IMAGINATION, CREATION & PSYCHIC INTEGRATION
“Man may be, in a figurative sense, in prison, but he has also been given a large bunch of keys and several files. The fundamental and undeniable fact about the imagination is that its purpose is to intensify the life in man.” So wrote the prolific English writer Colin Wilson(1931-).1 His book is, he says, “a study of the inaccuracies of the imagination, because the inaccuracies of different imaginations tend to cancel one another out, and what is left is a perception of the general laws of imagination. Hence this book could be called an attempt at a classification of unrealities, with a view to defining the concept of reality.” –Ron Price with thanks to 1Colin Wilson, The Strength to Dream, 1962.
You published this book when
I was getting ready to write my
university entrance examinations
and beginning my travel-pioneering
for the Canadian Baha’i community.
I did not read and begin to enjoy this
book until I was teaching literature to
another set of university entrance kids.
Imagination is a great power of my soul
but stands in need of guidance&control
to be part of an eternal act of creation
for this world is all one continued vision
of fancy, imagination, psychic integration.1
1 William Blake, William Wordsworth, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, Oxford UP, London, 1954, chapter 13 quoted in Dimensions of Spirituality, J.A. McLean, George Ronald, Oxford, 1994, pp. 194-5.
Ron Price
5 November 2011