The rational mind and the imagination: the beginning of a love story?
A guest post by Krista Thornburg
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I asked Krista to write a post after a conversation about how the rational mind isn’t really equipped for making all the decisions it wants to make. She sent me this charming fairy-tale Socratic dialogue.
“I’m In”
by Krista Thornburg
I decided to go for a walk this morning and looked outside. “Oh, no,” said my rational mind. “It’s raining.” Disappointed, I canceled my walk without another thought and sat down in a chair.
Looking out the window, I became entranced by billions of raindrops falling gently onto the glossy round leaves of a young magnolia tree—bits of water pooling together, quivering, and sliding over the edges onto the ground with a plop. One plop, two, plops, three . . . suddenly the rain that was keeping me indoors became very inviting. I wanted to be in it, like the magnolia tree.
Barefoot, without rain gear, I went outside. My toes felt kind of wiggly, all cool and wet, as I splashed around in puddles like I used to when I was five. Spreading my arms wide, I tilted my head back and stuck out my tongue. Every cell in my body relaxed as the cool droplets kissed my face. I felt whole. I felt free.
Wow—I could have missed all this if I had listened only to my rational mind, which hollered at me as I was going out the door, “Don’t go outside! You’ll catch a cold! It’s raining!”
Obviously, I didn’t listen to it, I didn’t catch a cold, and the world as we know it did not come to an end. Instead, I was enriched by an imaginative experience which I could have so easily missed. Hmm, I wondered, how often do I miss wondrous happenings without realizing it?
So, I asked my rational mind, "Why do you hold on so tightly?” It answered, “If I were not rational I would become irrational, something I must avoid.”
I could see the logic, but still, wasn’t it getting rather stuffy in the little box it was living in? So I pointed that out: “You do realize that you are living in a box of your own making?”
“Well, yes,” came the slow response, “though I do not know anything else, and knowing is very important to a rational mind—knowing, and being rational.”
I asked it what it thought about us going out into the rain and not catching a cold. It admitted that doing this was invigorating and actually made me healthier, something it had not considered before.
So, I offered, “Dear rational mind, I appreciate all the detail work you keep on top of 24/7, helping keep life organized, logical, intelligent, safe, etc. etc., etc. And please accept that opening to new possibilities does not mean you would become irrational. In fact, an open-minded outlook enhances mental health. Science has proven this to be true.”
This took a while to sink in, and then my rational mind let me know this made sense.
So I continued: ”I’d like to introduce you to a friend who is also with me 24/7. We would all benefit by your getting to know each other. Imaginative Intelligence (thank you Navé and Allegra for this term) lives outside your box, outside the confines of time and space you live in. It has vast resources that are continually creatively growing—it can’t not grow.”
“You mean,” said my rational mind, “if I venture outside my box I won’t become irrational? That my skills will be welcomed, and we’d both benefit from knowing each other? I like the idea that imagination has intelligence. I never thought of that before.”
“Yes, yes, yes!” I said.
Gradually, I could feel things shifting in my head—opening, expanding, balancing. A great step had just occurred within my psyche: my rational mind and my imaginative intelligence began laying their cards on the table and saw how, even though different, they could complement each other. Rational mind mused, “Wow, not only do we have instinctual intelligence, emotional intelligence, intellectual intelligence, artificial intelligence, we actually have imaginative intelligence too. OK, I’m in.”
Then imagination took hold and said, “Look! The first two letters of Imaginative are I and M, that spells ‘I’m.’ And the first two letters of Intelligence are I and N, spelling ‘in.’ ‘I’m In’—how cool is that?”
And they agreed: yes, we’re going to work well together.
Delightful! So enjoyable to read.
So impressive Krista,
and delightful! I’m in!