The false imagination dwells on pain, jealousy, revenge and retribution. It sees life as hellish and the meaning of life as the perpetuation of suffering. That dark imagination is based on ignorance of life's possibilities, and on mindless repetition, habitual unawareness and reactivity.
The true, artistic or aesthetic imagination has something of divinity in it. It seeks to transcend the unbearable suffering of ordinary life, seeing a way beyond life's miseries to a realm of liberated energy, contentment, beauty, joy and happiness.
Without this divine imagination, life would truly be not worth living. The strivings of artists and poets to give form to the transcendent beyond are the wellsprings of a new and better world, and to them we owe an incalculable debt of gratitude, however inadequate to the beautiful ideal their work may be.
The true, artistic or aesthetic imagination has something of divinity in it. It seeks to transcend the unbearable suffering of ordinary life, seeing a way beyond life's miseries to a realm of liberated energy, contentment, beauty, joy and happiness.
Without this divine imagination, life would truly be not worth living. The strivings of artists and poets to give form to the transcendent beyond are the wellsprings of a new and better world, and to them we owe an incalculable debt of gratitude, however inadequate to the beautiful ideal their work may be.