Rosicrucian Beacon Online - 2012-12 - AMORC

According to Rosicrucian tradition,
imagination is the supreme acting
factor within the subconscious
mind. It allows us to go beyond the
limitation of space and time.
form of visualisation that reproduces mental
images. Imagination includes imaging, but
imaging and visualisation need not be a form
of imagination; they are, instead, related to
‘memory classification’. As an illustration:
Concentrate your awareness on a nearby
object. If it is a tree, for example, notice its
colours, textures, odours and sounds. Now
close your eyes. Recollect in detail the object
you observed. This is imaging. On the other
hand, if we conceive a different use, an
alteration or a transformation of our tree or
favourite object, then we would be using
imagination.
Imagination is also mistaken at times for the
active inductive and deductive reasoning powers.
Minute by minute we are going backward or
forward, or both, in thought. Consciousness is
never stationary when awake. Through the use
of these subjective powers of reasoning we are
enabled to ask questions, classify and evaluate our
perceptions. The more we reason or contemplate
on either the sensory or imaginative information
coming to us from without or within, the better
we come to understand and utilise what we
experience.
We have pointed out that imagination
uses (but is not the same thing as) imaging,
visualisation, inductive or deductive thinking.
Imagination is not the product of concentration
or contemplation, nor is it the passive state of
awareness that leads to meditation. Instead,
imagination only reaches us through these three
major channels of thought. If not these things,
what, then is imagination? From where does it
come?
Complete Memory
According to Rosicrucian tradition, imagination
is the supreme acting factor within the
subconscious mind. It allows us to go beyond
© Supreme Grand Lodge of AMORC
the limitation of space and time. Unlimited
imagination uses a vast subconscious storehouse
of memory that we refer to as ‘complete memory’
or traditionally as the ‘Akashic Records’. Creative
imagination occurs when this complete memory
combines with intuition to bring together
unrelated but known elements in a new and
surprising manner.
Complete memory, intuition and imagination
form a supernal triangle on the immaterial
plane. Ideal images appear upon the mirror of
the meditative mind, are processed by reason,
there to become the objects of the future. By
way of illustration, in his imagination during
1865 Jules Verne took a seemingly impossible
but well-planned mechanical trip to the moon
one hundred years in advance of an actual moon
landing. But futuristic ideas can also start with
past events. Suppose I were to imagine how the
earliest humans lived in prehistoric times. Here I
am, then, imagining what seems to belong to the
past. But, if in my conception my imagined idea
were to become a reality by means of scientific
research, then my idea of the past would also
be a present event, and any proof that would
substantiate my imagined idea would make it a
reality in the future. Schliemann uncovered Troy
because he first imagined it to be a city that had
physical existence.
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Rosicrucian Beacon Online