Understand that our consciousness is split into roles, where one is an Observer who watches everything with a detachment from emotions like fear and your Observer has no desire to judge your actions.

When you peel and eat a banana it is you who does the pealing as well as eating it. However, it is also you who watches the peeling and eating of the banana. We can understand the Observer is always watching what we do, including our imagination. However, this watchfulness sees only the fully formed or near fully formed. Our Observing self is blinded to that which is below completion, below the consciousness.

For now I will walk the path which is far less well known, with the possibility of disagreement. These disagreements lead to conflict, cruelty and suffering. I may fear your reaction but I will tread on.

Underlying our Observer or full consciousness, we have the sub-conscious and unconscious. So too underneath the imagination we visualise using the Observer part of our selves is the sub-imagination. Yet deeper within is the under-imagination.

Humans would like to believe we are orderly, but we utilise chaos quite extensively. When we are on the verge of sleep and the dreaming process begins, many of us experience fragments of information. Most seem to make no sense. Yet these fragments are a rare insight we have into working below consciousness. These are fragments of images, sounds, thoughts, emotions and ideas, incomplete and without context.

I put it out there to you, that the sub-imagination (another core part of the creative process and one of which we may or may not be clearly aware of), is absorbing and sorting fragments of information for relevancy within our daily reality. It is looking for context. Our imaginations are constructed from these building blocks, like Lego bricks, and are sourced from a chaotic stream. So we combine these image, sound, thought, emotion and idea fragments together with our context to create something.

This chaotic stream is where things begin to get interesting, for example: where does it come from? An even more important question to think about is: what is driving the stream need? We know this last part as desire. Desire to create.. something. Why? And this question will become more important later.

Deep down inside lies the under-imagination. The wellspring of our creative steam. Our source of life and wealth, like imagination. From here you get your stream to fulfil desires which lacks the order, because it is freely given in love. Free of context which you may apply, sort and create with. Here lies the heart of creation which is the Creator.

The stream comes to you in freedom and love but you are the processor you decide what to accept and reject. To create more completely you could open your mind to accept outside your comfort zone. For example, if you must be different then experience sameness. If you must protest then submit. If you must submit then protest. If you must be real then abstract. Break the bonds and be free.

So we co-create with the Creator who is all that will be as long as you desire it. So then one could say there is no freewill for we are will-bound upon by the Creator. But so too is the Creator a part of us as we are of the Creator. In this way we are the Creator’s will. As free as we have always feared we are not. Remember the key is Love.

Anything can be created, with others who are open, then amazing things can bloom that are beyond ourselves.

If art is your desire then whyfor do you wait for a fleeting moment, when all moments are momentary? Do you fear your art is not resonant enough, not glamorous, too mundane? Art is the creative process, not the object. It is dead once created, move therefore to the next art and many will know the beauty of creation in action.

And so here I complete one half of what I want to say, for there is the Mirror. The other half which instead of being an internal mechanism, is all about being external.

Introspection is my strength from youth but extrospection was my education. For the question asked is why do we want to create? The answer is often very simple. It may be to make a better living, to feed the family, to entertain, or to share. It may be for nothing more than a few dollars in the pocket. Yet creation doesn’t stop there. Once something is made and observed by others it is like a virus. It spreads. Like the ideas of a stirrup, bronze and iron spread right across the world. Like the spread of religions and art, like the internet has spread. Central authorities be damned, it will seep even into the dark corners of China.

Your creation becomes a creation shared by the world. Copyright be damned. Copyright may slow the process, but the ideas will spread, legally, illegally and most often sub-legally. Microsoft coping the Xerox copying. Doom clones anyone? Who copies who? They all do, and if they didn’t, many products we use today would be dreadful because the majority of features on them were created by someone else. Without the spread all these features would be absent.

How many things do we use which are not comprised of many other creations? Even back to such basic things as bronze? Engineering study lets one see this as a tiny glimpse into the splendour and power of millions of ideas, that all come to work in harmony. They make one item into another all driven by people with the same basic reasons you made your creation for. To feed the family and make a living etc. To make a single computer requires so many steps and complex associations starting with raw materials like oil, ore, sand, trees, seawater, freshwater and plants and animals of various types.

Who can follow it all? I cannot follow even a single computer. It would take me years to try to, and by then it would have changed, improved, become obsolete. In the end I am only looking at selective parts of the process. I might look at how the silicon is processed and purified to make a CPU, only to neglect the purifier and all the steps it took to create that. Who can follow it all? The Observer. The other one. The “Big Guy in the Sky”.

Each of us have our petty needs and desires prompting us to complete our small step in the creative process. Summed up across the world, we have the ultimate result of many needs and desires cared for, with the bonus of amazing creations, like the computer which serve us in many capacities. One of those capacities is to create yet further wonderful things.

And so we come to the end of creation’s cycle which is the same as the beginning.

However it took more than imagination to create these things. For in imagination any form can exist and have meaning. Because these thoughts had to be worked into the far less flexible reality, which you and I live in. This was done with the tools and abilities we have, utilising our knowledge of reality to ‘create’ a physical representation of that imaginative thought. I loosely call this engineering.

In 1952, Walt Disney founded WED enterprises to create the Disneyland theme park. Drawing from his recent experience overseas, he wanted something grander and family friendly rather then the sorry excuses he had found in the US.

To make his concepts (his imagination) come to life he gathered some of the best and most diverse people from Disney Studios who were dubbed ‘imagineers’. These imagineers were to be the glue between Disney’s desires and the Disneyland theme park. ‘Imagineers’ who do ‘imagineering’ is of course a melding of the words ‘imagination’ and ‘engineer’. These imagineers were to use both their imagination and also engineering abilities to bring Disneyland to life.

It’s interesting to note that imagineering embodies the creation process of knowing what to create combined with bringing that creation into physical reality. Yes imagineers must find a way to bring their wondrous creations of the mind into a creation of reality. Reality has hard rules that the mind does not have to follow. Reality is the ultimate testing ground, as engineers know only too well.

The kind of people employed were incredibly diverse. Many skills and job kinds were needed including those that were not so formally recognised. So there were artists of various kinds, engineers of many flavours, those with experience in media and stage and so on, all adding their unique abilities into the greater project.

So Imagination is the starting process, followed by bringing that image into reality with our best available moulding skills. This sums up the awareness side of the creative process.

There’s an common perception that we have ‘Imagination on tap’. This is true in one sense but totally false in another.

Once upon a time a storyteller told his imaginative stories around the campfire and whose skill could elicit hope, wonder and even terror from listeners young and old.

Soon technology made the stories even better for the alphabet and printing presses soon spread the stories far and wide as books.

It wasn’t too long before the radio joined in so ‘one’ could again hear the story being told, wider than the local campfire! Television soon added images to the mix and truly made a story immersive. DVDs came then the internet which allows one to play the character in such stories and influence the outcomes. So now the stories are interactive deepening the immersion level, and therefore our attachment to them.

Truly we have been awash in imagination. All those books, TV shows, Movies, Music, Broadcasts, Podcasts and MMORPGs! But these are not of our own personal imagination. These are merely tools to convey another person’s imagination. An illusion that many have fallen for.

And it’s getting stale. Each new release is mostly a rehash of previously told stories. The Ménage à Trois, the Romeo and Juliet, these kinds of stories have been told so often their fresh brilliance has eroded to the nature of chewed cud. It’s parasitic solely feeding off another’s imagination and is it doing us much good?

What we need, is to use our own imaginations too.

But how do we do that? Well this is the sense where we do have imagination on tap. All of us have it we merely need to get in touch with it. Let’s face it, most of us are not accustomed to using it. We might ‘day dream’ but just plod along life without ever using the imagination we have. We’re too busy, too tired, too poor, too old, too inexperienced to do anything like that. Or are we?

Our children need to learn about the rules which govern reality, but also to explore and risk expressing their imagination (or ideas) is OK. It isn’t just children, we all need to wake up from other people’s dreams and nightmares to follow our own paths.

Artists (including those who create the many books, TV shows etc) may be able to help. Artists of all kinds still use their own imagination and do at least partially bring it into reality through whatever media they favour. They may promote the idea that their art is so much better but many of them probably know better. Artists must have something to offer.

Companies are afraid of imagination, because of the expensive iterative steps of bringing the imagination into reality, and the risk of it being rejected. Most faced with a choice of uncertainly high profit or more certainly low profit will nearly always choose the safest road. Those that embrace imagination go a lot further. It’s hard to come up with an example besides Disney’s, however there would be many small medium enterprises (SME) which do just that. Even larger companies do it to a small degree. Microsoft imports it by corporate takeovers and deals with smaller more dynamic businesses and individuals. Google in-houses quite a lot of it on the cheap, from it’s customers and developing nations. The tiniest drop can go a long way. Look at Youtube.

These days some of the most necessarily creative, innovative and ultimately imaginative business’ are found in the entrepreneurial startups and venture projects. Many of whom resort to breaking all sorts of business norms, such as bootstrapping. These business people are trying their hardest to bring something imaginative into commercially viable reality, and thus also becoming imagineers in action. We could learn something from there as well.

I feel imagination and it’s role in creation is too centrally important for us to continue to neglect. We need to revitalise interest in it and that will help us all be imagineers.