The imagination as a meditative discipline is inherently creative, a discipline of change rather than conservation. Its goal is always transformation, breaking through the weaknesses of previous orders and pushing toward something extraordinary and new. In this sense, products of the imagination are often counterintuitive. They run against the grain of our previous ways of understanding ourselves and the world. Our measure of them is the degree to which they open up new dimensions of reality to our mind. But sometimes this “opening” takes time to see or to feel. This is especially true of the most imaginative acts. Imaginative acts are most transformative when they are directed not toward a product that has been conceived in advance – where we already know clearly what we want. Instead, the imaginative acts that are most useful lead us to see and desire something that we could not have conceived or desired before that moment in time.