And, really, a spirituality exercise too.
Imagine that God Himself (not Jesus Christ, think only of God for this exercise) decides to give you a present of one day of God giving you a tour of the entire world, touching on the places and people that He both most wishes to view, and for you to see. What would that tour be like? What do you think God would select that He most wants to visit (and thus share with you) AND what He selects thinking you most need to see?
Hi young people, it's been quite a long time and discouraging, but I still continue to hope and pray for you. This imagination exercise is particularly for you.
Showing posts with label imagination. Show all posts
Showing posts with label imagination. Show all posts
Saturday, August 14, 2010
Friday, March 6, 2009
A creative writing and mental cleansing exercise
A creative writing and mental cleansing exercise
I’ve noticed that this modern society is very much into “cleansers,” usually for imaginary “detoxing” reasons, including the puzzling popularity of “colonics.” Well, detoxing and cleansing are of course worthy and important concepts in general, so here are a mental and spiritual cleansing exercise. Its purpose is to help people realign themselves into a more realistic perception of actual life and prudent separation from the depressive and paranoid imaginations that moderns now suffer from (and inflict on each other). This is also part of the faith and reason case studies, with a focus on regaining more authentic reasoning capabilities. Since it is a creative visualization exercise, you can also use this is part of my series on creative writing and arts exercises that focus on reality to provide positively imaginative and cutting edge creativity.
The basic premise of this story, this visualization, is that we are going to think of a scientifically and realistic, factual way to determine what actually happened each day in human history. In this story the reason that such a capability is created is that humans have lost the ability to look on their own past with any balance and reason. Here is an example of the problem. Some people are fascinated by ancient Indian cultures, such as the Aztecs, Mayans and Incans, because they consider certain segments of their culture to be either “cool” or “enlightening and mystical.” Thus they think that because there are certain cultural developments in their pagan mythologies and supposed forecasting of world events and so forth through their calendars that are exciting, mysterious and cool that the whole society had undue merit. By “undue merit” I mean that rather than just appreciating that they were fellow human beings who raised children and did the best they could, they are given, by some people, a numinous elevation in their importance. In fact, this elevation obscures the very unpleasant facts of their bloody torture and sacrifice of thousands and thousands of innocent people, including infants. As schools have become less judgmental and more “politically correct,” young people are less exposed to the mundane realities of human history and as a result turn to the imaginary entertainment media and other “soothsayers” who focus on the “cool” parts of human history and ignore the rest. This has led modern society into an awful mess and the ability to reason for millions of people has been polluted and damaged.
So let us suppose that there is a factual and scientifically valid way to take someone who has such a viewpoint, put them into a room, and turn on a television that allows them to see what actually happened on any given day in, let’s say, an Aztec city. This would be an actual viewing of the minute by minute genuine activities as they occurred. So there would be many hours of footage of watching people just do their day to day lives, raising children and slogging and toiling in the fields.
Here is the scientific principle of how this would work. It is important to understand that there is a way that pure factual science could in theory provide this capability. It is important to have a factual and scientific approach as part of the mental cleansing exercise so that one does not imagine that “aliens” or “seers” “provide” this “gift.” It is that mindset, both conscious and unconscious, that has gotten society into this dire mess of toxic mentality. So here is the science. Most people know that we are able to see and hear things because energy is reflected and/or emitted outward where the ears and the eyes then “catch” that energy and therefore perceive what is happening. We also know that the light continues onward into space. This is how we see the stars, because their light travels long distances until it reaches our eyes. Many jokes have been made on this principle that imaginary aliens will someday receive the first beams of our first television programs and enjoy (or puzzle over) “Howdy Doody” and “I Love Lucy.” So using that scientific principle, let’s take it a step further and build a system where not just television and radio waves but all waves, light and sound, are picked up in space to provide a real time image of what was happening on the surface of the earth.
So imagine that a million light years from earth (the distance that light travels in a year) we had cameras that were so powerful that they could collect the light of everything that was actually happening on earth, and so refined that they could detect down to the individual human or animal’s activity. In other words it is like installing a powerful traffic live cam except the events have already taken place and these cameras are positioned far enough out in space to collect all this light. Similarly microphones would be installed so that all sounds that were ever emitted were captured and matched to the visual images. This is, of course, where the science breaks down since all light and all sound is not preserved indefinitely nor are they powerful enough to actually live on in space. If you drop a book in your house the people on the street do not hear it because the sound waves do not travel farther than the walls of your home. But for the purpose of this exercise, let us assume that it is possible to gather all of the light and sound waves that were ever emitted on earth and view/listen to them as a genuine live stream of what had actually happened minute by minute on earth.
Thus one could take an Aztec admirer and put him or her in a room that receives these transmissions and they could watch and see and listen to any particular day of events in a given location in that time. So the viewer could flip the dial and watch a selected location on a selected day. Remember, they are not “back there” “in time” as if in a supposed “time machine,” they are simply watching, like on TIVO, what had actually happened in the past.
Nothing would restore mental balance and sanity faster. Anyone could watch day after day of reality, the boring mundane existence of people who had to labor for the food that they ate. However, one would also see that the one joy that people had was their children. People could watch day after day, year after year of this “television into the past” and essentially observe as it happened the reality that life was difficult compared to today in that everyone had to labor long hours just to survive, growing their food, building shelter, obtaining water and heat and raising their children. People could then also observe that children were the one gift that everyone had and valued… children were the treasure that even the poorest could “afford.” Such observing would take the glamour out of the few minutes of prurient and occult activity and perception of the culture as a whole, and restore the luster of understanding that through the generations it was children that were the goal of all of day to day human activity. Children were the reward for living, and rich and poor both agreed and were able to share in that common perception of the priority of life.
Thus one could restore through this television into the past a dose of the day to day reality as it occurred, not as compressed summaries or sound bytes of the exciting and mysterious “bits.” Further, one can then debunk the mystery of how things happened. One would see that no alien spaceships arrived to “give” the Aztecs or the Mayans “their calendar.” They could flip the channel and watch those who worked on those labors scratch their heads and observe phenomena that they did not understand (such as the stars), and then assemble the “facts” of what they saw into theories of world view. We could see if maybe the calendar turned out the way it did because King Freddie the Stubborn was in charge and the palace astronomers knew that he wanted the calendar to turn out a certain way. We could see that maybe one of the court astronomers is nagged by his hag wife and thus is in a bad mood whenever he works on the calendar. He thinks it is funny that he carves one of the snake gods to look like her. And then flipping the channel the observer could see how very uncool the roundup of the month’s bloody sacrifice of village people really was.
So using this television into the past people could book time in the television room to see what really happened in life in the past. It would serve two purposes. One is the obvious exciting ability to see what is true. For example, one could dial in and see the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus Christ. One could see that slaves built the pyramids, not freaky aliens who flew in on a ship and told the slave masters what to do. So with the television into the past one could settle all sorts of debates about what actually happened and what did not. But more importantly, and you may not believe this but it is true, the second purpose would be to observe how human life is like watching paint dry. It is NOT about the supernatural and human power mongering moments that occur in a period of moments or days, or during the reigns of forgotten despots and kings. It is about millions of people at a time walking around doing what they have to do to survive in a day, and build a society where their children can at least live and eventually thrive.
This is why such a capability is so detoxing and mentally cleansing. It would counteract and refute the over stimulated and distorted “sound byte” and “visual byte,” say nothing of the “enlightenment byte” that has polluted modern faculties. Nothing would restore genuine balance more than watching, oh let’s say a million years, of early humans walking around picking berries and roots, hunting for animals to eat, finding caves to live in, and raising their children, and that’s it. A day of viewing would reveal exiting things such as what prehistoric animals existed and how humans got by in such a difficult life, but quickly one would see that the real message is the “typical day:” drink water where you can find it, lapping it like an animal, dig for roots, pick fruit, eat some leftover animal kill, shelter from the sun and from predators, carry your children. What an exciting “direct TV” package that would be! One could watch millions of days of people trudging along trying to survive and valuing their young (that’s their young, such as their children, not their youth, such as the lack of wrinkles).
One could see, as I mentioned, that Jesus Christ really existed. One could also watch the real Buddha sit under the real tree. One could see the miracles of Jesus, including, of course, his resurrection from the dead and ascension into heaven. But the television would not ultimately give one faith in God, of course. All one can do is see and believe the reality of God’s prophets. One could look down on the Israelites and see the great Theophany of God on Mount Sinai as they did, where God descended like a thunderous cloud and appeared to Moses alone. But of course watching the real events does not infuse faith into one’s heart thousands of years later. That is the whole point of the scriptures: you have to have actually been there to feel that full infusion of belief. The Apostles repeatedly explain that in their writings that they saw all of this with their own eyes and participated. One of the early Church fathers wrote about people who had seen Jesus and been cured by him still being alive and witnessing to the reality many years later. When one is part of the day to day one receives the full infusion of belief because you are part of the reality. But even the most perfect TV that allows one to look back in time, even in the side by side minute by minute way, cannot give the same fullness of infusion of impact of the events and the faith that is engendered as having actually been there and participating. That is the entire point of genuine history: you study and believe the people who were actually there.
So now I’ve created almost a longing for this past TV capability among you, I would guess. That is a good thing even though it cannot be technically fulfilled. That craving can be satisfied as it always was traditionally, until these modern dreadful times, which is through study and discernment of the facts, using faith and reasoning. There is a plentitude of literature by those who lived, for example, during the time of Jesus, the decades after Jesus, the hundred years after Jesus, and the two hundred years after Jesus. Moderns can actually read the facts of what people said, saw and believed and then decide on the impact on their faith. Instead we have people running around thinking that either nothing can be believed or everything can be believed as having actually happened, or worse, “could have happened.” I’ve pointed out in this post and other previous postings that there is a vast difference between the facts of real people who lived and existed, such as Jesus Christ, the Buddha, the Prophet Muhammad (PBUH), and giving equal credence to writings that are mythologies (such as the fictional Greek and Roman pantheon of deities) and even worse than that, not reading any of the facts of who lived and what happened and making up by pulling out of one’s own mind and paranoia imaginary scenarios of “aliens” and so forth.
Sane thinking and sane living involve this order of progression:
1) Read and study factual accounts where they occur, whether writings or scientific records, such as fossils and geological formations.
2) Identify correctly those productions of humans that are pure imaginary that are done for cultural reasons and thus have value, of course, but are not factual.
3) Develop theories (called “hypotheses”) for the missing gaps, for what is not understood, but starting with the firm foundation of what is known and what can be reasonably inferred and deduced.
This used to be the way that individuals, groups and societies used to think and perceive reality. I am horrified to the very roots of my hair at how fewer and fewer people think in a clear, cleansed and factual way in these dreadful modern times. The imaginary has overthrown and distorted the reality.
Why has this happened? The obvious two reasons are that prosperity has separated too many power brokers from the reality and tempo of actual life, life that used to center around survival first and prosperity second. The second reason is that entertainment media has taken over the thought process of the vast majority of people, also the result of prosperity. People no longer value facts and reasoning, all they care about is “imagining,” “escapism” (which then becomes their new and horrible reality) and artificial or extreme sensation seeking. Any given hour of modern media gives more stimulation than an entire year of actual life would have among even the Aztecs. That is what has been totally lost in the modern psyche and what our theoretical “past TV” would provide the instant cure for.
So what do we do? We have to get back to genuine reality of perceptions within a reasonable tempo of life. Humans never lived in a time where our children, for example, can experience a daily diet of overstimulation. Even in the most dreadful times of war, for example, in human history, the vast majority of people had to plod each day to the fields to tend to the crops, their herds of animals and their children. No human ever experienced a daily or even a monthly or yearly diet of over stimulation as do our children and adults in just one hour of video games, television viewing, celebrity antics or the news, which contains so much that is dreadful. I’m not calling for censuring, but rather an understanding of times that have passed. It used to be, when I was young, that one could go a year without hearing about, for example, a father or mother killing their entire family. Now one cannot go through a day without hearing another example. I’m not saying that the news should not be reported, by using this example. I am pointing out that the news all by its self is over stimulating because of these events in these awful times, so why in the world is fuel being added to the fire of overstimulation on top of the sad reality? As I said, even in the worst of human times no child or adult experienced a relentless hour by hour day by day exposure to tragic real or imaginary over stimulation. Even work has become combative in modern times, with people having warlike analogies for their every day activities.
Think about that. If you could watch our “past TV” you’d notice that it’s not like the Smiths who grew corn on their acre imagined “marketing war” with the Jones who grew barley on their acre. Rather, even the Bible documents rules for how farmers should lend each other their tools. Yet we have corporations who are structured in totally warlike “free market competition” and individual “competitiveness” (look at the torture of the “human resources” departments with their “performance review system”) and you’ll see what I mean. I've spent years in corporate America and it is unrecognizable from where it was in the 1950’s where one could be competitive on one’s own initiative rather than competitive based on principles of looting, torture and war.
If you watched our “past TV” you’d see that generation after generation tried to do better for themselves and their family, not compete, loot and over stimulate. Farmer Smith would hope that next year he could extend his field another few feet in one direction in order to fit in another row of corn, and thus do a little better. Farmer Jones would hope that she could extend irrigation to another part of her field, and thus ride out times of low rain better. They didn’t plot against each other and instead they supported each other. Their kids did not go home believing that aliens talked to bug eyed Egyptians and played video games of how many they could slaughter. Humans simply are not meant to be as they are today; they are not meant to be like the moderns are today either spiritually or biologically, as “past TV” could show what kind of lifestyle and outlook humanity is evolved to be part of. Humanity is meant to be in a reality based incrementally improving standard of living that is individual, family and community based, punctuated by moderate stimulation as needed (times of crisis, sports, adventurers), and all revolving around one’s treasure of investment which is children, the present and the future.
To summarize, therefore, “past TV” would provide the following mental cleansing:
1) It would remind people that factual evidence exists to discern between what actually happened and the imaginary works of humans.
2) It would remind people that there is a tempo of life that people emerged and evolved into, and have now totally lost in the vast parts of modern society.
3) It would starkly demonstrate that modern humans have become paranoid and combative by their own choice and thus the imposition now of society, particularly modern workplace and “entertainment” ethos and that such an attitude never existed in even the most pained and troubled times of human history.
It is of the most desperate importance that everyone, individually and in our systems such as schools, return to a reality based process of learning and thinking. I hope I’ve provided one small but helpful visionary tool, where people can once in a while stop and think, “What would ‘past TV’ show us about what actually happened and how people genuinely lived?” You will develop a much refined and truer taste for everything, from intellectual to entertainment, if you do this, without losing any of the benefits and pleasures of genuine imagination, including for diversion.
What a mess.
:(
I’ve noticed that this modern society is very much into “cleansers,” usually for imaginary “detoxing” reasons, including the puzzling popularity of “colonics.” Well, detoxing and cleansing are of course worthy and important concepts in general, so here are a mental and spiritual cleansing exercise. Its purpose is to help people realign themselves into a more realistic perception of actual life and prudent separation from the depressive and paranoid imaginations that moderns now suffer from (and inflict on each other). This is also part of the faith and reason case studies, with a focus on regaining more authentic reasoning capabilities. Since it is a creative visualization exercise, you can also use this is part of my series on creative writing and arts exercises that focus on reality to provide positively imaginative and cutting edge creativity.
The basic premise of this story, this visualization, is that we are going to think of a scientifically and realistic, factual way to determine what actually happened each day in human history. In this story the reason that such a capability is created is that humans have lost the ability to look on their own past with any balance and reason. Here is an example of the problem. Some people are fascinated by ancient Indian cultures, such as the Aztecs, Mayans and Incans, because they consider certain segments of their culture to be either “cool” or “enlightening and mystical.” Thus they think that because there are certain cultural developments in their pagan mythologies and supposed forecasting of world events and so forth through their calendars that are exciting, mysterious and cool that the whole society had undue merit. By “undue merit” I mean that rather than just appreciating that they were fellow human beings who raised children and did the best they could, they are given, by some people, a numinous elevation in their importance. In fact, this elevation obscures the very unpleasant facts of their bloody torture and sacrifice of thousands and thousands of innocent people, including infants. As schools have become less judgmental and more “politically correct,” young people are less exposed to the mundane realities of human history and as a result turn to the imaginary entertainment media and other “soothsayers” who focus on the “cool” parts of human history and ignore the rest. This has led modern society into an awful mess and the ability to reason for millions of people has been polluted and damaged.
So let us suppose that there is a factual and scientifically valid way to take someone who has such a viewpoint, put them into a room, and turn on a television that allows them to see what actually happened on any given day in, let’s say, an Aztec city. This would be an actual viewing of the minute by minute genuine activities as they occurred. So there would be many hours of footage of watching people just do their day to day lives, raising children and slogging and toiling in the fields.
Here is the scientific principle of how this would work. It is important to understand that there is a way that pure factual science could in theory provide this capability. It is important to have a factual and scientific approach as part of the mental cleansing exercise so that one does not imagine that “aliens” or “seers” “provide” this “gift.” It is that mindset, both conscious and unconscious, that has gotten society into this dire mess of toxic mentality. So here is the science. Most people know that we are able to see and hear things because energy is reflected and/or emitted outward where the ears and the eyes then “catch” that energy and therefore perceive what is happening. We also know that the light continues onward into space. This is how we see the stars, because their light travels long distances until it reaches our eyes. Many jokes have been made on this principle that imaginary aliens will someday receive the first beams of our first television programs and enjoy (or puzzle over) “Howdy Doody” and “I Love Lucy.” So using that scientific principle, let’s take it a step further and build a system where not just television and radio waves but all waves, light and sound, are picked up in space to provide a real time image of what was happening on the surface of the earth.
So imagine that a million light years from earth (the distance that light travels in a year) we had cameras that were so powerful that they could collect the light of everything that was actually happening on earth, and so refined that they could detect down to the individual human or animal’s activity. In other words it is like installing a powerful traffic live cam except the events have already taken place and these cameras are positioned far enough out in space to collect all this light. Similarly microphones would be installed so that all sounds that were ever emitted were captured and matched to the visual images. This is, of course, where the science breaks down since all light and all sound is not preserved indefinitely nor are they powerful enough to actually live on in space. If you drop a book in your house the people on the street do not hear it because the sound waves do not travel farther than the walls of your home. But for the purpose of this exercise, let us assume that it is possible to gather all of the light and sound waves that were ever emitted on earth and view/listen to them as a genuine live stream of what had actually happened minute by minute on earth.
Thus one could take an Aztec admirer and put him or her in a room that receives these transmissions and they could watch and see and listen to any particular day of events in a given location in that time. So the viewer could flip the dial and watch a selected location on a selected day. Remember, they are not “back there” “in time” as if in a supposed “time machine,” they are simply watching, like on TIVO, what had actually happened in the past.
Nothing would restore mental balance and sanity faster. Anyone could watch day after day of reality, the boring mundane existence of people who had to labor for the food that they ate. However, one would also see that the one joy that people had was their children. People could watch day after day, year after year of this “television into the past” and essentially observe as it happened the reality that life was difficult compared to today in that everyone had to labor long hours just to survive, growing their food, building shelter, obtaining water and heat and raising their children. People could then also observe that children were the one gift that everyone had and valued… children were the treasure that even the poorest could “afford.” Such observing would take the glamour out of the few minutes of prurient and occult activity and perception of the culture as a whole, and restore the luster of understanding that through the generations it was children that were the goal of all of day to day human activity. Children were the reward for living, and rich and poor both agreed and were able to share in that common perception of the priority of life.
Thus one could restore through this television into the past a dose of the day to day reality as it occurred, not as compressed summaries or sound bytes of the exciting and mysterious “bits.” Further, one can then debunk the mystery of how things happened. One would see that no alien spaceships arrived to “give” the Aztecs or the Mayans “their calendar.” They could flip the channel and watch those who worked on those labors scratch their heads and observe phenomena that they did not understand (such as the stars), and then assemble the “facts” of what they saw into theories of world view. We could see if maybe the calendar turned out the way it did because King Freddie the Stubborn was in charge and the palace astronomers knew that he wanted the calendar to turn out a certain way. We could see that maybe one of the court astronomers is nagged by his hag wife and thus is in a bad mood whenever he works on the calendar. He thinks it is funny that he carves one of the snake gods to look like her. And then flipping the channel the observer could see how very uncool the roundup of the month’s bloody sacrifice of village people really was.
So using this television into the past people could book time in the television room to see what really happened in life in the past. It would serve two purposes. One is the obvious exciting ability to see what is true. For example, one could dial in and see the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus Christ. One could see that slaves built the pyramids, not freaky aliens who flew in on a ship and told the slave masters what to do. So with the television into the past one could settle all sorts of debates about what actually happened and what did not. But more importantly, and you may not believe this but it is true, the second purpose would be to observe how human life is like watching paint dry. It is NOT about the supernatural and human power mongering moments that occur in a period of moments or days, or during the reigns of forgotten despots and kings. It is about millions of people at a time walking around doing what they have to do to survive in a day, and build a society where their children can at least live and eventually thrive.
This is why such a capability is so detoxing and mentally cleansing. It would counteract and refute the over stimulated and distorted “sound byte” and “visual byte,” say nothing of the “enlightenment byte” that has polluted modern faculties. Nothing would restore genuine balance more than watching, oh let’s say a million years, of early humans walking around picking berries and roots, hunting for animals to eat, finding caves to live in, and raising their children, and that’s it. A day of viewing would reveal exiting things such as what prehistoric animals existed and how humans got by in such a difficult life, but quickly one would see that the real message is the “typical day:” drink water where you can find it, lapping it like an animal, dig for roots, pick fruit, eat some leftover animal kill, shelter from the sun and from predators, carry your children. What an exciting “direct TV” package that would be! One could watch millions of days of people trudging along trying to survive and valuing their young (that’s their young, such as their children, not their youth, such as the lack of wrinkles).
One could see, as I mentioned, that Jesus Christ really existed. One could also watch the real Buddha sit under the real tree. One could see the miracles of Jesus, including, of course, his resurrection from the dead and ascension into heaven. But the television would not ultimately give one faith in God, of course. All one can do is see and believe the reality of God’s prophets. One could look down on the Israelites and see the great Theophany of God on Mount Sinai as they did, where God descended like a thunderous cloud and appeared to Moses alone. But of course watching the real events does not infuse faith into one’s heart thousands of years later. That is the whole point of the scriptures: you have to have actually been there to feel that full infusion of belief. The Apostles repeatedly explain that in their writings that they saw all of this with their own eyes and participated. One of the early Church fathers wrote about people who had seen Jesus and been cured by him still being alive and witnessing to the reality many years later. When one is part of the day to day one receives the full infusion of belief because you are part of the reality. But even the most perfect TV that allows one to look back in time, even in the side by side minute by minute way, cannot give the same fullness of infusion of impact of the events and the faith that is engendered as having actually been there and participating. That is the entire point of genuine history: you study and believe the people who were actually there.
So now I’ve created almost a longing for this past TV capability among you, I would guess. That is a good thing even though it cannot be technically fulfilled. That craving can be satisfied as it always was traditionally, until these modern dreadful times, which is through study and discernment of the facts, using faith and reasoning. There is a plentitude of literature by those who lived, for example, during the time of Jesus, the decades after Jesus, the hundred years after Jesus, and the two hundred years after Jesus. Moderns can actually read the facts of what people said, saw and believed and then decide on the impact on their faith. Instead we have people running around thinking that either nothing can be believed or everything can be believed as having actually happened, or worse, “could have happened.” I’ve pointed out in this post and other previous postings that there is a vast difference between the facts of real people who lived and existed, such as Jesus Christ, the Buddha, the Prophet Muhammad (PBUH), and giving equal credence to writings that are mythologies (such as the fictional Greek and Roman pantheon of deities) and even worse than that, not reading any of the facts of who lived and what happened and making up by pulling out of one’s own mind and paranoia imaginary scenarios of “aliens” and so forth.
Sane thinking and sane living involve this order of progression:
1) Read and study factual accounts where they occur, whether writings or scientific records, such as fossils and geological formations.
2) Identify correctly those productions of humans that are pure imaginary that are done for cultural reasons and thus have value, of course, but are not factual.
3) Develop theories (called “hypotheses”) for the missing gaps, for what is not understood, but starting with the firm foundation of what is known and what can be reasonably inferred and deduced.
This used to be the way that individuals, groups and societies used to think and perceive reality. I am horrified to the very roots of my hair at how fewer and fewer people think in a clear, cleansed and factual way in these dreadful modern times. The imaginary has overthrown and distorted the reality.
Why has this happened? The obvious two reasons are that prosperity has separated too many power brokers from the reality and tempo of actual life, life that used to center around survival first and prosperity second. The second reason is that entertainment media has taken over the thought process of the vast majority of people, also the result of prosperity. People no longer value facts and reasoning, all they care about is “imagining,” “escapism” (which then becomes their new and horrible reality) and artificial or extreme sensation seeking. Any given hour of modern media gives more stimulation than an entire year of actual life would have among even the Aztecs. That is what has been totally lost in the modern psyche and what our theoretical “past TV” would provide the instant cure for.
So what do we do? We have to get back to genuine reality of perceptions within a reasonable tempo of life. Humans never lived in a time where our children, for example, can experience a daily diet of overstimulation. Even in the most dreadful times of war, for example, in human history, the vast majority of people had to plod each day to the fields to tend to the crops, their herds of animals and their children. No human ever experienced a daily or even a monthly or yearly diet of over stimulation as do our children and adults in just one hour of video games, television viewing, celebrity antics or the news, which contains so much that is dreadful. I’m not calling for censuring, but rather an understanding of times that have passed. It used to be, when I was young, that one could go a year without hearing about, for example, a father or mother killing their entire family. Now one cannot go through a day without hearing another example. I’m not saying that the news should not be reported, by using this example. I am pointing out that the news all by its self is over stimulating because of these events in these awful times, so why in the world is fuel being added to the fire of overstimulation on top of the sad reality? As I said, even in the worst of human times no child or adult experienced a relentless hour by hour day by day exposure to tragic real or imaginary over stimulation. Even work has become combative in modern times, with people having warlike analogies for their every day activities.
Think about that. If you could watch our “past TV” you’d notice that it’s not like the Smiths who grew corn on their acre imagined “marketing war” with the Jones who grew barley on their acre. Rather, even the Bible documents rules for how farmers should lend each other their tools. Yet we have corporations who are structured in totally warlike “free market competition” and individual “competitiveness” (look at the torture of the “human resources” departments with their “performance review system”) and you’ll see what I mean. I've spent years in corporate America and it is unrecognizable from where it was in the 1950’s where one could be competitive on one’s own initiative rather than competitive based on principles of looting, torture and war.
If you watched our “past TV” you’d see that generation after generation tried to do better for themselves and their family, not compete, loot and over stimulate. Farmer Smith would hope that next year he could extend his field another few feet in one direction in order to fit in another row of corn, and thus do a little better. Farmer Jones would hope that she could extend irrigation to another part of her field, and thus ride out times of low rain better. They didn’t plot against each other and instead they supported each other. Their kids did not go home believing that aliens talked to bug eyed Egyptians and played video games of how many they could slaughter. Humans simply are not meant to be as they are today; they are not meant to be like the moderns are today either spiritually or biologically, as “past TV” could show what kind of lifestyle and outlook humanity is evolved to be part of. Humanity is meant to be in a reality based incrementally improving standard of living that is individual, family and community based, punctuated by moderate stimulation as needed (times of crisis, sports, adventurers), and all revolving around one’s treasure of investment which is children, the present and the future.
To summarize, therefore, “past TV” would provide the following mental cleansing:
1) It would remind people that factual evidence exists to discern between what actually happened and the imaginary works of humans.
2) It would remind people that there is a tempo of life that people emerged and evolved into, and have now totally lost in the vast parts of modern society.
3) It would starkly demonstrate that modern humans have become paranoid and combative by their own choice and thus the imposition now of society, particularly modern workplace and “entertainment” ethos and that such an attitude never existed in even the most pained and troubled times of human history.
It is of the most desperate importance that everyone, individually and in our systems such as schools, return to a reality based process of learning and thinking. I hope I’ve provided one small but helpful visionary tool, where people can once in a while stop and think, “What would ‘past TV’ show us about what actually happened and how people genuinely lived?” You will develop a much refined and truer taste for everything, from intellectual to entertainment, if you do this, without losing any of the benefits and pleasures of genuine imagination, including for diversion.
What a mess.
:(
Saturday, October 25, 2008
Faith and reasoning tutorial on imagination
I’ve been thinking about another problem with how modern people think these days, and how to best express it in one of my continuing series of faith and reasoning skills. Tonight I’ve thought of a good exercise to share with you after I explain the problem, in order to help all my readers to better understand and remedy the problem. This should be of concern to everyone, but of particular interest to those in the creative and media arts and profession, who are instrumental in either deliberately or inadvertently contributing to this problem.
I’ve noticed over the past several decades that people have lost their ability to use their imagination in an authentic way. If I were speaking to a group of people right now, instead of entering words on my laptop keyboard, I’d expect to see some surprise at this statement. I’d also expect some to argue that people have never been more imaginative than they are today! But I would shake my head and say, “No, actually, humans are in a terrible period of imagination aridity and furthermore, what they now think is imagination is actually a trap of logic, an error in logic that is contributing toward much of the depression and confusion in the world today.” Here is why.
Genuine imagination is to visualize in one’s mind a new and creative situation or viewpoint. Imagination is used in both practical applications, such as problem solving in the workplace, and also for entertainment purposes, such as writing a fantasy novel. Humans have always used their imaginations as part of their day to day life, even in primitive times. Imagination usually took the very practical form of wondering what will happen next in a very prosaic day to day basis. Hunters would wonder if they would find food that day, and if they were nomadic and hunting in new territory, they would wonder what is beyond the curve of the next hill, or what is within the forest. As humans became developed explorers, they wondered what the shape the earth was, flat or round, and what types of people and animals they would encounter in their travels. As people had their industrial revolution and entered a more modern era with leisure time, where they could afford entertainment, people started not only wondering what types of experiences were beyond their reach (such as what it would be like to go into space, or at the bottom of the sea) but eventually, for entertainment purposes, made up scenarios. This is where modern humans are today, where actually the bulk of mass media entertainment is making stuff up. People make up scenarios based on things like being a celebrity or a hero, and they also make up entire world views, such as in science fiction or fantasy. And that’s cool and if that’s all that was going on, I would agree that those are expressions of imagination.
But I have noticed two problems with the use of “imagination” today in those areas, such that it actually renders those applications of imagination to be not only invalid but dangerous. That is that humans have developed a huge thirst for imagination at exactly the same, unfortunate, time that they are less able to distinguish between reality and imagination itself. One would have expected, as I certainly did, that people would be more sophisticated in this century at telling the difference between reality and imagination, and not blurring the two. But actually humans have terribly regressed, where they are totally confusing imagination with reality, and thus are no longer utilizing pure and clean imagination.
There are several reasons for this erroneous blending of exercises in reality and imagination. One is that despite increased scientific knowledge, young people are raised to be increasingly superstitious, rather than increasingly skilled in factual scientific reasoning. And no, friend atheists who read this blog, I am not referring to the religious folk who deny certain aspects of science such as evolution! LOL, nice try to blame them, though, ha. No, the people who persist in thinking of literal seven day creation, or of humans side by side with dinosaurs are not the problem. The problem is the broad based societal embracing of inflated views of individual “spirituality.” Shibboleths such as “we are all connected” and “what goes around comes around,” to say nothing of the infiltration of occult and magical thinking among mainstream otherwise sensible people is the problem. To summarize the problem, many people no longer understand that they are using their imagination when they do so and in fact, they think they are receiving “hidden” “knowledge” from “the spirit plane” or the “universe.” There are people who deliberately and consciously believe this, that there is really no such thing as imagination and that they are “channeling” the fruits of their imagination efforts, while others are unconscious of this societal tainting of their thinking. In fact, the people who believe in these notions, that any idea that pops into their little pea (and sometimes pee) brains is “channeled,” “placed,” or “implanted” there are very powerful in media, and they actually manipulate their output to put other people’s imagination entertainment in slavery and servitude to the “channeling” that these morons think they are receiving.
Virtually every work of “imaginary” entertainment, whether book, movie or video game, passes at some point in their creation through the hands of “believers” of the “all imagination is a secret message of channeling from the universe” and they drive the messages hard. Editors who have this philosophy emphasize the depressive and dreary (or inanely airy-fairy inflation) messages in the areas where they think the authors are “onto something.” I’ve noticed this for years. What first alerted me to this was many years ago when I wrote a fantasy trilogy (I’ve spoken about this before here on my blog) and let some friends read it. The Jungian who I realized was a stalking cultist kept asking me, “where” I “got” the book from. Um, duh, I imagined it and wrote it. But she was totally stuck on asking me repeatedly “where” this was “coming from.” That’s when I realized that she was an example of moderns who have had their thinking so messed up by their own hidden cult beliefs and also inflated opinions of humans (reincarnated and so forth, when in fact, of course, there is no reincarnation). I thought she was just a dangerous flake in that regard and so while it disturbed me, I did not put it into “societal crisis” terms at that time (late 1980’s to late 1990’s). However, I have seen that this “thinking” has infiltrated everything that comes out of the media complex (yeah, complex is the right term alright, as in psychological complex) and also in just regular discourse, from individuals talking to the “talk show circuit” and worst of all, in the “spirituality” and “self help” business. Rather than discerning one’s thoughts as being deliberately reality based or deliberately imagination based at a given time, people urge each other to “listen to your inner voice” and “value your intuitions.” OH MY GOD. If our early ancestors “valued their intuitions” when they had a random goofy thought while out in the fields or hunting, I guarantee humans would not have survived for long.
Brain studies show that when a certain part of the brain is damaged due to accident or disease, the patient may have bizarre random images that seem like they are on an “acid trip.” This does not mean that if they are imagining seeing these weird images that they actually exist in reality somewhere, or are a “spiritual message.” It means that we can identify that the brain has self ordering mechanisms to distinguish among reality, deliberate imagination, and inadvertent imagination. When that brain region is damaged, the patients suffer from what I am calling here as “inadvertent imagination,” which means they are creating imaginary scenarios in their mind, as they would when doing normal works of imagination, but in this case it is not deliberate and not under control.
So what moderns have done is actually damage their own brains. They have not bashed themselves and each other on that region of the brain (though they might as well have). But by losing the most crucial and vital of survival traits, which is the ability to distinguish between reality and imagination, and repeatedly reinforcing among each other that blurring, society has and is continuing to inflict upon each other what can only be described as anti-survival instinct brain damage in that regard. Every time that someone stokes a person’s “valuing” of their every pea brained random thought as being “meaningful,” “significant,” “intuitive,” “a message from beyond,” “so called fake ‘past life memories,’” and that old favorite “channeling the spirit,” they are chipping away at damaging their own brains and those they are influencing.
When one has a huge societal problem like this, the answer is both easy and difficult. It’s difficult because it’s so automatic and pernicious that people don’t even realize they are doing it, or subject to it, except for those who are being deliberately manipulative. And truthfully, even they got more than they bargained for and I am sympathetic. They don’t realize that like overusing an imaginary muscle that they think they actually have in their arm, for example, that they end up crippling their entire arm. So this is a huge problem and one that would make me extremely worried about humanity all night long if I hadn’t already thrown in the towel about how willfully screwed up you all have become. But I’m mad on behalf of those who have been and continue to be victimized by this crap. A lot of joy has been taken out of the world because of this, in addition to, as I said, the danger that humans’ survival instinct has been seriously impaired, causing them to make very bad decisions and substituting inflated depressive messages instead of entertainment. And I am not being a killjoy and saying that there should be no science fiction or fantasy, for example. Far from it as I am a great fan of some of both genres. However, I have dropped both like hot potatoes because both have been now thoroughly infested by this “new age,” occult, superstitious, and inappropriately magnified significance of imagination as being somehow “gateways” to “channeled” “actual” “knowledge.”
So I am not one to point out a problem and say, “Whoa, this is bad, what a bummer trip. Wow, humans have really messed up and boy are you all in trouble of your own making” and not try to help, if anyone actually listens, huh? That is why I did not want to write this topic blogging until I thought of a detoxing and discernment suggestion that can be used as an exercise. This is kind of like those popular books that supposedly help in one’s writing and artistic creativity (and by the way, a lot of them reinforce, both deliberately and inadvertently, exactly what I am warning about). So I decided that the best way to help my readers examine this problem is to engage in, right here and now, an exercise in pure imagination. By writing such an exercise as a model, I want to teach you to use that technique for yourselves. So now I will demonstrate what I want each of you to do in whatever context is most suitable for you. I’m going to use the scenario that I am a science fiction author, sitting down to write a story.
I am going to imagine what a planet would be like if its only life form was the daffodil flower. So the first image that popped into my mind is a planet that is totally covered with bright yellow daffodils! I am sitting here picturing what that would look like. I guess it would be kind of a golden color from far away, since the flowers would be too small to distinguish at a distance. It’s only as one approached the planet that one would eventually understand that it is entirely covered with vegetation that the vegetation is the same bright yellow color and that when one is close up, that these are trillions of the same flowers.
When I first thought of this, just before signing on to the blog, I realized that would actually be a disturbing sight, maybe like snow blindness, where one cannot see in the glare of unrelieved bright white snow all around. So I decided to imagine that the planet is covered with a mixture of the standard color earth daffodils, which range from white through the pale to bright yellows and into the oranges, including a rather salmon pink variety. So now I picture the planet with that mixture. Still, that is a bit much. Therefore there really has to be some sort of landforms, so let’s imagine that usual division of land and ocean that we have on earth. So the continents of this imaginary planet are now, in our mind’s eye, covered with the multi-color daffodils.
If I am serious about writing some sort of short story about this planet, I might imagine how daffodils probably developed, like trees on earth, some gradation in their height and width. Maybe there would be daffodil meadows comprising low regular sized flowers, and then daffodil forests of really tall daffodils. What would a tall, tree like daffodil look like? If the stalk is like a tree trunk, maybe they are a beautiful translucent green (because as gardeners know, daffodils have a pale green tube like stem that contains a lot of sticky sap). So I can imagine a really pretty view of the trunk like stalks of huge daffodils in the forest, where they glow with a pale green, and where they break the sap flows out. Maybe there are sap streams of water as a result? Ponds that form if a bunch of these forest daffodils fall in a windstorm or something.
OK, do you see how easy this is? Think of a scenario and just imagine what it would be like using logic, as I did here. This is the beginning of being reality based but being able to imagine something that does not in actuality exist. Since you went through this exercise “along with me,” as you are reading it just as I thought it through, I can assure you that I’m not “channeling” a “vision” of some nutty planet that is actually “out there” covered with daffodils. Also, I did not think of the daffodil in this exercise because I have some hidden issue or need (and thus an oh so spiritual message) regarding daffodils.
But more important, I don’t have the need to ruin my exercise by now bringing in the “de rigueur” depressive motifs that have taken over all uses of the imagination. I could go ahead and write a really nice and sweet little short story about the planet of daffodils (even with heavy emotional constructs such as daffodil angst, ha ha) but not “work into” the poor and innocent story the themes that the depressive cultists think must be in all “imagination” in order to reinforce their imaginary delusions about the world and universe order. No trapped souls in the daffodils. No daffodil vampires. No superhero daffodil that must rise up in order to protect the rest of the daffodils from a peony that arrives on an asteroid. No need to say that some of the daffodils are “gay.” The daffodils are not a sign from a destroyed “past civilization” that warns that too much gardening is no good. The daffodils are not arranged to be a “secret calendar” with “numinous dates and events.” Did I miss any of the freak show “imaginary” shibboleths?
Why are the same depressive themes presented as being “imagination” for “entertainment” over and over? Notice it is a handful of themes that repeat themselves, as I easily listed them thinking of them offhand as I wrote this. But this does not mean that I cannot be imaginary in a way that is artistically challenging. In other words, I could make this short story about the daffodil planet be ‘serious literature.’ The trouble is not that people are being all inflated with “good and evil” and battle of the universe type themes, though that is the reflex that it seems no one says no to anymore. The trouble is that just the same five or six tired and depressive fake world views are trotted out and shoved down everyone’s throat as entertainment and “imagination,” but are instead, “stories” that are in service of people who have some very strange false beliefs in actuality, that they propagandize through the entertainment media.
So if I was actually writing this story, I could make it serious literature and still be pure imagination. How? Here’s one example. Suppose I wrote the first half of the story describing this lovely planet, without saying how or who is viewing it, I just write as if someone is walking around and observing. Maybe then I gradually reveal as kind of a surprise, that the viewer is someone from earth who has been sent to this planet as a post traumatic stress disorder therapy. So, for example, it is an Iraq war veteran who is walking around, who sets up camp, who stays there for a week, and then is picked up by his shuttle craft. And then we find out that humans have “cultivated” this daffodil garden on an asteroid for use in PTSD therapy. So I could make all sorts of serious points, human drama issues, and imagine what it would be like for a PTSD soldier to think his or her thoughts while camping on this “therapy asteroid,” ha.
Well, if this story now appears in print or film, I’ll finally have proof of the many times I’ve been plagiarized, ha.
Anyway, I suggest that those of you, especially young people in school who are in a creative or academic mindset anyway, and are the target of much of the negative use of “imagination” that I describe, try this exercise out. Pick any simple scenario and work with it. Keep it very simple, as I demonstrate, because when you try to be complex in your first attempts, that is when the politically correct and warped themes creep in unnoticed. You are not avoiding challenging themes or real life issues, but you need to hit “reset” buttons first by being simple. The planet that is filled with only one substance is an ideal model to follow, just as I showed. So think of some sort of “what if” scenario that is like this case study example in structure, where first you imagine and describe a very simple scenario of setting. That is the purest of imagination. When you’ve done that a few times you can discern populating your case study imaginary scenario with increasingly complexity of theme, characters and action, as I did in thinking of the Iraq war veteran as the main character protagonist, seeing the planet through his or her eyes, then layering his or her situation (PTSD) and then the surprise ending, which is that this planet was created as a place of rehab by good old regular earth folks. Wouldn’t it be nice? You can be creatively deep and real without being compulsively dark, as unfortunately, all too much of “imagination” and “entertainment” is today.
Anyway, now I have tons of ideas how I could develop this short story into a series, ha. So I’ll just leave it with this example for now, since that is the purpose of this blogging tonight. I hope that you find this helpful and I do encourage everyone (yes, even those fat cat Hollywood producers) to hit their personal creativity reset button and try this exercise out. I’ll write more as I think of it on this subject, and in the meantime good luck and all the best with this exercise and thought process.
I’ve noticed over the past several decades that people have lost their ability to use their imagination in an authentic way. If I were speaking to a group of people right now, instead of entering words on my laptop keyboard, I’d expect to see some surprise at this statement. I’d also expect some to argue that people have never been more imaginative than they are today! But I would shake my head and say, “No, actually, humans are in a terrible period of imagination aridity and furthermore, what they now think is imagination is actually a trap of logic, an error in logic that is contributing toward much of the depression and confusion in the world today.” Here is why.
Genuine imagination is to visualize in one’s mind a new and creative situation or viewpoint. Imagination is used in both practical applications, such as problem solving in the workplace, and also for entertainment purposes, such as writing a fantasy novel. Humans have always used their imaginations as part of their day to day life, even in primitive times. Imagination usually took the very practical form of wondering what will happen next in a very prosaic day to day basis. Hunters would wonder if they would find food that day, and if they were nomadic and hunting in new territory, they would wonder what is beyond the curve of the next hill, or what is within the forest. As humans became developed explorers, they wondered what the shape the earth was, flat or round, and what types of people and animals they would encounter in their travels. As people had their industrial revolution and entered a more modern era with leisure time, where they could afford entertainment, people started not only wondering what types of experiences were beyond their reach (such as what it would be like to go into space, or at the bottom of the sea) but eventually, for entertainment purposes, made up scenarios. This is where modern humans are today, where actually the bulk of mass media entertainment is making stuff up. People make up scenarios based on things like being a celebrity or a hero, and they also make up entire world views, such as in science fiction or fantasy. And that’s cool and if that’s all that was going on, I would agree that those are expressions of imagination.
But I have noticed two problems with the use of “imagination” today in those areas, such that it actually renders those applications of imagination to be not only invalid but dangerous. That is that humans have developed a huge thirst for imagination at exactly the same, unfortunate, time that they are less able to distinguish between reality and imagination itself. One would have expected, as I certainly did, that people would be more sophisticated in this century at telling the difference between reality and imagination, and not blurring the two. But actually humans have terribly regressed, where they are totally confusing imagination with reality, and thus are no longer utilizing pure and clean imagination.
There are several reasons for this erroneous blending of exercises in reality and imagination. One is that despite increased scientific knowledge, young people are raised to be increasingly superstitious, rather than increasingly skilled in factual scientific reasoning. And no, friend atheists who read this blog, I am not referring to the religious folk who deny certain aspects of science such as evolution! LOL, nice try to blame them, though, ha. No, the people who persist in thinking of literal seven day creation, or of humans side by side with dinosaurs are not the problem. The problem is the broad based societal embracing of inflated views of individual “spirituality.” Shibboleths such as “we are all connected” and “what goes around comes around,” to say nothing of the infiltration of occult and magical thinking among mainstream otherwise sensible people is the problem. To summarize the problem, many people no longer understand that they are using their imagination when they do so and in fact, they think they are receiving “hidden” “knowledge” from “the spirit plane” or the “universe.” There are people who deliberately and consciously believe this, that there is really no such thing as imagination and that they are “channeling” the fruits of their imagination efforts, while others are unconscious of this societal tainting of their thinking. In fact, the people who believe in these notions, that any idea that pops into their little pea (and sometimes pee) brains is “channeled,” “placed,” or “implanted” there are very powerful in media, and they actually manipulate their output to put other people’s imagination entertainment in slavery and servitude to the “channeling” that these morons think they are receiving.
Virtually every work of “imaginary” entertainment, whether book, movie or video game, passes at some point in their creation through the hands of “believers” of the “all imagination is a secret message of channeling from the universe” and they drive the messages hard. Editors who have this philosophy emphasize the depressive and dreary (or inanely airy-fairy inflation) messages in the areas where they think the authors are “onto something.” I’ve noticed this for years. What first alerted me to this was many years ago when I wrote a fantasy trilogy (I’ve spoken about this before here on my blog) and let some friends read it. The Jungian who I realized was a stalking cultist kept asking me, “where” I “got” the book from. Um, duh, I imagined it and wrote it. But she was totally stuck on asking me repeatedly “where” this was “coming from.” That’s when I realized that she was an example of moderns who have had their thinking so messed up by their own hidden cult beliefs and also inflated opinions of humans (reincarnated and so forth, when in fact, of course, there is no reincarnation). I thought she was just a dangerous flake in that regard and so while it disturbed me, I did not put it into “societal crisis” terms at that time (late 1980’s to late 1990’s). However, I have seen that this “thinking” has infiltrated everything that comes out of the media complex (yeah, complex is the right term alright, as in psychological complex) and also in just regular discourse, from individuals talking to the “talk show circuit” and worst of all, in the “spirituality” and “self help” business. Rather than discerning one’s thoughts as being deliberately reality based or deliberately imagination based at a given time, people urge each other to “listen to your inner voice” and “value your intuitions.” OH MY GOD. If our early ancestors “valued their intuitions” when they had a random goofy thought while out in the fields or hunting, I guarantee humans would not have survived for long.
Brain studies show that when a certain part of the brain is damaged due to accident or disease, the patient may have bizarre random images that seem like they are on an “acid trip.” This does not mean that if they are imagining seeing these weird images that they actually exist in reality somewhere, or are a “spiritual message.” It means that we can identify that the brain has self ordering mechanisms to distinguish among reality, deliberate imagination, and inadvertent imagination. When that brain region is damaged, the patients suffer from what I am calling here as “inadvertent imagination,” which means they are creating imaginary scenarios in their mind, as they would when doing normal works of imagination, but in this case it is not deliberate and not under control.
So what moderns have done is actually damage their own brains. They have not bashed themselves and each other on that region of the brain (though they might as well have). But by losing the most crucial and vital of survival traits, which is the ability to distinguish between reality and imagination, and repeatedly reinforcing among each other that blurring, society has and is continuing to inflict upon each other what can only be described as anti-survival instinct brain damage in that regard. Every time that someone stokes a person’s “valuing” of their every pea brained random thought as being “meaningful,” “significant,” “intuitive,” “a message from beyond,” “so called fake ‘past life memories,’” and that old favorite “channeling the spirit,” they are chipping away at damaging their own brains and those they are influencing.
When one has a huge societal problem like this, the answer is both easy and difficult. It’s difficult because it’s so automatic and pernicious that people don’t even realize they are doing it, or subject to it, except for those who are being deliberately manipulative. And truthfully, even they got more than they bargained for and I am sympathetic. They don’t realize that like overusing an imaginary muscle that they think they actually have in their arm, for example, that they end up crippling their entire arm. So this is a huge problem and one that would make me extremely worried about humanity all night long if I hadn’t already thrown in the towel about how willfully screwed up you all have become. But I’m mad on behalf of those who have been and continue to be victimized by this crap. A lot of joy has been taken out of the world because of this, in addition to, as I said, the danger that humans’ survival instinct has been seriously impaired, causing them to make very bad decisions and substituting inflated depressive messages instead of entertainment. And I am not being a killjoy and saying that there should be no science fiction or fantasy, for example. Far from it as I am a great fan of some of both genres. However, I have dropped both like hot potatoes because both have been now thoroughly infested by this “new age,” occult, superstitious, and inappropriately magnified significance of imagination as being somehow “gateways” to “channeled” “actual” “knowledge.”
So I am not one to point out a problem and say, “Whoa, this is bad, what a bummer trip. Wow, humans have really messed up and boy are you all in trouble of your own making” and not try to help, if anyone actually listens, huh? That is why I did not want to write this topic blogging until I thought of a detoxing and discernment suggestion that can be used as an exercise. This is kind of like those popular books that supposedly help in one’s writing and artistic creativity (and by the way, a lot of them reinforce, both deliberately and inadvertently, exactly what I am warning about). So I decided that the best way to help my readers examine this problem is to engage in, right here and now, an exercise in pure imagination. By writing such an exercise as a model, I want to teach you to use that technique for yourselves. So now I will demonstrate what I want each of you to do in whatever context is most suitable for you. I’m going to use the scenario that I am a science fiction author, sitting down to write a story.
I am going to imagine what a planet would be like if its only life form was the daffodil flower. So the first image that popped into my mind is a planet that is totally covered with bright yellow daffodils! I am sitting here picturing what that would look like. I guess it would be kind of a golden color from far away, since the flowers would be too small to distinguish at a distance. It’s only as one approached the planet that one would eventually understand that it is entirely covered with vegetation that the vegetation is the same bright yellow color and that when one is close up, that these are trillions of the same flowers.
When I first thought of this, just before signing on to the blog, I realized that would actually be a disturbing sight, maybe like snow blindness, where one cannot see in the glare of unrelieved bright white snow all around. So I decided to imagine that the planet is covered with a mixture of the standard color earth daffodils, which range from white through the pale to bright yellows and into the oranges, including a rather salmon pink variety. So now I picture the planet with that mixture. Still, that is a bit much. Therefore there really has to be some sort of landforms, so let’s imagine that usual division of land and ocean that we have on earth. So the continents of this imaginary planet are now, in our mind’s eye, covered with the multi-color daffodils.
If I am serious about writing some sort of short story about this planet, I might imagine how daffodils probably developed, like trees on earth, some gradation in their height and width. Maybe there would be daffodil meadows comprising low regular sized flowers, and then daffodil forests of really tall daffodils. What would a tall, tree like daffodil look like? If the stalk is like a tree trunk, maybe they are a beautiful translucent green (because as gardeners know, daffodils have a pale green tube like stem that contains a lot of sticky sap). So I can imagine a really pretty view of the trunk like stalks of huge daffodils in the forest, where they glow with a pale green, and where they break the sap flows out. Maybe there are sap streams of water as a result? Ponds that form if a bunch of these forest daffodils fall in a windstorm or something.
OK, do you see how easy this is? Think of a scenario and just imagine what it would be like using logic, as I did here. This is the beginning of being reality based but being able to imagine something that does not in actuality exist. Since you went through this exercise “along with me,” as you are reading it just as I thought it through, I can assure you that I’m not “channeling” a “vision” of some nutty planet that is actually “out there” covered with daffodils. Also, I did not think of the daffodil in this exercise because I have some hidden issue or need (and thus an oh so spiritual message) regarding daffodils.
But more important, I don’t have the need to ruin my exercise by now bringing in the “de rigueur” depressive motifs that have taken over all uses of the imagination. I could go ahead and write a really nice and sweet little short story about the planet of daffodils (even with heavy emotional constructs such as daffodil angst, ha ha) but not “work into” the poor and innocent story the themes that the depressive cultists think must be in all “imagination” in order to reinforce their imaginary delusions about the world and universe order. No trapped souls in the daffodils. No daffodil vampires. No superhero daffodil that must rise up in order to protect the rest of the daffodils from a peony that arrives on an asteroid. No need to say that some of the daffodils are “gay.” The daffodils are not a sign from a destroyed “past civilization” that warns that too much gardening is no good. The daffodils are not arranged to be a “secret calendar” with “numinous dates and events.” Did I miss any of the freak show “imaginary” shibboleths?
Why are the same depressive themes presented as being “imagination” for “entertainment” over and over? Notice it is a handful of themes that repeat themselves, as I easily listed them thinking of them offhand as I wrote this. But this does not mean that I cannot be imaginary in a way that is artistically challenging. In other words, I could make this short story about the daffodil planet be ‘serious literature.’ The trouble is not that people are being all inflated with “good and evil” and battle of the universe type themes, though that is the reflex that it seems no one says no to anymore. The trouble is that just the same five or six tired and depressive fake world views are trotted out and shoved down everyone’s throat as entertainment and “imagination,” but are instead, “stories” that are in service of people who have some very strange false beliefs in actuality, that they propagandize through the entertainment media.
So if I was actually writing this story, I could make it serious literature and still be pure imagination. How? Here’s one example. Suppose I wrote the first half of the story describing this lovely planet, without saying how or who is viewing it, I just write as if someone is walking around and observing. Maybe then I gradually reveal as kind of a surprise, that the viewer is someone from earth who has been sent to this planet as a post traumatic stress disorder therapy. So, for example, it is an Iraq war veteran who is walking around, who sets up camp, who stays there for a week, and then is picked up by his shuttle craft. And then we find out that humans have “cultivated” this daffodil garden on an asteroid for use in PTSD therapy. So I could make all sorts of serious points, human drama issues, and imagine what it would be like for a PTSD soldier to think his or her thoughts while camping on this “therapy asteroid,” ha.
Well, if this story now appears in print or film, I’ll finally have proof of the many times I’ve been plagiarized, ha.
Anyway, I suggest that those of you, especially young people in school who are in a creative or academic mindset anyway, and are the target of much of the negative use of “imagination” that I describe, try this exercise out. Pick any simple scenario and work with it. Keep it very simple, as I demonstrate, because when you try to be complex in your first attempts, that is when the politically correct and warped themes creep in unnoticed. You are not avoiding challenging themes or real life issues, but you need to hit “reset” buttons first by being simple. The planet that is filled with only one substance is an ideal model to follow, just as I showed. So think of some sort of “what if” scenario that is like this case study example in structure, where first you imagine and describe a very simple scenario of setting. That is the purest of imagination. When you’ve done that a few times you can discern populating your case study imaginary scenario with increasingly complexity of theme, characters and action, as I did in thinking of the Iraq war veteran as the main character protagonist, seeing the planet through his or her eyes, then layering his or her situation (PTSD) and then the surprise ending, which is that this planet was created as a place of rehab by good old regular earth folks. Wouldn’t it be nice? You can be creatively deep and real without being compulsively dark, as unfortunately, all too much of “imagination” and “entertainment” is today.
Anyway, now I have tons of ideas how I could develop this short story into a series, ha. So I’ll just leave it with this example for now, since that is the purpose of this blogging tonight. I hope that you find this helpful and I do encourage everyone (yes, even those fat cat Hollywood producers) to hit their personal creativity reset button and try this exercise out. I’ll write more as I think of it on this subject, and in the meantime good luck and all the best with this exercise and thought process.
Faith and reasoning tutorial on imagination
I’ve been thinking about another problem with how modern people think these days, and how to best express it in one of my continuing series of faith and reasoning skills. Tonight I’ve thought of a good exercise to share with you after I explain the problem, in order to help all my readers to better understand and remedy the problem. This should be of concern to everyone, but of particular interest to those in the creative and media arts and profession, who are instrumental in either deliberately or inadvertently contributing to this problem.
I’ve noticed over the past several decades that people have lost their ability to use their imagination in an authentic way. If I were speaking to a group of people right now, instead of entering words on my laptop keyboard, I’d expect to see some surprise at this statement. I’d also expect some to argue that people have never been more imaginative than they are today! But I would shake my head and say, “No, actually, humans are in a terrible period of imagination aridity and furthermore, what they now think is imagination is actually a trap of logic, an error in logic that is contributing toward much of the depression and confusion in the world today.” Here is why.
Genuine imagination is to visualize in one’s mind a new and creative situation or viewpoint. Imagination is used in both practical applications, such as problem solving in the workplace, and also for entertainment purposes, such as writing a fantasy novel. Humans have always used their imaginations as part of their day to day life, even in primitive times. Imagination usually took the very practical form of wondering what will happen next in a very prosaic day to day basis. Hunters would wonder if they would find food that day, and if they were nomadic and hunting in new territory, they would wonder what is beyond the curve of the next hill, or what is within the forest. As humans became developed explorers, they wondered what the shape the earth was, flat or round, and what types of people and animals they would encounter in their travels. As people had their industrial revolution and entered a more modern era with leisure time, where they could afford entertainment, people started not only wondering what types of experiences were beyond their reach (such as what it would be like to go into space, or at the bottom of the sea) but eventually, for entertainment purposes, made up scenarios. This is where modern humans are today, where actually the bulk of mass media entertainment is making stuff up. People make up scenarios based on things like being a celebrity or a hero, and they also make up entire world views, such as in science fiction or fantasy. And that’s cool and if that’s all that was going on, I would agree that those are expressions of imagination.
But I have noticed two problems with the use of “imagination” today in those areas, such that it actually renders those applications of imagination to be not only invalid but dangerous. That is that humans have developed a huge thirst for imagination at exactly the same, unfortunate, time that they are less able to distinguish between reality and imagination itself. One would have expected, as I certainly did, that people would be more sophisticated in this century at telling the difference between reality and imagination, and not blurring the two. But actually humans have terribly regressed, where they are totally confusing imagination with reality, and thus are no longer utilizing pure and clean imagination.
There are several reasons for this erroneous blending of exercises in reality and imagination. One is that despite increased scientific knowledge, young people are raised to be increasingly superstitious, rather than increasingly skilled in factual scientific reasoning. And no, friend atheists who read this blog, I am not referring to the religious folk who deny certain aspects of science such as evolution! LOL, nice try to blame them, though, ha. No, the people who persist in thinking of literal seven day creation, or of humans side by side with dinosaurs are not the problem. The problem is the broad based societal embracing of inflated views of individual “spirituality.” Shibboleths such as “we are all connected” and “what goes around comes around,” to say nothing of the infiltration of occult and magical thinking among mainstream otherwise sensible people is the problem. To summarize the problem, many people no longer understand that they are using their imagination when they do so and in fact, they think they are receiving “hidden” “knowledge” from “the spirit plane” or the “universe.” There are people who deliberately and consciously believe this, that there is really no such thing as imagination and that they are “channeling” the fruits of their imagination efforts, while others are unconscious of this societal tainting of their thinking. In fact, the people who believe in these notions, that any idea that pops into their little pea (and sometimes pee) brains is “channeled,” “placed,” or “implanted” there are very powerful in media, and they actually manipulate their output to put other people’s imagination entertainment in slavery and servitude to the “channeling” that these morons think they are receiving.
Virtually every work of “imaginary” entertainment, whether book, movie or video game, passes at some point in their creation through the hands of “believers” of the “all imagination is a secret message of channeling from the universe” and they drive the messages hard. Editors who have this philosophy emphasize the depressive and dreary (or inanely airy-fairy inflation) messages in the areas where they think the authors are “onto something.” I’ve noticed this for years. What first alerted me to this was many years ago when I wrote a fantasy trilogy (I’ve spoken about this before here on my blog) and let some friends read it. The Jungian who I realized was a stalking cultist kept asking me, “where” I “got” the book from. Um, duh, I imagined it and wrote it. But she was totally stuck on asking me repeatedly “where” this was “coming from.” That’s when I realized that she was an example of moderns who have had their thinking so messed up by their own hidden cult beliefs and also inflated opinions of humans (reincarnated and so forth, when in fact, of course, there is no reincarnation). I thought she was just a dangerous flake in that regard and so while it disturbed me, I did not put it into “societal crisis” terms at that time (late 1980’s to late 1990’s). However, I have seen that this “thinking” has infiltrated everything that comes out of the media complex (yeah, complex is the right term alright, as in psychological complex) and also in just regular discourse, from individuals talking to the “talk show circuit” and worst of all, in the “spirituality” and “self help” business. Rather than discerning one’s thoughts as being deliberately reality based or deliberately imagination based at a given time, people urge each other to “listen to your inner voice” and “value your intuitions.” OH MY GOD. If our early ancestors “valued their intuitions” when they had a random goofy thought while out in the fields or hunting, I guarantee humans would not have survived for long.
Brain studies show that when a certain part of the brain is damaged due to accident or disease, the patient may have bizarre random images that seem like they are on an “acid trip.” This does not mean that if they are imagining seeing these weird images that they actually exist in reality somewhere, or are a “spiritual message.” It means that we can identify that the brain has self ordering mechanisms to distinguish among reality, deliberate imagination, and inadvertent imagination. When that brain region is damaged, the patients suffer from what I am calling here as “inadvertent imagination,” which means they are creating imaginary scenarios in their mind, as they would when doing normal works of imagination, but in this case it is not deliberate and not under control.
So what moderns have done is actually damage their own brains. They have not bashed themselves and each other on that region of the brain (though they might as well have). But by losing the most crucial and vital of survival traits, which is the ability to distinguish between reality and imagination, and repeatedly reinforcing among each other that blurring, society has and is continuing to inflict upon each other what can only be described as anti-survival instinct brain damage in that regard. Every time that someone stokes a person’s “valuing” of their every pea brained random thought as being “meaningful,” “significant,” “intuitive,” “a message from beyond,” “so called fake ‘past life memories,’” and that old favorite “channeling the spirit,” they are chipping away at damaging their own brains and those they are influencing.
When one has a huge societal problem like this, the answer is both easy and difficult. It’s difficult because it’s so automatic and pernicious that people don’t even realize they are doing it, or subject to it, except for those who are being deliberately manipulative. And truthfully, even they got more than they bargained for and I am sympathetic. They don’t realize that like overusing an imaginary muscle that they think they actually have in their arm, for example, that they end up crippling their entire arm. So this is a huge problem and one that would make me extremely worried about humanity all night long if I hadn’t already thrown in the towel about how willfully screwed up you all have become. But I’m mad on behalf of those who have been and continue to be victimized by this crap. A lot of joy has been taken out of the world because of this, in addition to, as I said, the danger that humans’ survival instinct has been seriously impaired, causing them to make very bad decisions and substituting inflated depressive messages instead of entertainment. And I am not being a killjoy and saying that there should be no science fiction or fantasy, for example. Far from it as I am a great fan of some of both genres. However, I have dropped both like hot potatoes because both have been now thoroughly infested by this “new age,” occult, superstitious, and inappropriately magnified significance of imagination as being somehow “gateways” to “channeled” “actual” “knowledge.”
So I am not one to point out a problem and say, “Whoa, this is bad, what a bummer trip. Wow, humans have really messed up and boy are you all in trouble of your own making” and not try to help, if anyone actually listens, huh? That is why I did not want to write this topic blogging until I thought of a detoxing and discernment suggestion that can be used as an exercise. This is kind of like those popular books that supposedly help in one’s writing and artistic creativity (and by the way, a lot of them reinforce, both deliberately and inadvertently, exactly what I am warning about). So I decided that the best way to help my readers examine this problem is to engage in, right here and now, an exercise in pure imagination. By writing such an exercise as a model, I want to teach you to use that technique for yourselves. So now I will demonstrate what I want each of you to do in whatever context is most suitable for you. I’m going to use the scenario that I am a science fiction author, sitting down to write a story.
I am going to imagine what a planet would be like if its only life form was the daffodil flower. So the first image that popped into my mind is a planet that is totally covered with bright yellow daffodils! I am sitting here picturing what that would look like. I guess it would be kind of a golden color from far away, since the flowers would be too small to distinguish at a distance. It’s only as one approached the planet that one would eventually understand that it is entirely covered with vegetation that the vegetation is the same bright yellow color and that when one is close up, that these are trillions of the same flowers.
When I first thought of this, just before signing on to the blog, I realized that would actually be a disturbing sight, maybe like snow blindness, where one cannot see in the glare of unrelieved bright white snow all around. So I decided to imagine that the planet is covered with a mixture of the standard color earth daffodils, which range from white through the pale to bright yellows and into the oranges, including a rather salmon pink variety. So now I picture the planet with that mixture. Still, that is a bit much. Therefore there really has to be some sort of landforms, so let’s imagine that usual division of land and ocean that we have on earth. So the continents of this imaginary planet are now, in our mind’s eye, covered with the multi-color daffodils.
If I am serious about writing some sort of short story about this planet, I might imagine how daffodils probably developed, like trees on earth, some gradation in their height and width. Maybe there would be daffodil meadows comprising low regular sized flowers, and then daffodil forests of really tall daffodils. What would a tall, tree like daffodil look like? If the stalk is like a tree trunk, maybe they are a beautiful translucent green (because as gardeners know, daffodils have a pale green tube like stem that contains a lot of sticky sap). So I can imagine a really pretty view of the trunk like stalks of huge daffodils in the forest, where they glow with a pale green, and where they break the sap flows out. Maybe there are sap streams of water as a result? Ponds that form if a bunch of these forest daffodils fall in a windstorm or something.
OK, do you see how easy this is? Think of a scenario and just imagine what it would be like using logic, as I did here. This is the beginning of being reality based but being able to imagine something that does not in actuality exist. Since you went through this exercise “along with me,” as you are reading it just as I thought it through, I can assure you that I’m not “channeling” a “vision” of some nutty planet that is actually “out there” covered with daffodils. Also, I did not think of the daffodil in this exercise because I have some hidden issue or need (and thus an oh so spiritual message) regarding daffodils.
But more important, I don’t have the need to ruin my exercise by now bringing in the “de rigueur” depressive motifs that have taken over all uses of the imagination. I could go ahead and write a really nice and sweet little short story about the planet of daffodils (even with heavy emotional constructs such as daffodil angst, ha ha) but not “work into” the poor and innocent story the themes that the depressive cultists think must be in all “imagination” in order to reinforce their imaginary delusions about the world and universe order. No trapped souls in the daffodils. No daffodil vampires. No superhero daffodil that must rise up in order to protect the rest of the daffodils from a peony that arrives on an asteroid. No need to say that some of the daffodils are “gay.” The daffodils are not a sign from a destroyed “past civilization” that warns that too much gardening is no good. The daffodils are not arranged to be a “secret calendar” with “numinous dates and events.” Did I miss any of the freak show “imaginary” shibboleths?
Why are the same depressive themes presented as being “imagination” for “entertainment” over and over? Notice it is a handful of themes that repeat themselves, as I easily listed them thinking of them offhand as I wrote this. But this does not mean that I cannot be imaginary in a way that is artistically challenging. In other words, I could make this short story about the daffodil planet be ‘serious literature.’ The trouble is not that people are being all inflated with “good and evil” and battle of the universe type themes, though that is the reflex that it seems no one says no to anymore. The trouble is that just the same five or six tired and depressive fake world views are trotted out and shoved down everyone’s throat as entertainment and “imagination,” but are instead, “stories” that are in service of people who have some very strange false beliefs in actuality, that they propagandize through the entertainment media.
So if I was actually writing this story, I could make it serious literature and still be pure imagination. How? Here’s one example. Suppose I wrote the first half of the story describing this lovely planet, without saying how or who is viewing it, I just write as if someone is walking around and observing. Maybe then I gradually reveal as kind of a surprise, that the viewer is someone from earth who has been sent to this planet as a post traumatic stress disorder therapy. So, for example, it is an Iraq war veteran who is walking around, who sets up camp, who stays there for a week, and then is picked up by his shuttle craft. And then we find out that humans have “cultivated” this daffodil garden on an asteroid for use in PTSD therapy. So I could make all sorts of serious points, human drama issues, and imagine what it would be like for a PTSD soldier to think his or her thoughts while camping on this “therapy asteroid,” ha.
Well, if this story now appears in print or film, I’ll finally have proof of the many times I’ve been plagiarized, ha.
Anyway, I suggest that those of you, especially young people in school who are in a creative or academic mindset anyway, and are the target of much of the negative use of “imagination” that I describe, try this exercise out. Pick any simple scenario and work with it. Keep it very simple, as I demonstrate, because when you try to be complex in your first attempts, that is when the politically correct and warped themes creep in unnoticed. You are not avoiding challenging themes or real life issues, but you need to hit “reset” buttons first by being simple. The planet that is filled with only one substance is an ideal model to follow, just as I showed. So think of some sort of “what if” scenario that is like this case study example in structure, where first you imagine and describe a very simple scenario of setting. That is the purest of imagination. When you’ve done that a few times you can discern populating your case study imaginary scenario with increasingly complexity of theme, characters and action, as I did in thinking of the Iraq war veteran as the main character protagonist, seeing the planet through his or her eyes, then layering his or her situation (PTSD) and then the surprise ending, which is that this planet was created as a place of rehab by good old regular earth folks. Wouldn’t it be nice? You can be creatively deep and real without being compulsively dark, as unfortunately, all too much of “imagination” and “entertainment” is today.
Anyway, now I have tons of ideas how I could develop this short story into a series, ha. So I’ll just leave it with this example for now, since that is the purpose of this blogging tonight. I hope that you find this helpful and I do encourage everyone (yes, even those fat cat Hollywood producers) to hit their personal creativity reset button and try this exercise out. I’ll write more as I think of it on this subject, and in the meantime good luck and all the best with this exercise and thought process.
I’ve noticed over the past several decades that people have lost their ability to use their imagination in an authentic way. If I were speaking to a group of people right now, instead of entering words on my laptop keyboard, I’d expect to see some surprise at this statement. I’d also expect some to argue that people have never been more imaginative than they are today! But I would shake my head and say, “No, actually, humans are in a terrible period of imagination aridity and furthermore, what they now think is imagination is actually a trap of logic, an error in logic that is contributing toward much of the depression and confusion in the world today.” Here is why.
Genuine imagination is to visualize in one’s mind a new and creative situation or viewpoint. Imagination is used in both practical applications, such as problem solving in the workplace, and also for entertainment purposes, such as writing a fantasy novel. Humans have always used their imaginations as part of their day to day life, even in primitive times. Imagination usually took the very practical form of wondering what will happen next in a very prosaic day to day basis. Hunters would wonder if they would find food that day, and if they were nomadic and hunting in new territory, they would wonder what is beyond the curve of the next hill, or what is within the forest. As humans became developed explorers, they wondered what the shape the earth was, flat or round, and what types of people and animals they would encounter in their travels. As people had their industrial revolution and entered a more modern era with leisure time, where they could afford entertainment, people started not only wondering what types of experiences were beyond their reach (such as what it would be like to go into space, or at the bottom of the sea) but eventually, for entertainment purposes, made up scenarios. This is where modern humans are today, where actually the bulk of mass media entertainment is making stuff up. People make up scenarios based on things like being a celebrity or a hero, and they also make up entire world views, such as in science fiction or fantasy. And that’s cool and if that’s all that was going on, I would agree that those are expressions of imagination.
But I have noticed two problems with the use of “imagination” today in those areas, such that it actually renders those applications of imagination to be not only invalid but dangerous. That is that humans have developed a huge thirst for imagination at exactly the same, unfortunate, time that they are less able to distinguish between reality and imagination itself. One would have expected, as I certainly did, that people would be more sophisticated in this century at telling the difference between reality and imagination, and not blurring the two. But actually humans have terribly regressed, where they are totally confusing imagination with reality, and thus are no longer utilizing pure and clean imagination.
There are several reasons for this erroneous blending of exercises in reality and imagination. One is that despite increased scientific knowledge, young people are raised to be increasingly superstitious, rather than increasingly skilled in factual scientific reasoning. And no, friend atheists who read this blog, I am not referring to the religious folk who deny certain aspects of science such as evolution! LOL, nice try to blame them, though, ha. No, the people who persist in thinking of literal seven day creation, or of humans side by side with dinosaurs are not the problem. The problem is the broad based societal embracing of inflated views of individual “spirituality.” Shibboleths such as “we are all connected” and “what goes around comes around,” to say nothing of the infiltration of occult and magical thinking among mainstream otherwise sensible people is the problem. To summarize the problem, many people no longer understand that they are using their imagination when they do so and in fact, they think they are receiving “hidden” “knowledge” from “the spirit plane” or the “universe.” There are people who deliberately and consciously believe this, that there is really no such thing as imagination and that they are “channeling” the fruits of their imagination efforts, while others are unconscious of this societal tainting of their thinking. In fact, the people who believe in these notions, that any idea that pops into their little pea (and sometimes pee) brains is “channeled,” “placed,” or “implanted” there are very powerful in media, and they actually manipulate their output to put other people’s imagination entertainment in slavery and servitude to the “channeling” that these morons think they are receiving.
Virtually every work of “imaginary” entertainment, whether book, movie or video game, passes at some point in their creation through the hands of “believers” of the “all imagination is a secret message of channeling from the universe” and they drive the messages hard. Editors who have this philosophy emphasize the depressive and dreary (or inanely airy-fairy inflation) messages in the areas where they think the authors are “onto something.” I’ve noticed this for years. What first alerted me to this was many years ago when I wrote a fantasy trilogy (I’ve spoken about this before here on my blog) and let some friends read it. The Jungian who I realized was a stalking cultist kept asking me, “where” I “got” the book from. Um, duh, I imagined it and wrote it. But she was totally stuck on asking me repeatedly “where” this was “coming from.” That’s when I realized that she was an example of moderns who have had their thinking so messed up by their own hidden cult beliefs and also inflated opinions of humans (reincarnated and so forth, when in fact, of course, there is no reincarnation). I thought she was just a dangerous flake in that regard and so while it disturbed me, I did not put it into “societal crisis” terms at that time (late 1980’s to late 1990’s). However, I have seen that this “thinking” has infiltrated everything that comes out of the media complex (yeah, complex is the right term alright, as in psychological complex) and also in just regular discourse, from individuals talking to the “talk show circuit” and worst of all, in the “spirituality” and “self help” business. Rather than discerning one’s thoughts as being deliberately reality based or deliberately imagination based at a given time, people urge each other to “listen to your inner voice” and “value your intuitions.” OH MY GOD. If our early ancestors “valued their intuitions” when they had a random goofy thought while out in the fields or hunting, I guarantee humans would not have survived for long.
Brain studies show that when a certain part of the brain is damaged due to accident or disease, the patient may have bizarre random images that seem like they are on an “acid trip.” This does not mean that if they are imagining seeing these weird images that they actually exist in reality somewhere, or are a “spiritual message.” It means that we can identify that the brain has self ordering mechanisms to distinguish among reality, deliberate imagination, and inadvertent imagination. When that brain region is damaged, the patients suffer from what I am calling here as “inadvertent imagination,” which means they are creating imaginary scenarios in their mind, as they would when doing normal works of imagination, but in this case it is not deliberate and not under control.
So what moderns have done is actually damage their own brains. They have not bashed themselves and each other on that region of the brain (though they might as well have). But by losing the most crucial and vital of survival traits, which is the ability to distinguish between reality and imagination, and repeatedly reinforcing among each other that blurring, society has and is continuing to inflict upon each other what can only be described as anti-survival instinct brain damage in that regard. Every time that someone stokes a person’s “valuing” of their every pea brained random thought as being “meaningful,” “significant,” “intuitive,” “a message from beyond,” “so called fake ‘past life memories,’” and that old favorite “channeling the spirit,” they are chipping away at damaging their own brains and those they are influencing.
When one has a huge societal problem like this, the answer is both easy and difficult. It’s difficult because it’s so automatic and pernicious that people don’t even realize they are doing it, or subject to it, except for those who are being deliberately manipulative. And truthfully, even they got more than they bargained for and I am sympathetic. They don’t realize that like overusing an imaginary muscle that they think they actually have in their arm, for example, that they end up crippling their entire arm. So this is a huge problem and one that would make me extremely worried about humanity all night long if I hadn’t already thrown in the towel about how willfully screwed up you all have become. But I’m mad on behalf of those who have been and continue to be victimized by this crap. A lot of joy has been taken out of the world because of this, in addition to, as I said, the danger that humans’ survival instinct has been seriously impaired, causing them to make very bad decisions and substituting inflated depressive messages instead of entertainment. And I am not being a killjoy and saying that there should be no science fiction or fantasy, for example. Far from it as I am a great fan of some of both genres. However, I have dropped both like hot potatoes because both have been now thoroughly infested by this “new age,” occult, superstitious, and inappropriately magnified significance of imagination as being somehow “gateways” to “channeled” “actual” “knowledge.”
So I am not one to point out a problem and say, “Whoa, this is bad, what a bummer trip. Wow, humans have really messed up and boy are you all in trouble of your own making” and not try to help, if anyone actually listens, huh? That is why I did not want to write this topic blogging until I thought of a detoxing and discernment suggestion that can be used as an exercise. This is kind of like those popular books that supposedly help in one’s writing and artistic creativity (and by the way, a lot of them reinforce, both deliberately and inadvertently, exactly what I am warning about). So I decided that the best way to help my readers examine this problem is to engage in, right here and now, an exercise in pure imagination. By writing such an exercise as a model, I want to teach you to use that technique for yourselves. So now I will demonstrate what I want each of you to do in whatever context is most suitable for you. I’m going to use the scenario that I am a science fiction author, sitting down to write a story.
I am going to imagine what a planet would be like if its only life form was the daffodil flower. So the first image that popped into my mind is a planet that is totally covered with bright yellow daffodils! I am sitting here picturing what that would look like. I guess it would be kind of a golden color from far away, since the flowers would be too small to distinguish at a distance. It’s only as one approached the planet that one would eventually understand that it is entirely covered with vegetation that the vegetation is the same bright yellow color and that when one is close up, that these are trillions of the same flowers.
When I first thought of this, just before signing on to the blog, I realized that would actually be a disturbing sight, maybe like snow blindness, where one cannot see in the glare of unrelieved bright white snow all around. So I decided to imagine that the planet is covered with a mixture of the standard color earth daffodils, which range from white through the pale to bright yellows and into the oranges, including a rather salmon pink variety. So now I picture the planet with that mixture. Still, that is a bit much. Therefore there really has to be some sort of landforms, so let’s imagine that usual division of land and ocean that we have on earth. So the continents of this imaginary planet are now, in our mind’s eye, covered with the multi-color daffodils.
If I am serious about writing some sort of short story about this planet, I might imagine how daffodils probably developed, like trees on earth, some gradation in their height and width. Maybe there would be daffodil meadows comprising low regular sized flowers, and then daffodil forests of really tall daffodils. What would a tall, tree like daffodil look like? If the stalk is like a tree trunk, maybe they are a beautiful translucent green (because as gardeners know, daffodils have a pale green tube like stem that contains a lot of sticky sap). So I can imagine a really pretty view of the trunk like stalks of huge daffodils in the forest, where they glow with a pale green, and where they break the sap flows out. Maybe there are sap streams of water as a result? Ponds that form if a bunch of these forest daffodils fall in a windstorm or something.
OK, do you see how easy this is? Think of a scenario and just imagine what it would be like using logic, as I did here. This is the beginning of being reality based but being able to imagine something that does not in actuality exist. Since you went through this exercise “along with me,” as you are reading it just as I thought it through, I can assure you that I’m not “channeling” a “vision” of some nutty planet that is actually “out there” covered with daffodils. Also, I did not think of the daffodil in this exercise because I have some hidden issue or need (and thus an oh so spiritual message) regarding daffodils.
But more important, I don’t have the need to ruin my exercise by now bringing in the “de rigueur” depressive motifs that have taken over all uses of the imagination. I could go ahead and write a really nice and sweet little short story about the planet of daffodils (even with heavy emotional constructs such as daffodil angst, ha ha) but not “work into” the poor and innocent story the themes that the depressive cultists think must be in all “imagination” in order to reinforce their imaginary delusions about the world and universe order. No trapped souls in the daffodils. No daffodil vampires. No superhero daffodil that must rise up in order to protect the rest of the daffodils from a peony that arrives on an asteroid. No need to say that some of the daffodils are “gay.” The daffodils are not a sign from a destroyed “past civilization” that warns that too much gardening is no good. The daffodils are not arranged to be a “secret calendar” with “numinous dates and events.” Did I miss any of the freak show “imaginary” shibboleths?
Why are the same depressive themes presented as being “imagination” for “entertainment” over and over? Notice it is a handful of themes that repeat themselves, as I easily listed them thinking of them offhand as I wrote this. But this does not mean that I cannot be imaginary in a way that is artistically challenging. In other words, I could make this short story about the daffodil planet be ‘serious literature.’ The trouble is not that people are being all inflated with “good and evil” and battle of the universe type themes, though that is the reflex that it seems no one says no to anymore. The trouble is that just the same five or six tired and depressive fake world views are trotted out and shoved down everyone’s throat as entertainment and “imagination,” but are instead, “stories” that are in service of people who have some very strange false beliefs in actuality, that they propagandize through the entertainment media.
So if I was actually writing this story, I could make it serious literature and still be pure imagination. How? Here’s one example. Suppose I wrote the first half of the story describing this lovely planet, without saying how or who is viewing it, I just write as if someone is walking around and observing. Maybe then I gradually reveal as kind of a surprise, that the viewer is someone from earth who has been sent to this planet as a post traumatic stress disorder therapy. So, for example, it is an Iraq war veteran who is walking around, who sets up camp, who stays there for a week, and then is picked up by his shuttle craft. And then we find out that humans have “cultivated” this daffodil garden on an asteroid for use in PTSD therapy. So I could make all sorts of serious points, human drama issues, and imagine what it would be like for a PTSD soldier to think his or her thoughts while camping on this “therapy asteroid,” ha.
Well, if this story now appears in print or film, I’ll finally have proof of the many times I’ve been plagiarized, ha.
Anyway, I suggest that those of you, especially young people in school who are in a creative or academic mindset anyway, and are the target of much of the negative use of “imagination” that I describe, try this exercise out. Pick any simple scenario and work with it. Keep it very simple, as I demonstrate, because when you try to be complex in your first attempts, that is when the politically correct and warped themes creep in unnoticed. You are not avoiding challenging themes or real life issues, but you need to hit “reset” buttons first by being simple. The planet that is filled with only one substance is an ideal model to follow, just as I showed. So think of some sort of “what if” scenario that is like this case study example in structure, where first you imagine and describe a very simple scenario of setting. That is the purest of imagination. When you’ve done that a few times you can discern populating your case study imaginary scenario with increasingly complexity of theme, characters and action, as I did in thinking of the Iraq war veteran as the main character protagonist, seeing the planet through his or her eyes, then layering his or her situation (PTSD) and then the surprise ending, which is that this planet was created as a place of rehab by good old regular earth folks. Wouldn’t it be nice? You can be creatively deep and real without being compulsively dark, as unfortunately, all too much of “imagination” and “entertainment” is today.
Anyway, now I have tons of ideas how I could develop this short story into a series, ha. So I’ll just leave it with this example for now, since that is the purpose of this blogging tonight. I hope that you find this helpful and I do encourage everyone (yes, even those fat cat Hollywood producers) to hit their personal creativity reset button and try this exercise out. I’ll write more as I think of it on this subject, and in the meantime good luck and all the best with this exercise and thought process.
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