Thursday 30 June 2011

Unidentified Flying Imaginings

For something so vital to humanity, imagination too often gets a bad rap. “It’s just your imagination” is the common expression when a person wants to dispel another’s perception of some aspect of reality.

I watched a TV show this week where an Australian comedian investigated the phenomenon of UFOs, travelling to Roswell, New Mexico, to a kind of festival of UFO believers. In many ways it was fascinating and funny to hear people’s stories of space ship sightings, alien abductions and weird encounters with otherworldly beings intent on bodily probing their victims.

These kinds of shows, humorous or not, inevitably come to the position that people who believe in UFOs are deluded or mad and that it’s “just their imagination”. Ironically, such a black-and-white position is the mirror opposite of the wide-eyed credulity of many UFO believers. Fundamentalist rationalism meets fundamentalist supernaturalism.

I wonder if in the 21st century we can come up with understandings that are a bit more sophisticated, a little more nuanced. Imagination doesn’t have to be synonymous with unreality, nor should it be taken as some kind of hard, absolute truth. Imagination is vital – we couldn’t live without a mental ability to broaden the horizon of our everyday world. Nothing new would be created by humans without it. Everything would be immensely dull and lonely.

Imagination is a bridge between the known and the unknown, between the outer, concrete world and the inner world of the human psyche, between consciousness and the unconscious. Carl Jung, in Man and His Symbols, says: “Even when our senses react to real phenomena, sights, and sounds, they are somehow translated from the realm of reality into that of the mind ... thus every experience contains an indefinite number of unknown factors.”

So when someone investigates a phenomenon like UFOs that goes beyond the boundaries of the known accepted reality, inevitably imagination comes into play. The proper attitude of the investigator should be humility. Why would a person believe they had encountered an alien? What does it say potentially about them, their psychology and their life? They may be barking mad, but they may not. Even in madness certain truths about them and the kind of society they live in will be revealed if questions are asked. And the widespread occurrence of something like UFO sightings points to fascinating, broader patterns in the collective psyche.

Inevitably, such an investigation comes up against a battery of unknowns and factors that cannot be fully answered by the rational mind. That’s OK. Humans are more than one-dimensional rational beings. We ought to be celebrating ourselves in our full roundedness and the role the imagination plays in making us who we are.

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