IMAGINATION

Now let’s explore the third vritti, vikalpa, which means “imagination” or “fantasy.”

Imagination is a very important mental faculty with which we form and create new ideas, images and concepts that cannot always be verified by pramana. It is necessary for creativity, innovation and discovery, but it can also lead us into a spiral of delusion.

Patanjali writes:

1.9: Shabda jnana anupati vastu shunyah vikalpah

Fantasy or imagination is a thought pattern that has verbal expression and knowledge, but for which there is no such object or reality in existence.

Vikalpa is not the general term used for all types of imagination. There are four Sanskrit words that can loosely be translated as imagination: vikalpa, kalpana, pratibha and bhavana. Vikalpa is, in a sense, the lowest form of imagination. It describes the apparently random fantasies that continuously surface in the mind like mental static.

Vikalpas are imaginary stories, thoughts and images that play out in our minds, for example, a fantasy that plays out during a daydream in class at school, or seeing a shadow in the dark and fearing it is a ghost. Most of the ongoing chitchat in our minds belongs to the category of vikalpa: “What will happen if I …?” “What if she doesn’t like me?” etc. Such chitchat is composed of all sorts of illusory beliefs and mental constructs. We preempt reality with our fantasies and expectations.

There is a wonderful story about vikalpa. One night, a young man decided he wanted to cross the river on the outskirts of town to visit his beloved. There was a storm and the river was dangerous, but he was determined to cross to see her. So he looked around for a boat to carry him and eventually saw a log floating by. He grabbed onto it, and let the log carry him downstream across the river. When he arrived at the home of his beloved, all the lights were off, but he saw a rope hanging down from her balcony. So he climbed the rope and went to her.