Imagination is the Subconscious Mind/Spiritual Realm

"Imagination is the ability to form new images and sensations that are not perceived through sight, hearing, or other senses. Imagination helps make knowledge applicable in solving problems and is fundamental to integrating experience and the learning process. A basic training for imagination is listening to storytelling in which the exactness of the chosen words is the fundamental factor to "evoke worlds". It is a whole cycle of image formation or any sensation which may be described as "hidden" as it takes place without anyone else's knowledge. A person may imagine according to his mood, it may be good or bad depending on the situation. Some people imagine in a state of tension or gloominess in order to calm themselves.

On further reflection, imagining turns out to be much more reality-directed than the stereotype implies. If a child imagines the life of a slave in ancient Rome as mainly spent watching sports on TV, with occasional household chores, they are imagining it wrong. That is not what it was like to be a slave. The imagination is not just a random idea generator. The test is how close you can come to imagining the life of a slave as it really was, not how far you can deviate from reality. A reality-directed faculty of imagination has clear survival value. By enabling you to imagine all sorts of scenarios, it alerts you to dangers and opportunities. You come across a cave. You imagine wintering there with a warm fire — opportunity. You imagine a bear waking up inside — danger. Having imagined possibilities, you can take account of them in contingency planning. If a bear is in the cave, how do you deal with it? If you winter there, what do you do for food and drink? Answering those questions involves more imagining, which must be reality-directed.

Constraining imagination by knowledge does not make it redundant. We rarely know an explicit formula that tells us what to do in a complex situation. We have to work out what to do by thinking through the possibilities in ways that are simultaneously imaginative and realistic, and not less imaginative when more realistic. Knowledge, far from limiting imagination, enables it to serve its central function.

The whole of human cognition is based upon imagination. That is, nothing that is perceived is purely observation but all is a morph between sense and imagination.

Language and words are a means by which humans convey information to one another and the method used to recognize a "truth" is termed a criterion of truth. There are differing claims on such questions as what constitutes truth: what things are capable of being true or false; how to define and identify truth; the roles that revealed and acquired knowledge play; and whether truth is subjective or objective/ relative or absolute.

Piaget posited that perceptions depend on the world view of a person. The world view is the result of arranging perceptions into existing imagery by imagination. Piaget cites the example of a child saying that the moon is following her when she walks around the village at night. Like this, perceptions are integrated into the world view to make sense. Imagination is needed to make sense of perceptions as well as knowledge.

It is accepted as the innate ability and process of inventing personal realms within the mind from elements derived from sense perceptions of the shared world.

Imagined images are seen with the "mind's eye".

So what is the difference between imagined and perceived reality?

Many mental illnesses can be attributed to a supposed inability to distinguish between the sensed and the internally created worlds. Some cultures and traditions even view the apparently shared world as an illusion of the mind or go to the opposite extreme and accept the imagined/dreamed realms as of equal validity to the apparently shared world as the Australian Aborigines do with their concept of dreamtime.

Imagination, because of having freedom from external limitations, can often become a source of real pleasure and unnecessary suffering. Consistent with this idea, imagining pleasurable and fearful events is found to engage emotional circuits involved in emotional perception and experience. A person of vivid imagination often suffers acutely from the imagined perils besetting friends, relatives, or even strangers.

Also crippling fear can result from taking an imagined painful future too seriously. Imagination can produce some symptoms of real illnesses. In some cases, specific physical manifestations occur such as rashes and bruises appearing on the skin, as though imagination had passed into belief or the events imagined were actually in progress."

"The world as experienced is an interpretation of data arriving from the senses; it is perceived as real by contrast to most thoughts and imaginings." However, our thoughts and imaginings interpret the data arriving from our senses and as such are as real as that which is observed around us. "Users of hallucinogenic drugs are said to have a heightened imagination." Imagination is the subconscious mind or the spiritual realm/influences around us and within us: God/Angels and Demons/Satan. When one takes drugs or psychedelics it exposes them to these entities and so gives them a heightened awareness of the spiritual influences around them. A person suffering from what we characterize as a mental disorder is simply more sensitive to the spiritual realm around them and may seem increasingly disturbed or troubled. We can be influenced by the spiritual realm in a negative or positive way. However, we do not typically label someone as having a mental disorder if they are reflecting an unusually positive mood or if they seem advanced in certain areas of cognition. As such when a person is influenced in a positive way through the spiritual realm we tend not to notice.

"Psychosis (from the Greek ψυχή "psyche", for mind/soul, and -ωσις "-osis") refers to an abnormal condition of the mind, and is a generic psychiatric term for a mental state often described as involving a "loss of contact with reality". People suffering from psychosis are described as psychotic. Psychosis is given to the more severe forms of psychiatric disorder, during which hallucinations and delusions and impaired insight may occur.

Mysticism is the pursuit of communion with, identity with, or conscious awareness of an ultimate reality, divinity, spiritual truth, or God through direct experience, intuition, instinct or insight. Mysticism usually centers on practices intended to nurture those experiences. Mysticism may be dualistic, maintaining a distinction between the self and the divine, or may be nondualistic.

In the contemporary usage "mysticism" has become an umbrella term conflated with spirituality and esotericism.

Mystical Psychosis is a term coined by Arthur J. Deikmann in the early 1970s to characterize first-person accounts of psychotic experiences that are strikingly similar to reports of mystical experiences.

A first episode of mystical psychosis is often very frightening, confusing and distressing, particularly because it is an unfamiliar experience. For example, researchers have found that people experiencing paranormal and mystical phenomena report symptoms of anxiety or panic attacks."

Imagination plays a role in counterfactual reasoning. It allows us to make judgments and it plays a role in the way in which we experience and interpret stimuli around us. It guides us in our everyday life and allows us to see the world in a specific way. But what really contributes to what we call false perceptions? What, in essence, is the definition of a false perception? Many with mood disorders or schizophrenia are seen as having a vivid imagination that distinguishes their thoughts from reality but in truth this is incorrect. Imagination is reality. So then what sets apart these detrimental psychotic thoughts from other more beneficial or sane thoughts? To figure this out all we have to do is consider the thought. If one is a crazed maniac begging to be put in an isolated room in order to be protected from the snakes that have taken over the rest of the building then it is apparent that this person suffers from an irrational sense of fear. But let’s consider a less threatening situation in which a person has debilitating feelings such as in the case of schizophrenia. Most schizophrenics dislike being around others due to feelings of discomfort they experience around some people. However, what causes this discomfort? If you ask a person suffering from this disorder they may tell you that they can just sense that certain people do not like them or would harm them. Is this really all that unrealistic? What if these people just have a heightened awareness of the senses and are naturally empathic? They also experience hallucinations but what if these hallucinations are just atypical thought processes? We’ve already established that our imagination is quite real. So what makes a hallucination any less real? Both are the same thing by definition: a thought process.