prophet Isaiah, link it to being found in relationship with God…
“You keep him in perfect peace whose mind is stayed on You, because he trusts in You.”
