IMAGINE THAT! (Part 1)

Have you ever been “put down” by someone who, when you shared a thought that sounded ridiculous or you shared an unusual idea that just popped up in the back of your mind, replied “that’s just your imagination”? You may have even said it to yourself. The comment was meant to squelch the imagining as if it was unimportant, as if your imaginings are just fanciful notions with no substance, almost childish in nature. For most of us, when that happens we just put the notion out of our heads and move on. What a mistake!

As a teacher, I always appreciated the imagination in kids and the creativity that it generated within them. I also appreciated the imagination in creative adults, like my husband, a product designer for many years. But I had no deep understanding of its potential and its connection between us and the Kingdom of God. As a ferret, I wasn’t even sniffing at it from curiosity!

Some 15 years ago, I was on one of my many ferret trails, studying brain function in relation to how kids learn, (ho hum!) when I stumbled on a little article about prayer and brain function in a Reader’s Digest that was so stunning and powerful to me that it stopped me dead in my tracks. Somehow, I knew that God had put that article in my hands and that He intended for me to “ferret out” the connections between what was in that article and what God had created within us. It has turned out to be a very long, circuitous and exciting trail that has opened my eyes to the power of the IMAGINATION and brought me to bridges that connect imaginings to FAITH. OMG! What an adventure ensued!

It has actually taken me many years of traveling these trails to grasp what God desired to show me. I am still traveling these trails on occasion. Many of my excursions have crossed through quantum physics and the study of light to the study of the neurology, neurotheology and biology of the brain, into scripture, not only my Bible but the Tanakh and the Targum (ancient Jewish commentaries on the Old Testament) and more. But what I have learned has revolutionized my walk with the Lord. I have often said…”When Science ends up supporting Scripture, it’s a good day for Science.”

Now, on to the article! It was so long ago that, sadly, I don’t remember the title but it was about research being done by Dr. Andrew Newberg on the influence of prayer and meditation on brain function. I still have my notes, but, stupid me, I have lost the article, itself! UGH! Anyway, I will try to give you my best ferret explanation. If you could look at a cut-away of the top view of a brain you would notice the right and left lobes. When the brain is active in conscious thought, there are outside rings (parietal lobes)on each brain half, that look like two halves of a donut that glow hot in reds and oranges in a brain scan. At the back of the brain, a cortex (a membrane) that runs parallel to the ground and stretches toward the center of the brain (shaped a bit like a light bulb), is, as the article referred to it, called the dorsal lateral cortex. This cortex remains cool in rational thought, but when prayer or meditation is active, the front parts of the brain cool and this cortex demonstrates activity by heating up with reds and oranges in the scan. Hum!

My first question was, did God put a room in my brain to be used only for prayer? It was a good question but I was way off base. As I pressed on, I stumbled on some fascinating data: The left and right parietal lobes are fed information from the surrounding material universe by the 5 senses much as a computer receives information from keyboard input. There are approximately 100,000 million nerve endings that run to and from the 5 senses to the parietal lobes. (How Dr. Newberg and his researchers found this out boggles my mind!) But this is the really cool data: There are 10,000 billion nerve endings that run to and from the dorsal lateral cortext which touch the unseen “spaces” in the universe. Now, unseen spaces are a whole other ferret adventure, but suffice it to say that every unseen space in the material universe is filled with light, “electromagnetic energy”. Why is that important? I John 1:5 states: “God IS LIGHT, and in Him there is no darkness at all”. (A little chair dance, here!) The nerve endings in our dorsal lateral cortex are “hard wired” to touch the spirit realm, the things of God. Dr. Newberg confirms this fact in his research, he even used the term “hard wired”. OK, here’s one more cool bit of information to help you get this. When Jesus ministered on earth, He often said “Repent for the Kingdom of God is at hand.” There are two really important words here that we need to understand. First “REPENT”, the Greek translation is to change the way you think. Why? Because the Kingdom is “AT HAND”. That phrase, in the Greek, literally means to be superimposed on. The Kingdom of God is superimposed on the material world. Science got it right! Einstein, Niels, Bohr, and Frank are quantum physicists who actually proved that “light” is superimposed (or co-exists in the same space) with the material world, filling every space. And light, being the smallest particle of existent matter( the basic building block of the material world), is also the only particle that is both material and immaterial. Whoa!!! Think about that for a while! Talk about a wild ferret trail… hopefully the Lord will let me share my quantum physics trip, one day.

Can you see it? God created us with a brain that contains the ability to communicate, in a multi-dimensional existence, not only with this material world, but also with the spirit world (the unseen) and we have the ability to process information from multiple dimensions! Paul’s words in II Corinthians 4:18 came to my mind right away. “…we look not at the things which are seen but at the things which are not seen for the things which are seen are temporal but the things which are not seen are eternal.” Not only can we look at the unseen, but we can receive input from God’s realm! Ferret question…so, can we see and hear from God without using our 5 senses?

The 4 Gospels were full of accounts of Jesus teaching the people truths that they had never heard. He wanted them to “get it”, not on the level of mental assent, but on a level much deeper within their understanding. Think about it, when Jesus would finish making a point, He would add strange statements like … to him who has ears to hear, let him hear… or… even though they have eyes to see they do not see. Huh??? Everyone he talked to had ears, what was He talking about? They had eyes as well! Answer…their deafness and blindness was not “of this world”, it was a Kingdom of God issue.

So where were these ears and eyes that Jesus was referring to? It had to do with the dorsal lateral cortex, I was certain, but I didn’t know where to look next, so I just put it on hold. (I should have known that God was still in charge of this adventure). LOL!   So I returned to brain study and kids! I was learning how kids take information from the “desk top” of their brain and transfer it to long term memory. Holy Cow! I was back where I started!   Woop! Woop! Ok, let me make the connection! Information that we manipulate with our 5 senses, what we think on, focus on and talk about helps us form IMAGES on the back of our brain.

(In my last adventure we talked about being “image” people) The more detailed the images, the more solid the memory and the stronger we come to rely on the images as fact whether or not they actually are fact. For instance, people imagined the world was flat for so long, it came to be the accepted science of the day. Every parent can tell you that the monster under the bed is real to their distraught children! Amen to that!

OMG! Whoa! The IMAGINATION, then,  is the “audio-visual” center in our brain. It incorporates the Dorsal Lateral Cortex, the vision center and the rest of the area at the back of the brain which includes a movie screen, projector and photo and film storage! (Not exactly scientific, but it works) And here is the first bridge… not only does the imagination take information from the material world through the 5 senses via the frontal lobes of the brain….. BUT…. It takes in information from the unseen world through the dorsal lateral cortex! So, that beautiful little cortex that God created in us actually has eyes to see and ears to hear what the SPIRIT has to say! What we receive into that little cortex goes into our IMAGINATION just like information from the material world. So keep your mind’s eyes and ears opened and when those thoughts pop up in the back of your mind again, don’t take them lightly, pay attention! Paul says it like this “Eye has not seen nor ear heard, neither have entered into the hearts of man the things which God has prepared for them that love Him. But God has revealed them unto us by His Spirit…Now, we have received not the spirit of the world, but the Spirit which is of God; that we might know the things that are freely given to us of God.” (I Cor. 2:9-12)

Where is the bridge to Faith? We have to dive back into science! The frontal lobes of the brain are wired to receive information from all 5 senses. But there is only one of those senses that touches the dorsal lateral cortex. Are you ready for this??? It is the auditory nerve! “Faith comes by hearing and hearing by the Word of God!” (Romans 10:17) Woohoo!!! In Joshua 1:8 God tells him to repeat the Word out loud to himself and in Proverbs over and over God says to LISTEN to the Word, incline your ear and Faith comes! Hebrews 11: 1 is the hallmark definition of faith for Christians, but when you look at those verses through the prism of IMAGINATION, it becomes very powerful. “Now faith is the substance (in the Greek it means the spiritual image, blue print, A MIND PHOTO; the title deed) of things hoped for (hoped means confidently expected), the evidence (the proof of things we do not see and the conviction of their reality) of things not seen. [The Amplified Bible says it this way – faith perceiving as real fact what is not revealed to the senses]. So faith has its origin in the Word of God, filtered through our dorsal lateral cortex where the Spirit can give you the mind of God upon it and it is sent to the IMAGINATION where it becomes a faith image, spiritual reality in the face of material appearances.   The best example is in Hebrews 11: 7-19   By faith, Abraham, when he was tried, offered up Isaac; and he that had received the promises offered up his only begotten son…Accounting that God was able to raise him up, even from the dead; from whence he also received him in a “figure” (faith vision).   (Whew! That’s a mouthful!)

All of this, to say that our IMAGINATION is alive and well and very important!   It is not a place of foolish dreams or fanciful thoughts, it is a powerful creative gift given to us by God! In Genesis 1 we discover that mankind was made in the image and likeness of God. Image means we look like Him in some way but “likeness” means we function like He functions. The first function we see God perform is the creation of heaven and earth. We see that God is a faith filled, thinking, reasoning, creative being. We have been hard wired to be faith filled, thinking, reasoning, creative beings, as well. God’s plan is to work with us and through us to create and recreate in the earth as He has done in the entire universe.  Think of the music that came to Beethoven or the art that came through the fingers of Michael Angelo. God spoke to them through their imaginations! All creative production starts with a vision in the mind’s eye or the sounds in the mind’s ears that are, then, reproduced in the material realm. Where did the thoughts and ideas come from? They came from the unseen through the dorsal lateral cortex to the imagination and then, through us, to the material world!

IMAGINE THAT!!!! Happy dance… woop,woop!!!! More to come…