After the lecture concluded in the previous post, Hazrat Inayat Khan took questions about thoughts and imagination.

Question: What is imagination?

Answer: Imagination is uncontrolled thought.

Question: Is it good to have a strong imagination?

Answer: It is good to be strong oneself. If one has strength, then imagination is strong and thought is strong and one is strong oneself. Furthermore, a strong imagination means a strength going out from oneself, reaching out without control. Therefore, strong imagination is not always promising. It is strength of thought that is desirable. For what is thought? Thought is a self-directed and controlled imagination.

Question: If thought has a body, is it bound to a place, or does it spread throughout the whole universe?

Answer: This is a subtle question. One could ask, ‘If a person is in prison, is his mind in prison too, or can it reach beyond, can it go out of prison?’ Certainly it can. It is the body of the man that is in prison. His mind can reach everywhere. Perhaps a thought produced in the mind-world is made captive by its object or motive, by its source, or by its application in a sphere, within a horizon where it is working out its destiny. Nevertheless, it is a thought, and it is capable of reaching every part of the universe in a moment’s time.

Question: How should undesirable thoughts be destroyed? Must this always be done by the person who created them?

Answer: Yes, it is the creator of the thought who must destroy it, and it is not in every person’s power to do it. Yet, the mind that has reached mastery, that can create as it wishes, this same mind can destroy.

Question: Would you explain further what role the brain plays in thinking?

Answer: The brain may be likened to a photographic plate. The thought falls upon the brain, just as a reflection falls upon the photographic plate – both one’s own thought and the thought of another. Then there is another process, and that is that the thought is developed like the photographic plate. What is it developed with? Is there some solution in which the photographic plate is to be put? Yes, and that is the intelligence. Through one’s own intelligence, it is developed and made clearer.

Question: Has one element superiority over another? For instance, is a thought colored by fire superior to a thought colored by another element?

Answer: There is no superiority of one element over another. The superiority of a thought is according to the outlook of the mind. For instance, one person standing on the ground sees the horizon just before him – this is one outlook. Another person stands on the top of a tower and from there, he looks at the wide horizon – his outlook is different. It is according to the outlook that the thought is superior or inferior. Besides, no one can take a thought, any thought-picture before himself and say, ‘This is an inferior thought,’ or, ‘This is a superior thought.’ Thought is not an earthly coin, which can be inferior or superior. What makes it inferior or superior is the motive behind it.

To be continued…