The Image-Making Power

H.P. Blavatsky, W.Q. Judge, C.A. Bartzokas · Constitution of Man Series · 16 pages

A study of imagination, its power, potential and limits, and it begins by putting faith in its place first. Faith with no reason for its basis is called nothing but superstition and folly; blind faith bereft of understanding is make-believe, and only the efflorescence of personal experience can produce the self-confidence of real faith. A belief not arrived at by thoughtful comparison of a proposition against one's own reason and experience will be short-lived, with attitudes and conduct following the prevailing wind. The Buddha is cited for the rule: not to believe any proposition on account of the authority, status or prestige of whoever propounds it, but to believe and act only when it has been corroborated by one's own reason and consciousness.

Only then is imagination validated, by faith and will together — faith without will being described as a windmill without wind, barren of results. The claims made for the faculty are substantial: that we operate by our imagination on the imagination of others; that by vivifying memories of past lives imagination is the world's instrument of adaptation; and that it acts on faith and so frees man from the servility of worship, since the Father who is the true Christ lives in the innermost chamber of our spiritual soul and not outside us. Imagination is called the best guide of our blind senses, and will the exclusive possession of man on this plane — the same pairing set out at length in Will and Desire in Confusing Words.

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