Writing, imagination, creative arts exercise

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.

A writing exercise

I have not suggested a new writing exercise in a while, but I thought of one tonight, so here it is. Like the other writing exercises it focuses on being creative without morbidity and despair. You'll see that this one is on the edge, but the reason is that whether it is on the edge or not is entirely up to you. Thus the two choices you make in writing this story (or script or outline) should lead you to exploring your own optimism, but also illuminate some unhelpful shadows.

1. The scene: There is a planet inhabited entirely by robots. They are aware, purposeful, and have organized themselves into a coherent and one might even say "contented" existence.

The first challenge: What would a "contented" society of robots be like, to you, in your mind? You could make a myriad of choices regarding how this "coherent and content" robot society would be organized, how sophisticated they are programmed, and whether they are creative.

2. The situation, ie, the plot tension: They know they are robots, but they have no record of how they came into being. One day they find a fragment of information that states that they will all melt down and turn into slag on an exact day in the future. There is no further information such as why and exactly how that it will happen; only that it is a certainty.

The second challenge: What do they do?

Again, there is a myriad of choices you could make as you think about how the robotic society you created "would, will and should" react to this news.


Use this exercise to learn the boundary between edgy and morbid, danger and despair, the actual meaning of life and whether mechanics ever are actually "life" in any fashion, and creative problem solving (on the robots' behalf) ha.

Art design talk

This is especially for young people. (Hi again...)
I've written before about detoxing and thus regaining some genuine originality and peace of mind in works of art (including writing). By detoxing I mean from the lurid, depressive and morbid mindsets and hence output of much art. Here is a case study I leave for you to read and study about how it used to be. Each of the USA states has a great seal. Idaho's is the only one to be designed by a woman. Look at the art work and read the description here:

www.netstate.com/states/symb/seals/id_seal.htm

I found this website when doing a little research to find images of the flower syringa, and thus got the idea of this as a case study for purifying your minds and adjusting more to reality when creating your art.

Read her motivations for each image. Now remember, this seal was designed before people became so nutty that they think each selected symbol has "hidden" meaning. That's my main point. The artist selected symbols that the vast majority of people could relate to, no secret, and when there was symbolism (about the roles of men and women and the question of women's voting rights) she is open about how she artistically deals with it.

She's not working depressive symbolism into it, such as cult imagery or, heaven forbid, as so much art is today, showing like peeling skin and the bones and skull beneath. I mean, why? Why are young people so morbid? Because they learned it from the most depressive, warped and morbid of all generations to date, their parents and teachers. Abandon that mindset because it is not truthful and it destroys your authenticity (what you think is original you are just parroting of depressives).

Here's an assignment. I was looking at cornucopias (cone shaped baskets that hold flowers and produce) at a store just in the past several days. It's a traditional symbol of the holiday of Thanksgiving. Notice that the woman in the seal has one at her feet. Sketch or computer produce a cornucopia filled with items of your own selection, including anything, not just fruits, flowers and vegetables. For example, if I were designing one, I'd try to work in something like a heavy rain cloud. I'd make other suggestions but don't want to skew your own work. Think about your motivations as you select each one, and how you would visually represent it. Use that as a way to question whether any item is truly selected to be interesting and edgy (which is good), or to be depressive and bring either yourself or the viewer down in mood and erode peace of mind. Swap any items like that which you find with something else and journal your thoughts. Save it because that will be cool to revisit each year and think about what might change in what you place in the cornucopia.

I hope you find this interesting and helpful!

How to ruin a good party

So you are a 'saved' Christian, and to your delight, *BAM*, the tribulations commence, you survive them, and the Jesus Christ arrives for the End of Times and the final judgment, riding his white horse (and with a double edged sword emitting from his mouth).

Delighted, you run up to him, thrilled you were right, and before He says anything to you, you bleat out to him:

"I knew I was right, that I'd be saved, and that the End of Times would come while I'm alive. My sister, who is reincarnated Blessed Virgin Mary, and my aunt, who is reincarnated Mary Magdeline, also agreed with me! Though actually sometimes we wondered if my brother was Mary Magdeline, since we know that in reincarnation the sexual genders often change!!"

That ruins a good party for sure. And you won't even have time to get your asbestos underwear (aka "long johns") donned before you will need them ;-)

Case study: Quiz for Catholic haters faith/reason

We all know about the Christians who are Catholic haters. They are the ones who despise the Catholic Church, claiming that it's not the true faith, "there's no Pope in the Bible" and that Catholics are all going to be "left behind" in the rapture and thus end up going to hell.

Hmm. Well, this is for any who might be sado-masochists and thus read my blog, ha ha ha, but mostly this is a case study, especially for my much loved younger readers (hi there!) Here is how to handle this situation using both faith and reasoning. The faith part assumes that you are a Christian who believes in Jesus Christ as Messiah, Savior and Son of God. Assuming that, let's go to work with using reasoning.

POOF!!!!!!!!!!

One of these Christians who has genuine faith in Jesus Christ but who hates Catholics has been transported back in time, exactly to the time and place of Jesus Christ.

He or she looks around, and there is Jesus himself, in the process of selecting the Apostles. The Apostles include Simon, whom Jesus renames Peter (the Rock), who Catholics consider the first pope. The Apostles also include Judas Iscariot, the one who will betray Jesus.

What does our Catholic hating Christian do, he or she who knows how the future turns out. As tempted as he or she is to run up to Jesus and tell him not to select or trust Judas, he or she, through their genuine faith, realizes that Judas (or someone) will inevitably betray Jesus since that is God's will and his greater plan. So he or she puts a sock in their pie hole about telling Jesus not to select Judas.

But oh my goodness, there is the big fat tempting target Peter.

So let's assume that our Catholic hating but genuinely loving of Jesus runs up to Jesus and throws him or her self at Jesus and implores him "Do not select Peter as an Apostle! Don't you know what will happen? They will establish a false church around him, called the Roman Catholic Church! At it's peak it will have one billion members! They will all go to hell!"

[Bonus question. Do you think he or she will actually blush a bit at "telling Jesus what is going to happen in the future?"]

So here are the questions, using reasoning.

Question 1. If you believe that Jesus is the Son of God, and you were suddenly, with no explanation, time traveled back to precisely when Jesus selects Peter and/or later when Peter is given by Christ "the keys," would you beg or admonish Jesus not to select Peter? Why?

Question 2. If you do not go quite that far as to actually beg Jesus not to select Peter, would you "warn" Jesus about what "will happen in the future?" Why? (I mean, would you reckon Jesus does not know? What would that say about him being the Son of God? I mean, that he would need you to tell him what will happen.)

Question 3. Suppose that you DO tell Jesus either 1 or 2. Which of Jesus' replies would you prefer? I assume that you would prefer the reply that strengthens your faith, because what other objective would you have?

A. "Thanks for telling me. You are right; I am not going to select Peter after all."

B. "No kidding.... really? That's what is going to happen in the future? A billion Catholics? You were right to tell me, because that's not what I want at all!"

C. "Well, if I change things now that will change the scriptures, of course, and you'll return to your time and find it all different and messed up. So here's what I will do. I'll let things go as you know they did, but .... (hey, what exactly is your name again?).... I'll have Paul write in an epistle that in the year 2000 all Catholics should now listen to you and what you say, and abandon the Church and follow you!" You return to your own time and find that sure enough, Paul wrote to Timothy, "By the way in the year 2000 all Catholic Church members should abandon their faith and listen to Joe Schmo instead, and he will tell them how to be saved."

D. "Yes, you are right. God and I know that billions of people will make a really bad mistake based on what I said to Peter, and all of them will go to hell. Depressing, isn't it?" (That ought to make you really want to worship Jesus).

E. Jesus sits you down and fills you in on the "secret plan" that God "has," and you leave all self glorified knowing that YOU know something that even the Apostles do not know. You laugh up your sleeve at how awesome a secret you have and oh well, God has his reasons for letting over a billion people make the "wrong" choice and while thinking they are following Jesus, they are probably going to end up in hell cause God has a "secret plan" *chortle.*

Young people, which of these answers, if any of them, would make you love Jesus more and trust God more? None I would reckon, but hey, that's just me saying.

If you have faith you MUST ALSO HAVE BRAINS AND REASONING BASED on FAITH and TRUST.

Either Jesus is here to save and not to destroy, or he is not. Would Jesus chuckle to himself at over a billion people thinking they are following him, but they are all going to hell instead? Would God let so many Christian people "misunderstand?" What kind of Jesus, Son of God, or God the Father would THAT be? Not the Jesus or the God that I know and love.

And wow, if Jesus needs Joe Schmo to go back in time and clue him in, that would sure make a lot of people nervous. Did Jesus really launch the New Covenant without having a clue what would happen? He knew what Saul (who became Paul) was up to. Why would he not know that Joe Schmo two thousand years later could have told Jesus that he needs to tighten up his decision making and his scripture wording, since over a billion people will "misunderstand" and thus miss out in the rapture and go to hell? Yikes.

When someone has this type of blind disregard for fellow Christians, you have to give him or her the benefit of the doubt, which they are not giving in their turn, and allow belief that their faith is genuine. OK, so you believe in Jesus and God. So..... why do you not trust them to know better than you? You need to help such people use some reasoning along with their faith, using dialogue such as what I provided. Otherwise you just quote scriptures in kind of a rote kabuki theater fashion at each other. Put them there in that place of time and ask them, "What would you say to Jesus? And what reply could Jesus make that would satisfy you?"

Enlightening, no? ;-)

Another creative writing/detox exercise

I hope that many of you enjoyed and found useful and thought provoking my previous blog entries suggesting ways to refresh one's creative writing process. The purpose is to lose many of the depressive, occult and anti-life, anti-God and anti-spiritual seepage that modern society and entertainment has imposed, especially on the young.

While having lunch today (pizza) I suddenly thought of another scenario that you could use as the basis for a creative writing exercise. As with my previous suggestions you can either fully develop the storyline or you can just use it as a point to think about and receive some creative inspiration. As always the story lines that I suggest may have an element of "fantasy" or "science fiction," but are firmly grounded in reality and what is easily possible and feasible. Whenever you write, strive for that yourself, since it keeps the mind and spirit from becoming toxic, where it only imagines the unfeasible (under the "anything is possible" delusion) and the relentlessly warlike or depressive.

Storyline:

Suppose that during the time that the Nazis were in power, both previous to and during World War II until their fall, they had a secret activity, one that would become obvious and virtually inescapable only after they had been defeated.

What if the Nazis had worked to infest all materials throughout the world with evidence of their insignia and sayings. For example, they would get a person in every factory in the world to secret within the manufacturing process an engraving of "Heil Hitler." So every automobile, for example, would have in the chassis those words engraved somewhere, and every automotive part that was made had initials, or dates, or that saying, or some other saying, or the swastika engraved. What if clothes makers in their hire hid within the folded hems of all clothes being manufactured Nazi sayings. So for example, within the cuff of trousers, or within the pocket of blue jeans, secret embroideries were placed. And what if within every book printed during those years, Nazi sympathizers inserted "Heil Hitler" in the spines of the book? Food containers would have special lettering hidden under the lid or the labels, or in the box flaps, and so forth. What if masons laid stones in houses, buildings, churches with such things carved?

Now, in this scenario, there is no point to their doing this other than to keep the wounds open forever, after they are gone. Do not develop this storyline the obvious modern way, which is that they do with with "special powers." Think of it as unbelievably comprehensive anticipatory stalking, and nothing else.

So the way this storyline works, even after the Nazis are defeated, the guilty are jailed or executed, and history unfolds exactly as it actually did (Beatles and all, Vietnam, etc...) everyone around the world is constantly reminded on a daily basis of Nazi dogma as their labels and slogans continue to inescapably pop up everywhere.

So........... develop in your story line what life and the human psyche would be like today if that occurred. Remember, history is exactly the same (for example, Mr. Obama is President now) with the only difference being that everyone everywhere receives constant daily unpleasant reminders of Nazi doctrine, even sewn into their underwear.

Suggestions to explore:

1. Do people become resigned and manage to "turn it off" or do they fight back and there is an industry formed of people who try to root out these continuous stalking messages?

2. How far can they go in rooting it out, if every home built during that era has something hidden in it about Nazis?

3. How would this have affected Shoah survivors and specifically Jews, both in and outside of Israel?

4. How would the priorities of the Israeli government differ if they too are burdened with this continuous stalking within all their products?

5. What would the schools be teaching kids about this problem? What would they teach and is it different than what you, as the creative author, think they should be teaching?

To get the right mindset, picture these as verbal and written IEDs. So just as IEDs have been a terrible weapon in Iraq, imagine Nazi verbal and pictorial "IEDs" that are planted absolutely everywhere, in secret places, found when least expected.

For example, your favorite shirt pocket tears and when you go to fix it there in the torn seams staring back at you is a tiny embroidery label of "Heil Hitler?"

Would this stalking eventually make modern kids curious and think that something so powerful as this plan must mean being a Nazi is worth looking into? Would society be dealing with half of its population freaked and wearied by this stalking, while the younger half has to battle being tempted and intrigued by it?

Think about it and sleep well. LOL.

Exercise examples and more context information

Based on what I wrote, imagine this.

1. You turn on "past TV" and watch the earliest of human development, where they first organized into groups and then at some point used weapons to war against other groups, for whatever reasons. You watch day after day of one group overpowering the other group and slaughtering everyone in the group, including, in fact, especially the infants. So one group would war and wipe out the other group: not armies but tribal family and clan based units. The whole objective of each conflict is to kill all of the others, probably because they competed for the same food. You watch day after day of these events over a period of thousands of years.

And then one day you notice one group declares war on another group, but instead of slaughtering them all, this winning group decides to keep the other group alive and force them to work for them. You applaud... and then you just realize that you've applauded the development of slavery.

2. You oppose inoculations against disease because you think something about them "causes" other ills, such as autism, or that they are a privacy imposition.

You turn on "past TV" and watch day after day of people walking around with even one disease, let's say smallpox because it is so visible. You can watch as it actually happened millions of individuals suffer from and die from the selected case study disease. So you can "be there" in true "reality TV" as every family loses at least one child, maybe more, to rampant disease, and entire families are wiped out. Like true "reality TV" you feel their pain and you say, "If only something could have been done." Your heart is wrung after watching let's say the hundredth episode of "past TV" of a smallpox infected person suffering and dying. You then flip the channels and listen in as generations of scientists wonder what caused the disease and work to develop cures, some of them primitive and totally wrong, while, as intellectual knowledge grows, others start to understand and work on cures. They start to develop inoculations. You applaud them. Huh?


With these examples of "past TV" you can structure your own logical imaginings of the day to day, like watching paint dry or a faucet dripping, of how humans really lived, and how they reached the conclusions and outcomes that they did. It puts your modern opinions within their proper context of what factually actually happened.


Think of any of the social, environment, moral or business issues we face today, and imagine what "past TV" would show you about those day to day experiences, and how humans without drama lived and adapted. Adaptation is different from evolution or enlightenment by the way. Humans adapt their behavior according to real circumstances, and that can occur within a moment in the blink of an eye or over generations.

Some terminology and concepts:

Quick adaptation is, for example, you change a driving habit instantly when you find one day you have an accident due to it (you may stop texting while driving after an accident). Slow adaptation is a group of people learn to grow different crops for food when the weather changes and they no longer have enough rain for what they used to grow.

Evolution differs because that would mean the people who used to eat the original food die out and only ones who can eat the new food survive and reproduce, so it is a biological outcome to a long time "opportunity" (an advantage or disadvantage that one's body must respond to through survival or not). So a bad opportunity (not enough rain to grow your crops) for evolution arises and one way that would be "solved" if adaptation is not used (because humans are too primitive) is that they stay in place and everyone dies out except the few people who can eat the local shrubbery. Evolution takes place biologically, while adaptation is mental. Humans adapt to the loss of rain and their original crop that they depend on by growing a new crop that is drought resistant or moving to a place where their original food can be found. Primitive humans and animals have evolution "imposed" on them when they lack the ability to act through adaptation. Thus they evolve by dying out until only the population that has the minority ability to eat what is available survives and passes on those genes.

Enlightenment is not "answers to problems" such as what to eat. Enlightenment is having the proper spiritual context for the ongoing human condition. For example, Jesus pointed out to the disciples that the lilies are the most beautiful of beings all on their own, without human adornment, and that the sparrows can find their own food. Jesus is enlightening the disciples about how much God proportionately loves humans for if he bestows the love of beauty and the finding of food on the humblest of creatures, how much more so does he love humans who are conscious and who know him? Jesus does not give a textbook exposition of the genetics of lily colors and spots or pointers on where the sparrows can find even more food. Thus moderns must stop thinking that "enlightenment" is "problem solving." It is not. Lack of that understanding is part of the "aliens with answer" and "psychics tell you what will happen" dead end trap of much modern thinking.

The human problem solving tools are:

1) Adaptation (change behavior)
2) Evolution (have circumstances of life and death imposed on you).

Enlightenment is not a problem solving tool.


So, by the way, go back to the modern person who opposes inoculations based on let's say an autism fear. I am not telling that person to stop being cautious or even to change their belief. What I am showing them is that they need to understand the other position fully. They need to understand the full context of consequences of no inoculation or spotty inoculation since it is not an "individual" decision. Past TV shows that it's called "public health" for a reason: disease management is not an "individual choice" or "individual risk" by its nature, even though free society to some extent respects individual non-compliance. What I am saying is that those who support more research or who have fears about inoculations, in that example, need to understand the context of risk profile and history for all, not just themselves, that they are making their assumed argument. If people truly understand their own history and the facts they find themselves cheering the very developments that they may later question, whether the questioning is legitimate or magical thinking.

Part of problem solving, via adaptation, is having the facts. Suppose the texting driver has an accident because she was distracted while texting and looked away from the road and crashed. She would reasonably stop texting. However, suppose her accident was caused because her tire exploded? Adaptation would then shift to ensuring that future tires are safe and properly pressurized, while not texting is a secondary adaptation because if she was not texting maybe she'd have a split second advantage as she fought to control the now out of control car. Improper adaptation would be to continue to have unsafe tires and to text, but to put a bigger bumper on the car. See, this is why people must have clear thinking about past and present reality, and primary and secondary causes and effects. This, actually, used to be taught in school :-) That's why I'm teaching you the terminologies and principles as they used to be taught in your average every day educational system to the young.

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.
:(

OK, an exercise hint

I can hear the people who have engineering orientations and are heavy number crunchers screaming that the exercise I just proposed is impossible, LOL. So here is a hint about one-just one-way to understand that it is not impossible.

Suppose these people need to cut one hundred boards of exactly the same length for construction, but they don't use numbers for counting (either quantity or dimensions) but use colors instead.

What if they used a prism that generated a detailed pictorial of a color spectrum, and using a color filter or wheel they can define a certain length as being one line on the standard color spectrum and quantity being another line on the spectrum?

Engineers would have standard access to spectrums and modifying color wheels that act as filters for different purposes. People then use a precise reading of a spectrum line to represent a quantity. "No numbers or counting are used in this, simply visual comparison of colors and their spectrum lines."

This is one way that precise work can be done and replicated without numbers. It's a hint how a color based computer would work too, and not via just a bit based system that uses color instead of 0 or 1. It would be like a visual (optical recognition) manipulation of matrices of colors and spectrum lines!!!

Once you loosen from the tyranny of thinking that human tools rule humans and not the other way around, you realize there are other ways that could be used, and you start to loose the compulsions of OCD and occult type of thinking.

"Numerology" detox exercise, also creative writing

Here is a mental exercise that serves two purposes: 1) another in my series of tutorials about how to regain genuine creativity, such as in the entertainment media, without having an occult, depressive or paranoid sub agenda and 2) how to continue to detach from and detox from compulsive OCD "counting" and also occult numerology "beliefs."

Imagine humanoid life on another planet, who are happy and successful, but they differ from humans in one fundamental way: they never developed a system of counting using numbers.

What did they do instead? Let us say that they use colors to count, to inventory and to create formulas?

How would that work? That is the exercise. Write a short story, or an outline, of how a humanoid race could not only get by but thrive without any concept of numbers, and how they used colors for their manipulation of quantity.

For example, what if they had a very simple system where red represented a single quantity, and then the introduction of blue represented additional quantities?

It really is a struggle at first to think about that because humans have become so invested in numeric thinking, to the point where it is an addiction.

But if you persist you will start to see how numbers ultimately do not have any meaning at all, and that there are ways that one could survive and thrive using a different system, such as colors, to manage concepts of quantity.

Can you imagine a computer invented by these people based on color wavelengths? I can.

Give it some thought and see how it liberates you from thinking that counting and numbers have any meaning other than the way humans selected to manage quantity. Numbers were invented by humans to serve humans, not for humans to serve numbers. Life can exist quite well without that particular system. So work on thinking about this planet and race of people who manage their concept of quantities by using colors, in either a simple way (discrete colors and their combinations) or complex (the continuum of multiple spectrums!)

I hope that you have found this helpful.

Case study: creative artists/viewers: victims

We all know someone who has experienced great abuse in their lives. For example, nearly everyone knows a woman who has been abused and battered by a man. Many people who read this blog are themselves victims. This is, needless to say, a situation that is getting worse and not better, for a number of reasons, and is outrageous and needs to be addressed.

Having said that, I need to gently question an assumption that has crept into the mindset of those who produce creative work, and those who view it, when the producer of the creative work is him or herself a victim of abuse. This mindset is that it is not only inevitable but desirable that the abuse or traumatic event inform not only one or two of their works, but all of their works. In other words, the assumption is that the person's art or creative expression is now irrevocably changed and fueled by the victimizing event.

This is actually a modern affectation, not a historic one by any stretch of the imagination. People who have gone through dreadful times in their lives have not necessarily revealed any of its effects in their creative output. In fact, what I want to help you to see in this case study is that there used to be a heritage and tradition of creative output where most (not all) but most who produce creative works extol the goodness of life and a positive outlook, never referencing their own victimization, as their reaction to having suffered.

The obvious classic example is an author who has been imprisoned. Often the author will not dwell on the imprisonment experience but, rather, experiences the familiar feeling of "the air is much sweeter than he or she had remembered," "the sun is brighter," and "the flowers are more beautiful" after their release. So in classic times creative artists who have suffered have often left no trace of their suffering in their works and, rather, have had a more finely honed sensitivity and appreciation of those parts of life that are not part of the suffering experienced.

In fact, especially you young people, I know that creative classes even promote and dig for the pain, teaching a "cathartic," "raising public awareness," and "source of dramatic material" set of roles for any victimizing experience you have had. While that is true if you are planning to write about that experience, I want you to question whether one should let one or more victimizing experiences inform ALL of your creative output. I would argue that is neither healthy and healing nor is it particularly of good intention for your creative art audience.

Here is an analogy to help you to discern this problem better and to resist the modern affectation that your victim experiences must be reflected throughout all of your creative output. As you sit at the computer doing your creative work, or at the easel, or using old fashioned paper and pencils you are using both of your hands with five fingers each (unless you are disabled, so please bear with me the limitation of the analogy). So under normal circumstances you have ten fingers that you can use to wield the technology tools or hold a paint brush. Think of your victimization as a sixth finger for one hand. If you are writing about your victimization, or creating art about those feelings, sure, you "put on" that sixth finger for those works. But would you leave it on forever?

When mentors and educators and those who promote your creative works push for constant reference in your entire ongoing body of works of your victimization (often disguised as the supposedly positive "you are showing how you have 'overcome' that dreadful experience") they are basically telling you to strap that "victim sixth finger" on one of your hands and never take it off. If you were suddenly given a sixth finger, a real one, you'd find it does not add to your talent or dexterity and would, in fact, hinder it. Likewise, strapping on the victim sixth finger and using it for all of your creative output is a great limitation to your creativity and a disservice to not only you yourself but also to your fans and hoped for audience.

Here is why. Someone who is able to compartmentalize their victim experience to only those works that directly address it, but then let go of it for other works can reach farther and in more directions as a result. Think of it this way. When you increase the contrast in a photograph, dark areas are darker and light areas are lighter and there is much more gradation in between, allowing finer detail to be seen (I have to use this processing a lot in my photographs, although not the ones I have displayed here on my blog, but the less talented ones, LOL). Now, as I said, the point of increasing contrast is to bring out more detail; the point of the contrast is not to make the darker parts darker and then stare only at the darkened parts. If that is the effect that you want with one photograph, then that is what you do. But you do not use the contrast feature exclusively to make the dark parts darker and minimize the rest of the photograph. Likewise, truly mature creative artists throughout human history have had more sensitivity and nuance for the normal parts of life, that is, the non victim event part of life because the darkness of their victim event has brought out the beauty of detail in the rest of the photograph through contrast, not through occultation.

Most mature victims of war, or abuse, crime, fire, or what have you, fervently wish that "no one should ever have to go through what I have." Thus they may write something about their experience to, yes, raise awareness, and to have some catharsis. Many victims join or found movements to remediate those who suffer from the same or similar victimization. However, these worthy reactions have diminished the talent and reach of many creative artists who continually "mine" their trauma rather than do the requisite amount of reference and then use the trauma's reverse shadowing to better illuminate the rest of life so, indeed, their fans and audience "don't have to go through what they have gone through."

Victim informed art is, to use another analogy, as damaging as second hand smoke. When the creative artist continually mines their victimization for material they are doing the same as blowing second hand trauma smoke on their fans and audience. This is a well known phenomenon among psychologists and counselors. Counselors who see patients with one form of trauma over and over start to show symptoms themselves of that trauma as if they themselves have suffered the actual same victimization. I saw this where I interned first hand and it is part of the warning for self monitoring and time outs that is explained to new counselors as their training. Continually revisited trauma is unhelpful for the sufferer and also operates as a contagion, a "second hand smoke" to those who consume creative product that is developed by those who are constantly referencing and "digging in the mines" of their own trauma.

So here is my case study exercise. Imagine that you have been falsely imprisoned for seven years. You have been released. Now, write a short story, or just an outline, extolling the wonderfulness of something that you missed while in prison and enjoy even more now that you have been released. Refuse to dwell on the unjustness of your imprisonment and deny yourself even a sentence of "poor me" or "but wow, am I 'strong' and I have 'overcome'" in this exercise, since that is the point. Pretend that your readers will not even know that you were in prison; your readers will think that the purpose of your writing is to extol the wonderfulness of some ordinary part of life. They will have no idea why you have such sensitivity and fervor for the item you select.

If you find that difficult and even more telling, if you are resentful that you are writing about something wonderful without your reader knowing that "you got that knowledge through unjust suffering," that is exactly the programming that I am trying to get you to recognize and challenge. It should not be the "new normal" that someone should extol let's say for example the smell of the hot pretzel carts in New York City (since that is what you missed and now appreciate) only if you can at the same time whine and bum out the reader about why you missed the smell of hot pretzels so much.

Someone who reads a very cool and interesting piece about how great the hot pretzels smell when you walk by will be inspired. Someone who reads the same piece but it is punctuated and bracketed by your story of suffering an unjust imprisonment is robbed of much of the new territory that your creative work would have opened for him or her because now his or her focus is in part on the sadness and futility of your false imprisonment and not on your creative virtuosity of bringing to life the mundane hot pretzel smells.

It is like if you are playing the violin in the orchestra and someone is hammering nails in the background and you claim that your violin playing is "even better" because you "overcame the distracting loud hammering sounds." Um, I guess, but is it really? And is that the CD that anyone would want to listen to, your overcoming the nailing sounds in the background versus your virtuosity at the violin in and of itself? Look, I guess another analogy just crept in, ha.

So do that exercise and I guarantee it will be a great self examination tool and helpful for expanding your creative expression.

I hope that you have found this thought provoking, interesting and helpful.

Case study for creative artists/viewers re: MLK

I mentioned before about the difference between creating good entertainment based on historical and current figures and bad entertainment that distorts the setting through which the story telling takes place. Here’s an example about a movie that I would not go to see about Martin Luther King, and one I would go see (hence I’m presenting a new case study story line for your consideration).

I would not go to see a movie that starts with looking at MLK and his circle of supporters, and then pans to show some anonymous white guy or gal in the background who is then revealed to be a “secret supporter” of MLK and his Civil Rights agenda through his or her “supernatural powers.” This dreadful bore of a movie that would be an embarrassment to walk by the theater showing it, say nothing of go inside, would “reveal” that the pale guy or gal is in “actuality” the “reincarnated descendent of the Queen of Sheba,” who is white in “disguise” (or maybe the Thetans aren’t so good with colors). Thus this movie would “inspire all who view it to know that steps in are everywhere, and you are never really alone.” You’d also figure out that those Afro-American dudes would never have gotten anywhere without their secret step in whitey pale pals who (wink wink!) have “Solomon and the Queen of Sheba’s blood to help them.”

Here is a movie I would go to see and be proud to write and produce. Some average white guy ends up hearing MLK speak. It moves him, but he has a regular life and doesn’t want to get into the activist movement since it is, obviously, dangerous at that time. He gets the idea that to help he and his wife will adopt Afro-American orphans, say a brother and a sister. Now, that would be an astonishing decision during that time and the movie would follow their struggle to actually get this adoption approved. The narrator could even be the grown up child, one of the two, looking back on it all. “Dad sure didn’t know what he was getting into.” The movie then follows how such an adoption would have worked and how the family grows. This should be placed in the South, I guess, because I’d like to see how they raise their children with their biological relatives nearby and how they straddle the two worlds. So the movie would show what worked, and even humorous things, and a lot of drama and unexpected consequences, all mirrored against historically accurate timeframes of the 50’s, 60’s and 70’s to the present. There would be tie-in’s between the events in MLK’s life, and his memory after he is assassinated, and events in the kid’s lives and their growing families. The kids make decisions about career and so forth that are fraught with meaning because of their duality of cultural and racial raising in a time when that was by no means as accepted as it is today. I’ll leave as some creative curiosity and suspense from what vantage point and ongoing life events the narrator is telling his or her family story.

Now THAT is a movie I’d like to see!

Case study for creative artists/viewers (2)

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Case study for creative artists and viewers

Help! I can’t stop teaching! LOL. I love to teach, not because I am a smarty pants, but because I’ve noticed that people have slipped into a very sad mode of learning, and I wish to change that. So here is another case study that addresses those in the creative arts, both producers of creative arts (such as the entertainment industry) and consumers (watchers of TV, movies etc, so they can demand better and not assume that they are getting the best). I in particular want to address, as always, the young people, the students and those who are starting out in these creative arts fields.

I wrote a previous case study of how one can write an interesting science fiction or fantasy type of story without being dark and depressive, but still being creative and edgy. The case study I presented was my story idea for a planet that has only yellow flowers and a traumatized Iraqi vet is sent there for some therapy. I have another, more developed story line that I thought of today to use for this case study. With this story line you can start to weed out of your own creativity tendencies toward unnecessary darkness and depression and instead restore it with genuine edge, drama and creativity. Too many moderns have grown up with two generations of entertainment and other creative arts professionals who equate edge, drama, suspense and deep plot lines (all great things) with darkness, sadness, fright, depression and depravity of thought or action (not too good things). Thus they weave into all their creative works enforced turns in the plot and underlying “messages” that are bringing everyone down and ultimately not really providing the edge that a really creative person craves in their works. So here is my new story line.

An average American returns from Iraq or Afghanistan wounded. Now when casting this person I mean what I say that he or she is genuinely average from an average family, so the protagonist can be male or female, straight or gay, white, Afro-American or Hispanic, from any part of the country. When you reach the parts that explore his or her past all of it will be perfectly ordinary, no reasons exist for what is about to take place because it remains a mystery throughout the story line and is never resolved.

The person comes back with severe wounds and severe post traumatic stress disorder, but while the wounds heal at a normal pace, he or she literally “gets over” his or her post traumatic stress disorder in a matter of a day or two. He or she does not do anything special, but one day doctors (and the vet him or herself) notices that “Voila” his or her PTSD is totally gone. They wonder about it but think nothing of it, figuring that either he or she is just extraordinarily resilient or it was not such a bad case of PTSD in the first place.

While in the hospital or rehab facility the patient, who is now being treated just for the physical wounds, socializes with other wounded vets. Suddenly, everyone notices, including him or her self, that every patient that he or she speaks to socially, not in a therapeutic way per se, suddenly is healed of their PTSD too. That becomes the story line, NOT the “why” or “how” but what does one do with such a “gift.” But because it is natural and not a supernatural or talent infusion, it’s called the knack. He or she has a knack for somehow saying the right thing that almost magically seeming eliminates and cures a fellow patient’s PTSD.

So the drama and edge comes from two components of this story line. One is to show the before and after of those he or she deals with and “cures.” It’s not like it rubs off from him or her where he or she just needs to be in the room, so it’s not miraculous curing. And it is not like he or she is using therapeutic and behavior modification psychological principles. Somehow he or she just says the right “ordinary” things and the PTSD is gone. So there can be a series of scenes where he or she converses about just ordinary things, what they did in the war, where their family is from, favorite hobbies and childhood memories, and somehow in those ruminations for each patient the one with the knack hits on saying something (different in each case) that works. For example, one vet may talk about a great play he made in a baseball or football game and feel bad that he, due to physical wounds, might not play sports again. But then after that vet has reminisced about the one great play, after the conservation and like a day later his PTSD is gone, even though they never discussed it. So there is great fertile ground for many scenes of ordinary conversation mysteriously resulting in an extraordinary PTSD cure.

The second component of the drama and edge is what do the various components of the society as a whole, such as the military, the government and others “do” with this person with the knack? Again, resist the urge to turn it into a dark “secret weapon” or the “drug manufacturers try to kill him or her” trite formula of paranoia, as is the standard today. Think about what we as a whole would genuinely “do” with such a person. That is the source of the second layer of drama and edge. Does he or she want to leave their normal life and go around the country or even the world doing nothing but “curing” people of PTSD? Would the military try to force her, cutting new orders so long as he or she is in the military to do such a thing? I would assume that he or she wants to help being, like I said, an average person, but he or she also wants a normal life too. How do they find the balance? Suppose he or she already has a spouse and children. Does the military create a new position just for him or her? Some comedy and irony would be appropriate in this entire “balancing act” too. The best edge is from genuine drama with the genuine gentle humor of human nature, including the funny and somewhat pathetic, LOL.

What would the government “think” about such a person? Thank goodness I am giving all of you this idea post-Bush administration so that Bush lovers and haters don’t ruin my great story line with distorting it to suit political agenda! The edge and drama of this is that normal people with normal capabilities are trying to now figure out what to do with a normal person who has one extraordinary knack and capability. Insurance companies, what would they do? Offer him or her lots of money to work at diminishing their payout to PTSD patients who require long treatment? Would non governmental charitable agencies try to get him or her as an employee to travel the world curing PTSD among poor villagers and war refugees?

There is so much here that it could be a great movie but also a long running TV series. That is because the edge and the drama comes from each interaction with a PTSD patient, the attempt of the person with the knack to have a normal life too, and the continuing series of governments, agencies and others with a vested interest in his or her knack.

See? One can have an incredible story line with a great plot and lots of potential for edge without alien possession, insane insurance agents trying to kill him or her, everyone is depressed and miserable in the end, and robots rule the world. One also learns to be a mature creative artists and consumer where you are interested and even fascinated with the plot but not because one must ever find out “why” or “how” he or she “does” it. It’s just there; it’s one of those fascinating mysteries about human individuality, not some overblown spiritual or superpower thing. This keeps it real, because this is close to the real world, with its problems of war and other causes of PTSD, but also entertainment because it is dramatic and inspiring and lifts one a bit out of the ordinary, through this knack, but not into warped fantasy. It is edgy too because one continually can’t help but wonder “how,” just as the protagonist him or her self wonders, but not so much because like I said, there is no explanation. No “reincarnation and past lives,” no “embodied aliens,” no “mutant superpowers gained from radioactive rays on the battlefield,” sheesh, for goodness sakes. And the pressure on the vet with the knack does not drive him or her to insanity, drugs, crazy sex and other dark depressive escapism, just to “work those themes” into what is supposed to be entertainment. The vet’s best friend does not need to be an assassin or a drug dealer.

This case study of an original story line is thus an example of how great creativity can provide edge, drama, mystery and humor without the same tired paranoid and depressive tools used by just about everyone in the industry today. There is nothing more fascinating than ordinary and real people (not contorted caricatures of “keeping it real”) who have one, maybe two, extraordinary circumstances to deal with.

I hope that you have found this helpful and interesting!

A comment about my style of blogging

In this blog I deliberately write as if I am orally conversing with a person. Thus I do not write as if this was a piece for publication. I deliberately use conversational tools, such as starting sentences with "So," "But," "And," and using terms such as "literally" and other less than proper grammar and verbiage. I do this since I often go for days without actually speaking to a person, so I "pretend" I am "speaking" to "you." I have a traditional Ivy League education in writing and retain skills such as sentence diagramming that actually very few moderns have today. There is no reason to be haughty about my writing abilities, and you all look much more attractive when your noses are not so high up in the air.

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.