Aug ‘25 1-to-1 Wiseletter (Pure Imagination)
In August's 1-to-1 Wiseletter, we'll be looking at the song Pure Imagination.
Quote
Come with me and you'll be in a world of pure imagination. Take a look and you'll see into your imagination.
Composed over the phone in just one day by composers Leslie Bricusse and Anthony Newley, Pure Imagination remains one of the most lasting songs from the movie Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. It’s interesting that it never charted and wasn’t even one of the more popular songs from the soundtrack of the film when it was released in 1971. A decade would pass before it starting to gain recognition. It saw another resurgence after Gene Wilder’s death in 2016.
That it has become arguably the most widespread and enduring songs of the film has something to do with the lyrics, I think. They’re simple and timeless which generally favors the transmission of songs (and words) through time. Plus, the song contains only four unique verses.
I’ve heard it dozens of times, but I didn’t pick up on its depth until I was an adult. It offers up the experience of the world as moksha, the equivalent of the beatific vision, or what the Japanese would call satori.
The world, Bricusse tells us, is someone’s dream, their illusion, their imagination. A core wisdom of the Advaita Vedanta is that the world is the dream of the Godhead. Pure Imagination opens with an invitation from a guide to a world of imagination.
Come with me and you'll be
In a world of pure imagination
The guide then reveals that it’s not just any imagination, it’s our imagination.
Take a look and you'll see
Into your imagination
The guide implies a relationship between our imagination and what we thought was someone else’s. To get to pure imagination, the guide advises that we start off with spin.
We'll begin with a spin
Traveling in the world of my creation
The opening lines of the Book of St. John tell us “In the beginning was the Word.” The word word comes from the Proto Indo-European word wert, which means to spin, or to turn. We’re welcome to think of the ever-rotating thousand petal Lotus of the East, or the spinning spirit (ruach) of the Old Testament Hebrew God, and the Old English wyrd which meaning becoming or fate. Spinning or twirling is connected to the very act of existence, Being itself.
The rune, or letter, of Wyrd. It signifies the interconnected web of past, present and future.
InWyrd also gives us the word weird. When something’s weird, it’s uncanny, paranormal even, truly mysterious.
What we'll see will defy
Explanation
This refers to the uncanniness of existence when experienced in its raw form, without the intercession of illusion. It evokes the deepest question of all philosophy—why is there something rather than nothing? Reality is in this way the ultimate mystery. It has no reason to be here. There’s nothing rational about it. It's being here truly defies explanation. It has no purpose beyond itself--much like singing or laughter or dancing.
We’re then told that heaven isn’t in some far-off place or a future reward for good behavior. It isn't even transcendent. It’s imminent. It’s right here.
If you want to view paradise
Simply look around and view it
The world, the present moment of experience, is heaven, our guide says.
And if our guide is to be trusted further, which is to say if their creation is in fact our imagination (i.e. Traveling in the world of my creation), it follows then that our imagination is creating the world. If this is the case, then we’re responsible for our lives to a greater extent than we may have ever thought.
Anything you want to, do it
Want to change the world?
There's nothing to it
And now that I know that my life is my creation, I am set free.
There is no life I know
To compare with pure imagination
Living there, you'll be free
If you truly wish to be
I am free because I am consistent with creation. I create; I am. I live in the world as its creator (but not its controller). I am liberated by its limits, constraints, and laws because this makes me authentically human, a creat-ure of the world.
Bricusse, the writer of Pure Imagination, died at the age of 90 in 2021 at his home in France. this sense, we, as conscious beings, are nothing greater than freedom embodied. Real freedom moves toward limitation, not away from it.
Think of the discipline of carpentry. You must first learn the laws of the craft, internalizing its rules and techniques. Otherwise, your tables, rocking chairs, and porch decks fall apart.
And only when the techniques of carpentry are mastered do you have any chance of authentically expressing yourself through it. You are a free carpenter (or dancer, doctor, jeweler, lawyer, electrician, piano player, mother etc.) to the extent that your design and hand are curbed by objective techniques, behaviors, habits, and disciplines set in place by the masters who preceded you.
The world is unquestionably free not because it's randomly assembled but because its ordered and limited. In the same way, our lives are free because they're ordered and limited by responsibility.
QUESTION
If you could change anything about your life, what would it be?
Cheers,
John
