To imagine or not to imagine. LO27732

From: AM de Lange (amdelange@gold.up.ac.za)
Date: 01/30/02


Replying to LO27700 --

Dear Organlearners,

Bill Hancy <wthancy@home.com> writes:

>At, I cannot answer "why I make New Year's
>resolutions," because I do not make them. So, I
>will have to answer why I do not make New Year's
>resolutions. Many years back, I did make them,
>but within weeks I had forgotten about them,
(snip)
>I have come to make resolutions in my life
>aperiodically; i.e., when needed. If a change in
>my life occurs either voluntarily or involuntarily,
>I must first become committed to that change.
>To do that, I use my imagination to vision the
>desired state (dream). Then, I create a path that
>takes me from my current state to my desired state.

Greetings dear Bill,

What you have described is much the same for me. I wonder how many fellow
learners have had the same personal evolution in making resolutions.

I like your sentence "I must first become committed to that change." very
much. It is pregnant in all the 7Es (seven essentialities of creativity)
-- liveness, sureness, wholeness, fruitfulness, spareness, otherness and
openness. For example, wholeness means that I and the change have to
become one.

>What I have found most useful in the creation of that
>path is, like you said, to examine the past in order to
>realize a better future.

I have often contemplated the question
. "How far do I have to dig into the past to
. understand how to improve the future?"
For example, consider imagination. In my own life I have
experienced many times how my own imagination sometimes
led to something better and other times to something worse.
But when I began to study the ancient philosophers, I found
that they had the same dialectical experiences. Some of them
encouraged imagination while others thought it was the source
of all failures.

I gradually began to get the idea that after 2500 years of thinking among
philosophers, something else must be responsible for the failures of
imagination rather than merely imagination self. Through the years I
considered dozens of possible causes, but I always had to disregard them
after some time. It is only after I have discovered the 7Es that I began
to understand why my imagination (expectation) sometimes failed the actual
outcome.

>To me, all systems are 3-dimensional. They all have
>past, current, and future states. These states are all
>interrelated and interconnected and must be examined
>collectively. Examining only one or two of them, will
>result in incomplete diagnoses.

I cannot agree more. Often, when I examine some kind of evolution
(geological, biological, linguistic, etc.), I try to imagine myself in
some epoch, looking to epochs earlier to it and epochs later to it. For
example, some 400M (Silurian epoch) years back both vertebrata animals in
water and vascullar plants on land began to appear. Try to imagine how the
world looked like before the Silurian epoch and how it looked afterwards.

What is the key feature we have to bear in mind when imagining these two
worlds? Before the Silurian epoch plants and animals had form, but these
forms were sustained by an outer frame (like exoskeleton for insects. In
the Silurian epoch this outer support became transformed into an inner
frame (endoskeleton). The possibility for up right growing plants and
walking animals became a reality.

Most significant for me is how the outer support became internalised. We
as parents support our children from the outside. But in their personal
evolution we have to help them to transform our external support into an
internal support. This internal support is their personalities well formed
according to the 7Es.

Plants and animals which developed an inner support, lost the
protection/armour which the outer frame also gave. To compensate for this
loss, they had to develop a "higher intelligence" to avoid danger rather
than to resist it.

Likewise our children have to develop a higher intelligence so that when
we stop acting as their "armour", they will be able to avoid danger rather
than confronting it. I see their imagination as a most important
constituent of this higher intelligence.

>From there, I imagine my vision, and then create
>through diagnosing, acting, and evaluating. I know
>I am successful when my "becoming" becomes "being."

In other words Bill, for you it is impossible not to imagine. I like the
way in which you use your liveness ("becoming- being") as a test for the
success of you imagination. How would we use, for example, wholeness as
another test? Well, we need to know wholeness ("unity-associativity").
The seminal name ("unity-associativity") tells us that some things have to
become together as one. What things? Who wants to try answering this
question?

With care and best wishes

-- 

At de Lange <amdelange@gold.up.ac.za> Snailmail: A M de Lange Gold Fields Computer Centre Faculty of Science - University of Pretoria Pretoria 0001 - Rep of South Africa

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