In most professions and academic fields imagination is more important than knowledge

Can imagination exist without knowledge? Can imagination be expressed intelligibly without knowledge? Is imagination of any use without being expressed? It is of no use without being expressed, because no one except the one who imagines will be aware of the imagining, and that will perish with the death of the person.

Knowledge arises from our perception of the world around us by means of our sense organs. We experience the world as pleasing or painful, delightful or repulsive, and the desire for the pleasing and fear of the painful give rise to the imagination of pleasure and pain. Funnily enough, we enjoy both in the same way. We love to watch both comedies and horror films. We get pleasure from wallowing in a Jacuzzi or swimming the freezing English Channel from Dover to Calais, from flying over Mount Everest or climbing it Knowledge of pain and pleasure fuels our imagination.

If our imaginings were not rooted in experience, they would be unintelligible to everyone - probably including the imaginer himself.

In fact, if we think of the behavior of a newborn infant, we realize that we are born with a certain basic, instinctual knowledge of how to communicate our pleasure or distress by smiling or crying. Imagination arrives on our mental scene later, when we learn of the pleasure or pain we get from contact with external objects. We learn to Imagine the pleasure our presence gives to others around us by observing the reactions of those persons to our actions.

It is knowledge of things around us that enables us to imagine the permutations and combinations of those things, and to experiment with them.

As in our ordinary lives, so in specialized fields - such as academics, medicine, or law -- we are led to imagination by knowledge. A professor can find new ways of effectively putting an arcane point across to his students only if he thoroughly knows the subject and the means that have been tried in the past without success. To do something differently, with imagination, one must know the conventional means and ways of doing that thing.

Were the laws of motion pure imagination? Obviously not, for they grew out of the observation of everyday events. Was the idea of relativity entirely imagination? No, that too was based on an extension of the knowledge that although light travels at tremendous speed, it nevertheless travels at a finite speed. And we can imagine traveling at an equal or even at greater speed.

A lawyer may hit upon a new and irrefutable interpretation of a piece of old legislation to prove his client innocent An architect in search of a new design may dream of one when sleep releases his intellect from mental bie and tets hin fantasize in dream - but fantasies cannot be divorced from his experience.

In the physical world, the everyday world, your intellect, and therefore our imagination, a firmly rooted in experience as a centuries old harvan tree is rooted to the ground, the in the contemplation of the un-experienced the original cause, the reason 1 pure experiences and imaginings that drive us inexorabiy to act in this world, that pul magination, devoid of roots in experience has its scope But again, such imaginings wi need to be projected as experience so that others can begin Imagining the State, t Nirvana, to which such free-floating imagination leads the imaginer.

It seems that in most professions, and in academics, knowledge is more important than imagination, because it precedes imagination. But at the frontier where knowledge of the physical world as gathered by our senses and manipulated into interpretable patterns by our intellect can no longer help, we have to rely on our imagination, and conjure up experiences that are not explicable to listeners unless they themselves strive to conjure up those experiences in their own imagination. Here, we enter into the realm of meditation and other such practices that are not measurable in familiar material terms.

Therefore, most of the time, experience is more important than imagination as a source of knowledge. In fact, Imagination is a tool with which to shape knowledge into new forms so that it can be used in innovative ways.