Everything You Can Imagine Is Possible

Of course there is no way for me to prove this. But I believe it and I will give you some reasons to believe it too.

Using our brains we can imagine possible futures. We can’t imagine anything outside of the realm of what’s possible. Everything we do imagine is possible. It applies to everything, literally everything, from our wildest dreams to the most speculative science fiction novels there are. Yes, traveling 2000 years into the past is possible. And yes, turning the world into one beautiful oasis is possible too. Such is the nature of our universe. The problem? We don’t understand the workings of the universe well enough to take the actions necessary to make it happen. This, unfortunately, is also the nature of the universe.

Our imagination isn’t the fundamental limit of everything that’s possible. It’s just a tiny fraction of it. The space of imagination is much vaster than the few ideas that we humans have. And the impossible? It can’t be imagined. Instead, it is the absence of imagination. Think about it: we are made by the universe, we are part of the same system. Why would we be able to imagine anything that has nothing to do with it, that isn’t a part of it, and that exists only in our heads?

Why is the title of this article important? Because we hear too many people, too often claiming that something is impossible. I not only believe these people to be wrong but also for these statements to be harmful and unproductive. But don’t mistake my belief as some crazy person’s overly optimistic statement. Yes, I believe that everything we can imagine is possible but it doesn’t just happen to us either, that’s what a crazy optimist would believe. I believe that we need to make it happen through actions.

So, imagination doesn’t mean inevitable existence. Because existence comes from action which is the actualization of something that’s possible into something, well, actual. The reason we sometimes describe things we imagine as not actualisable, impossible, or unrealistic, is not because they are, but because we lack the know-how to act and make what we imagine a reality. In other words, the limit is our know-how of what actions to take to realise the future that we imagine.

This uncovers some interesting truths. Such as: we are shaping the world, we are fully responsible for how it unfolds, and for that we need imagination, understanding, and action. If the present hasn’t turned out the way we wanted, it’s because we have been lacking imagination, understanding, or action. For example, if we can’t imagine a beautiful world, we can’t look for the know-how to build it and can’t take the actions to actually build it. If we lack any of the three it just doesn’t work. And if we lack imagination, the other two can’t exist.

The absence of imagination means death. That’s really what death is, a state of no action because of the complete absence of imagination, a state of impossibility. We humans wouldn’t live long without any understanding of the world or any action, but we are already dead or have never existed without the capacity to imagine.

Last week, I attended the funeral of a very precious person who was depressed and sadly committed suicide. Of course I can’t know what was happening in this person’s mind. All I can say is that my own experiences have shown me that as part of a depression comes a lesser capacity to imagine a future that is different from the present. I imagine that for someone who had committed suicide the possibilities for the future had become less and less until the only possible action was suicide. The last possible action there was, resulting in the only possible state when imagination was lost and has completely left the body: impossibility, impossible for those still alive to imagine.

Imagination isn’t just some funny side effect of the workings of the human mind. It’s its most important feature, one we truly can’t live without. It’s the human tool to uncover possible futures, all of which can be actualized. We just have to figure out how.