Human imagination is an extremely powerful faculty that can create
wholly new and different realities... An individual's imagination is
powerful enough to reconfigure his adult personality, abilities, countenance
and physique within a few years. On worlds in darkness, this potential
is seldom demonstrated in the positive due to overriding beliefs in
human inadequacy and limitation. By the same token, on darkened worlds
negative demonstrations of imagination's potential are pervasive!
Negative structures of thought and feeling blanket the darkened planet,
guiding its residents to imagine failure in every aspect of their lives.
Their popular culture celebrates violence and pain in presentations
gross and subtle... One by one individuals emerging from childhood's
freedom become convinced of life's difficulty and danger, and generate
private failures of confidence, trust, freedom and ability. These accumulate
to the point that their bodies ache, weaken and deteriorate: decades
and even centuries before they might freely choose to leave them.
A pessimist might declare that human misery proves our fundamental
impotence in a hostile universe. But Petrus here declares that human
misery in a loving universe gives compelling proof of our unlimited
power of imagination! What if you could persuade God that it was miserable
and inadequate? What kind of world and creatures would such a God bring
forth? You are God, and this has happened to you.
