The Imagination Cycle

I've had quite a few conversations with friends and family and a number of significant personal experiences in the last few years that have reaffirmed one of the major pillars of my worldview: that the perspective we bring to each moment in our lives has a profound impact on the content that fills up each day.  Put another way, life isn't a series of events occurring independently that we simply react to and form emotional perspectives on, but rather our own emotional perspectives strongly influence the outcomes of situations we encounter in life.  The two aspects ("objective" external reality and "subjective" internal experience) are impossible to separate, and continuously influence each other in a dynamic cycle.

Well, I've been reading this wonderful little book called Einstein's Dreams by Alan Lightman, which is exactly what the title promises.  Chapter after chapter dives into brilliantly imagined thought experiments that explore the nature of time.  Einstein was renowned for proposing and exploring these gedanken experiments (German, not the most elegant language, right?), and I think that book at least implies that such imaginative exploration were essential to the groundbreaking challenges Einstein went on to make to our notions of space-time.  Considered against the backdrop of the other personal reflections I've had this year, the idea that the terrain we let our imagination tread might significantly impact our understanding of the world was really compelling.

And it got me thinking - maybe the world would be a much better place if each of us started our day with a meditation where we imagined the world as we wished it were.  If we visualized walking through our day being kind to everyone we met and receiving that kindness in return, considering the consequences of our choices and wrapped in the comfort of knowing we exist in a world of social relations that we each value and protect... it might make us more likely to make choices that push that world closer to existence.

So I'm issuing a call to anyone who's interested seeing the world become a nicer, happier, more loving place: start your day with five minutes of meditation on what you want the world to be, and see if the rest of your day feels any different.  I'd love to document anecdotes that anyone is willing to share.