Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the famous British Romantic poet, once observed that imagination is how the self grapples with its perception.  Put another way, imagination is how we give life to what we perceive.

    Writing nearly two centuries later, modern neurobiologists conclude that imagination is the result of metaphoric processes which happen, often unconsciously, in our brains.  It is the product of our innately image making selves.
 

   Speaking out of another time, the early medieval theologian Augustine suggested that humans use analogy to understand the transcendent, in particular, the person of God.  Confronted with the transcendent and infinite, people tend to think in terms of analogy.  Their finite minds cannot directly grasp the nature of the infinite.  So they resort to analogy:   the metaphor making ability of their imagination.
    

    We may never "see" the transcendent in this existence.  But we certainly sense that it is, in some shape or form, "there."  We are creatures of analogical imagination.
    

    Maybe it is easier to understand God than we think.