Cognitive Capacity #6 - Imagination

What do our children need most in this era of AI and information overload?  What will the role of humanity be in the future?  It will be to guide us towards a positive potential.  If you believe in the Law of Attraction then the most important capacity for creating this positive future is that if Imagination.

Even Einstein said, "Imagination is more powerful than knowledge."

It is the start of all creation.  Creativity is a capacity that involves the will force, but even before something is created in the world, it is imagined in the mind.  

The work of Neville Goddard uses imagination as a tool to create.  With our youth, imagination comes easily, we only need to keep fostering this natural ability to help them utilize this in ways that will lead them to a good life.  

Perhaps one of the cricial elements in this is to make them aware of what they are imagining for their life and the world around them.  There are so many frightening images on the television and even in Hollywood movies.  These impact a child's inner imagination, and these ideas are often projected into their outer world.  Children who come from violent homes, or neighborhoods, have seen events that are profoundly impactful.  These images may play over and over in their minds.

We need to help them develop their own capacity to imagine what they want to see in the world.  We do not have to block out every negative image, we need only to build the capacity for them to transform the negative into a positive possibility.  This skill of positive imagination will serve as a tool for creative problem solving throughout their lives.  The Waldorf curriculum, developed by Rudolf Steiner, was created to ensure healthy soul and spiritual development.  This is an area of developement that has been all but ignored in conventional schooling.  The problem with this failure to acknowledge the soul development, is that we tend to end up with adults who are out of touch with their purpose, their deeper sense of self, and the spiritual world around them.  Steiner saw imagination as a way of keeping youth connected to the spiritual world.

Rudolf Steiner on Imagination

• Steiner taught that imagination is a soul-organ, preparing the human being for true moral insight and freedom.
  
• Without imagination, a person becomes trapped in materialism, unable to perceive spiritual realities or feel compassion for others.
  
• Imagination, in this view, is the first stage of spiritual cognition, which develops later into inspiration and intuition.
  

Tools Steiner Recommended:

• Nature-based experiences: observing natural rhythms connects children to living patterns.
  
• Artistic work: drawing, painting, music, modeling--all awaken inner pictures.
  
• Storytelling: not just reading books, but telling stories aloud, forming pictures in the soul.
  
• No media exposure in early childhood: Steiner strongly warned against screens, which replace the child's inner picture-making with pre-fabricated imagery.