Question: Are there delicate and beautiful worlds of the psychic imagination that the artist should try to seek access to for inspiration?

Sri Chinmoy: Yes, there are many, many beautiful, delicate psychic worlds. You are using the term “imagination”, but this is absolutely wrong. These are not imagination; they are psychic realities. What you call imagination is not imagination as such; it is a reality in another world. Here on earth we call it imagination. But when we go to a higher plane, where we get the message of creativity, the light of creativity, it is not imagination at all. It is real. Only we don’t see its reality in the physical form here. We are on the first floor and a flower is on the second floor. We don’t see the flower because we are on the first floor. But when the fragrance comes down, we know there is a flower, a source, and the source is on the second floor.

So imagination is a world of its own, a reality-world. But here we don’t see it because it is stationed a little higher. The good artist must always seek access to the higher worlds for inspiration, for if one wants to create something, one has to get something from a higher plane. Then only will the world be illumined and fulfilled. Anything that comes from above has more beauty in it, more purity in it, more reality in it. Our goal is to bring down from above divinity, reality, beauty — everything that is divine.

The imagination-world is not a mental hallucination; it is reality-world far above this physical world. Let us try to have an access to this world so we can get inspiration and create something new, something unprecedented.

From:Sri Chinmoy,Sri Chinmoy speaks, part 10, Agni Press, 1977
Sourced from https://srichinmoylibrary.com/scs_10