Image by Gerd Altmann
Written by Fabiana Fondevila. Narrated by Marie T. Russell.
“I can’t believe that!” said Alice.
“Can’t you?” The Queen said in a pitying tone. “Try again: draw a long breath, and shut your eyes.”
Alice laughed. “There’s no use trying,” she said, “one can’t believe impossible things.”
“I daresay you haven’t had much practice,” said the Queen. “When I was your age, I always did it for half an hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”
-- Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
Many people regard the imagination with suspicion, as something that has no place in adult life. In contrast, the wisdom traditions teach that the imagination is one of the most important, most direct channels to the divine, and probably one of the oldest.
In The Evolution of Imagination, Stephen T. Asma, a specialist in the philosophy of the natural sciences, describes the imagination as “the eye of ancestral man” and considers it a human skill acquired before language. Thomas Moore in Care of the Soul, speaking from a spiritual perspective, proposes: “The key to seeing the world’s soul, and in the process wakening our own, is to get over the confusion by which we think that fact is real and imagination is illusion.”
Another scientist, the never mediocre Albert Einstein, defies convention when he asserts: “Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand.”
Let’s look at some of the many ways we can explore this fantastic river and see what surprises it can offer us.
Continue reading the article on InnerSelf.com (also access the audio/mp3 version)
Read by Marie T. Russell, InnerSelf.com
Music By Caffeine Creek Band, Pixabay
About the Author
Fabiana Fondevila is an author, storyteller, ritual maker, activist, and teacher from Buenos Aires, Argentina. Fabiana’s seminars weave together nature exploration, dreamwork, mythic consciousness, archetypal psychology, social work, and essential emotions such as awe, gratitude, and enchantment. For over a decade, she has led year-long courses (both online and face-to-face) which take students on a personal and communal adventure of growth and discovery, challenging themselves to come ever closer to being the change they wish to see in the world. Fabiana also leads an online campaign to highlight and combat exclusion and discrimination and, since the pandemic began, has given regular Sunday talks (in Spanish, via Zoom and social media) to share a message of hope, resilience and her embodied, earthy approach to spirituality.
She is the author of a dozen children’s books, a Young Adult novel which in 2017 won second prize in Sigmar’s Children’s and Young Adults’ Literary Award. In 2018, she published her first book for adults, “Donde vive el asombro”. The above article is excerpted from the English version, “Where Wonder Lives. Practices for Cultivating the Sacred in Your Daily Life”,
Visit her website at FabianaFondevila.com/english
