Showing posts with label imagination. Show all posts
Showing posts with label imagination. Show all posts

Wednesday, January 20, 2010

A disciplined imagination.

Outward and Inward Man - Religion and the Human Mind - Beliefnet Community
A 'disciplined' imagination just doesn't seem very imaginative, or productive, to me. If your thoughts only go where you want them to go, I'll bet you VERY seldom experience a EUREKA! flash.
Christianlib

J'C: "You seem to be confusing discipline with control or repression. A disciplined imagination can go wherever it wants but knows the difference between imagination and reality. It can go to the farthest borders of fantasy, and can even suspend disbelief as needed, but the tether to reality stays in place and the fantasy is never confused with what is. This is not to say that one can not learn from fantasy, the eureka moments are common and useful. But finally they get pulled 'back to the lab' to be tested against what really is."

Imagination and reality.

Outward and Inward Man - Beliefnet
It doesn't mean that everything imagined will take you some place. A great deal of imagination is mental masturbation.
F1fan

J'C: "That really depends on how disciplined your imagination is. Much of what people deal with in reality is reality masturbation.

Almost everything we deal with in the real world is abstraction. Give a person 10 bucks or worse, charge 10 bucks on a credit card, for a latte and you have exchanged an abstraction for a frothy concoction that you abstract as a latte. If it is a low fat decaf latte you have nothing but an abstraction. As Kurt Vonnegut pointed out 'There was a soft drink bottle on the windowsill. Its label boasted that it contained no nourishment whatsoever.'"

J'C: The beginning of a conversation. To be continued