Imagination, Inspiration, Intent, and Faith

This thought, covered by others, really inspired me to articulate my opinion concerning it - thanks for the inspirations! Thanks to KMH, Callum, OV, and Barry, very many thanks, indeed.


I've made the statement before that "Imagination supercedes faith", and it tends to be ignored (I think it's perceived as my naivete`), but to me, faith is a subset of imagination, inspiration, and intent - if you can imagine a beautiful life in a balanced universe, clearly, with detailed connections to yourself and others, it manifests through the inspiration that brings clarity, and the intent that creates a reality where faith is the state of being.

"Belief comes from without, knowledge comes from within."
-Marishi Nisargudhat

"There lives more faith in honest doubt, believe me, than in half the creeds."
--Tennyson, "In Memoriam"

"Faith is not belief without proof, but trust without reservation."
--Elton Trueblood

If I, or someone else, develops a set of criteria (dogma), can I have faith in such without processing it through my imagination - visualizing, internalizing, pondering or meditating upon its validity, relevance, and potential? Can I have those unseen things without the inspiration necessary to clarify my desires and to patiently focus my behavior toward "right action"?

Hebrews 11:1 states "Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen." It does not say that faith is acceptance of litany, dogma, or ritual as reality.

And

James 2:20 says that "Faith without works is dead", I consider this as a warning that faith is driven first by the creative work of imagination, requires the work of seeking and opening to inspiration, and manifests through actions, which, is the kind of work that most of us consider to be the active side of faith. All three of these require "works" to practice and refine. In stipulating these criteria, I am saying that faith is a result, not a cause. What comes from faith is a deeper realization of potential, connection to Sourse (God, Divine Self, whatever you want to call it), and manifestation (creation) of reality.

In the article "Imagination, Advent, and Christian Faith, Rev. Gil Ott wrote:
Peter Gomes, the minister of Memorial Church at Harvard University speaks of the Christian bible as a book of imagination. A book of imagination. He urges Christians (as well as everyone else) not to see the Bible as a book of rules or regulations, rather to see it as a book meant to speak to, to stoke, to fuel the imagination.

Ah! To fuel the imagination.

From what I can see, imagination is in short supply these days. We modern folk tend to relate more to facts and figures. We’re more into statistics than symbols. We like to keep close to that stuff we call reality. Reality, meaning only that stuff we can see and touch.

And when reality is reduced to only sensory perceptions, I think our expectations tend to shrink, to become scaled down. We become blind to the divine intrusions among us. We become myopic. Our span of vision has become too narrow to comprehend the width and breadth of rich and diverse religious traditions that have shaped our culture.

In his article, The Uses of Imagination in Religious Experience, Dr. F. Thomas Trotter defines imagination as follows:

"My definition of imagination is this: It is the act of making images that convey through their shapes, form, and emotional authority a power of reality that lies at the heart of things. It is, further, the act of apprehending the power of events by way of their shapes, forms, and emotional authority so that the ordinary events of life are held in some accountability to a vision of truth. In a real sense, the principle use of imagination is to inform and vitalize human life. It is to create life itself, certainly to create human communities, probably to create all of the informed gestures of love that we know.


I am positing that faith is the actual state of grace that is sparked by imagination, connects us to our Source through inspiration, and manifests into our universe by our intent; devoid of these other factors, faith is without worth, it is "dead" - as an actiivated and emanated state, then, faith is the balance where miracles become so entwined with the everyday that, for the faithful, there is no real difference.

The Buddha said, "I teach one thing and one thing only: suffering and the end of suffering", If I have faith in this statement, a hope or belief that it's true, how will it save me or the world from suffering any suffering? I can't see how it would at all. However, by finding faith - through the work of imagining that it's [i]potentially true[/i], by seeking inspiration from All That Is Out There And In Here that it is true, and by Intending to make it true by exhibiting the evidence of it's truth, I can then find that point, the balance where it Is True because I Know the process from one end to the other, and the insubstantial becomes 'real' - others may see some change in me and say "It's a miracle, you do not suffer!", and I can simply say "You don't have to, either.", this, to me, is faith.