|
Monday, July 28, 2003
Imagination and lying
By ORLANDO P. CARVAJAL
UNCUT GEMS
To succeed in business nowadays one has to be gifted with a lively imagination. Lacking this, one cannot come up with innovative products and services much less discover creative ways of selling these products and services. In the struggle for self-improvement, however, one has to eliminate imagination in order to grow into a genuine and mature human being. It is said that the hardest to wake up is somebody who is not asleep. How, indeed, do you wake up somebody who is already awake? By the same token the hardest to develop emotionally is somebody who is in reality immature but thinks otherwise and imagines himself to be a mature and responsible adult.
Our imagination creates false beliefs about ourselves and prevents us from acquiring the good qualities of a genuine and mature human being. For instance, if you imagine yourself to be already a loving person, how can you possibly want to acquire the loving quality that you think you already have? If you imagine yourself to be understanding and compassionate, how can you be motivated to develop yourself to become an understanding and compassionate person? If you imagine yourself to be without sin, how can you be taught to ask forgiveness?
In order for us to grow into a different being, that is, a loving and compassionate being, we must want to become one badly enough. The main reason why we do not want to become a better person badly enough is our imagination or, better still, our personality’s propensity to imagine. Most of the time we imagine ourselves to already possess human qualities of love and compassion that, in reality, we do not have. Because of imagining, we do not really know ourselves. Very often, for many of us, it takes a painful experience like the loss of a loved one or of a priced possession to burst our imagination and make us discover our true selves.
We usually think of lying as not telling another person the truth either by hiding it or by distorting it. Rarely are we aware of the other type of lying which is the more pernicious kind. This is the lie that we give to ourselves. This is the lie that imagination fills our lives with. This happens when the personality’s imagination makes us falsely believe that we can know the truth about ourselves in our present state of consciousness. The fact is we cannot know ourselves deeply enough in our present state of consciousness. We need a higher level of consciousness to discern the truth about ourselves. This is the level where we become aware of our essence or come very close to being aware of it. In our waking state, our present consciousness level, we are controlled by the personality that naturally makes us think that we are better than we really are. The personality does not want us to work on ourselves to become better persons.
The personality instead is always trying to convince us we are better than the rest of the world. On the level of our personality we automatically imagine ourselves to be this kind of a person when in fact we are not.
How do we go to a higher level of consciousness? Knowing that we are usually imagining ourselves to be who we are is a good start. Accepting the truth that we cannot know the truth about ourselves in our present state of consciousness is another big step towards self-improvement. Next we must struggle with ourselves to go beyond imagination and unmask the lies that our personality tells us about ourselves.
(July 28, 2003 issue)
Want Sun.Star news on your mobile phone? Click here.
Write letter to the editor. Click here.
Join the Sun.Star message board. Click here. |
|
[ return
to top ]
[ home
]
|
LOCAL NEWS
BUSINESS
OPINION
SPORTS
LIFESTYLE
FEATURE
SUPERBALITA
WEEKEND
|
