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Today’s imagination is tomorrow’s reality

It is becoming increasingly clearer to me that the future will not be, but already is. And if we do not see it, it is not because it has not arrived yet, but because we have not taken our imagination to the necessary level of development to see the future and, in that way, allow the future to emerge in the present.

Perhaps Einstein was right in saying that imagination was more powerful than knowledge, because knowledge is limited, but imagination is not. In fact, it is said that Einstein would have characterized the imagination as "the preview of life’s future attractions".

In other words, today's imagination, expressed for example in art and science fiction among other fields, is a preview of a future that is already here and that always was here, but that we do not see because of the low level of our imagination.

How do we know that we have a low level of imagination? Because we solve everything by means of a conflict. Whether it is a football match, a march of immigrants, a protest by retirees, or an unexpected lane change on the highway, we resolve everything with violence, with confrontations, and even with brutality.

A different kind world is so far from our imagination that when we imagine it we think it is something already lost and unrecoverable (like Paradise), something beyond our reach and this planet (like Heaven), or even a simple delirium (like the numerous Utopias presented throughout history.)

And then, with our lack of imagination, we feed the social field of negativity that sees everything as a disjunctive (us vs. them), everything is solved by means of the destruction of the other (or at least they try to destroy the other), and every problem is blamed on a newly found scapegoat, without nobody ever taking responsibility.

The monster within us, the reptilian brain, the shadow (as Jung said) then emerges from within us and shows its unpleasant face in all kinds of unpleasant actions. But perhaps the most unpleasant action of all is to keep us locked in the circle of the present without allowing us any access to the future.

It is true that many of those who in the past had the audacity to imagine a different future paid a high price for publicly expressing their imagination. But it is also true that those imaginative minds created a new future, even if they did not see it. Or, rather, they saw it before other people did, but not together with the other people who needed years or centuries to see it.

Maybe it's time to let our imagination fly again, not as an easy escapism from current reality or to deny our undeniable problems, but as a way to activate or reactivate the social field of positivity that, although almost empty of energy, it is reactivated with every good intention, every drop of hope, every sigh of faith.

Maybe we should reimagine our imagination before the unimaginable happens.

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