Imagination Thread Continuation [Resources]

A continuation of this great thread created by Michael2!
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New article on Aeon:
[url=https://aeon.co/essays/imagination-is-such-an-ancient-ability-it-might-precede-language]
Imagination is such an ancient ability it might precede language

Contrary to this interpretation, I want to suggest that imagination, properly understood, is one of the earliest human abilities, not a recent arrival. Thinking and communicating are vastly improved by language, it is true. But ‘thinking with imagery’ and even ‘thinking with the body’ must have preceded language by hundreds of thousands of years. It is part of our mammalian inheritance to read, store and retrieve emotionally coded representations of the world, and we do this via conditioned associations, not propositional coding. 

Lions on the savanna, for example, learn and make predictions because experience forges strong associations between perception and feeling. Animals appear to use images (visual, auditory, olfactory memories) to navigate novel territories and problems. For early humans, a kind of cognitive gap opened up between stimulus and response – a gap that created the possibility of having multiple responses to a perception, rather than one immediate response. This gap was crucial for the imagination: it created an inner space in our minds. The next step was that early human brains began to generate information, rather than merely record and process it – we began to create representations of things that never were but might be. On this view, imagination extends back into the Pleistocene, at least, and likely emerged slowly in our Homo erectus cousins.

Placed this Quote...

"Contrary to this interpretation, I want to suggest that imagination, properly understood, is one of the earliest human abilities, not a recent arrival. Thinking and communicating are vastly improved by language, it is true. But ‘thinking with imagery’ and even ‘thinking with the body’ must have preceded language by hundreds of thousands of years. It is part of our mammalian inheritance to read, store and retrieve emotionally coded representations of the world, and we do this via conditioned associations, not propositional coding. 

Lions on the savanna, for example, learn and make predictions because experience forges strong associations between perception and feeling. Animals appear to use images (visual, auditory, olfactory memories) to navigate novel territories and problems. For early humans, a kind of cognitive gap opened up between stimulus and response – a gap that created the possibility of having multiple responses to a perception, rather than one immediate response. This gap was crucial for the imagination: it created an inner space in our minds. The next step was that early human brains began to generate information, rather than merely record and process it – we began to create representations of things that never were but might be. On this view, imagination extends back into the Pleistocene, at least, and likely emerged slowly in our Homo erectus cousins."

It is uncertain what date the Anunnaki left our planet, after genetically modifying a part of the hominoid species subsequently leaving us to "fend for ourselves". It wasn't an abandonment as much as it was an indication that soul entities upon incarnation had developed a pipeline to their Higher Selves. That pipeline is our imaginations. An example might be of assistance.

Let's say you have a problem challenge.

Relax into your imagination and imagine the version of reality you prefer including yourself in that scenario. Specifically, imagine the "ideal" version of you - the "you" you would most like to be. Then insert this current challenging situation into your imaginary scene and notice how this imaginary Ideal You handles the situation. Copy and paste, think, act and feel like that Ideal You!  This is your Higher Mind communicating with you, showing the way, the most efficient and rewarding path...leaving it up to your free will to choose that whichever is your preference.

[quote pid='7871' dateline='1506735929']
Contrary to this interpretation, I want to suggest that imagination, properly understood, is one of the earliest human abilities, not a recent arrival. Thinking and communicating are vastly improved by language, it is true. But ‘thinking with imagery’ and even ‘thinking with the body’ must have preceded language by hundreds of thousands of years. It is part of our mammalian inheritance to read, store and retrieve emotionally coded representations of the world, and we do this via conditioned associations, not propositional coding. 

Lions on the savanna, for example, learn and make predictions because experience forges strong associations between perception and feeling. Animals appear to use images (visual, auditory, olfactory memories) to navigate novel territories and problems. For early humans, a kind of cognitive gap opened up between stimulus and response – a gap that created the possibility of having multiple responses to a perception, rather than one immediate response. This gap was crucial for the imagination: it created an inner space in our minds. The next step was that early human brains began to generate information, rather than merely record and process it – we began to create representations of things that never were but might be. On this view, imagination extends back into the Pleistocene, at least, and likely emerged slowly in our Homo erectus cousins.

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A fascinating conjecture. It is interesting to me how this sort of informed evolutionary psychology speculation about human origins is incompatible with spiritualistic and dualistic beliefs about the ultimate spirit nature of human consciousness. This includes belief in survival of physical death of a mobile center of consciousness, and reincarnation. These beliefs (for which there is a considerable body of evidence) see human imagination as a quality or capacity inherent to the soul or spirit, and merely manifested in the physical via brains once brains had evolved to be capable of receiving it.  The evolution of such abilities in the brain would be seen as having required outside intervention, or the process could be some form of "dualistic Darwinism". I don't favor the latter.

I just noticed that my view of the origin of the human imagination above seems to be quite compatible with Pssst's in post #2. Certainly many channeled teachings advise that the best way to achieve true spiritual knowledge is through deliberate use of the imagination fueled by knowledge and desire for the truth. These teachings say it is one of the better ways to the truth, though that seems counterintuitive to the rational mind, since the rational mind views the imagination as a creative faculty not a communicative one.  It may be both.

I just noticed that my view of the origin of the human imagination above seems to be quite compatible with Pssst's in post #2. Certainly many channeled teachings advise that the best way to achieve true spiritual knowledge is through deliberate use of the imagination fueled by knowledge and desire for the truth. These teachings say it is one of the better ways to the truth, though that seems counterintuitive to the rational mind, since the rational mind views the imagination as a creative faculty not a communicative one.  It may be both.

I feel complimented. 

Yes, follow your passions, engage your imagination (to open up the commo from your Higher Mind), live only in the Moment (trust your HM and your Life) and negotiate with your physical ego to turn off your physical mind.

Henry Corbin, Suhrawardi, and the Lost Knowledge of the Imagination

This is an excerpt from my latest book, Lost Knowledge of the Imagination, published by Floris Books. In it I explore the idea of the imagination as a  ‘cognitive’ faculty, that is, a means of knowing the world, rather than, as is more often the case, a way of escaping from it into some more congenial fantasy world. The title comes from the poet, essayist and Blake scholar Kathleen Raine, who for many years guided the Temenos Academy, a modern school dedicated to rediscovering this knowledge and keeping it alive.

How did we lose this knowledge? It began to slip away in the early seventeenth century, at the start of our modern age, although the roots of that process reached backed millennia earlier. But this knowledge was known for centuries before its eclipse and continues to be known and pursued well into our own postmodern times. In my book I look at different teachers of this lost knowledge. One is Kathleen Raine herself; another, as in this excerpt, is the French philosopher and Iranologist Henry Corbin, who famously coined the term imaginal to differentiate it from the imaginary, so to avoid the pejorative connotations this has in our culture. Here I look at how Corbin came to this idea through the work of the tenth century Persia philosopher Suhrawardi.

Seeing More, Imagining More

Eriol Claw

However, my point about this is that in these instances, and in many instances with reflections in “dark mirrors”—including puddles, rivers, waters, and even my phone’s dark screen—I’m often “scrying” and “seeing” by projecting my attention into the reflection. In these reflections—especially, dark or partial reflections—well, a dark mirror does not show all of the scene. We must enter into the mirror, perceiving and imagining what else is there beyond and around the edges of the surface before us. And I find that in doing so, I can more easily perceive what I might call the Nearby.

In a related manner, there’s something in how humans imagine their landscape, and I think Tarnas’s observations on how relationships and even truth are discovered through imagination line up with this. Landscape, the world around us, “trajects” us. To point to Augustin Berque again: “Trajection [is] that ‘movement’,” that line, “that transference from self to world (but the world as agent, as setting, as stage for other subjects)” and back again.[qtd. from here] Our gaze—imaginal and otherwise—and experience of the world reaches out and penetrates the world even as it penetrates and changes us in turn. We witness the land and imagine and “see” what lies beyond us, and that includes the spiritual “reflection” and what’s around the edges of the mirror or waters. And that act of reflection on our part is probably just an artifact of how we get ourselves to imagine/see that aspect, that imaginally-deep part of the world.

So, we relate to the landscape, and we imagine the land and its (supposedly hidden) depths, and that imagining is also perceiving. And as Tarnas argues while discussing Tolkien’s use of landscape in Lord of the Rings, the land makes the myth, but the myth carries the land with it. Landscape provides context and space, including imaginal space. She wonders if the shrinking of fae in myth and legend correlates to where western culture imagined space for them to exist—with less space, they shrink for us to accommodate them into our (shrinking) imaginal engagement with the world. As the west categorized and charted what it imagined the world to be, it eliminated the places where the west could imagine the fae to live. However, once the west consigned them wholly to the imagination, then they could assume whatever size they wanted again.

Seeing More, Imagining More

Eriol Claw

This reverie on the creative imagination brings to mind the free will redux thread elsewhere in this forum. There is an absolute disconnect between the obvious existence of human artistic, musical and literary creativity and the modern materialist insistence in the nonexistence of free will, namely that all human thoughts are completely predetermined. That all free choices and even more importantly, acts of creative imagination, are merely the results of deterministic cause-effect chains in human brains going back who knows how long. This view is of course completely counterintuitive and more importantly totally preposterous in my opinion because of the completely new, unique, intricate and designed nature of these creations of human imagination. This claim would require that this vast body of complex specified information was somehow specified at the time of the Big Bang. Of course the great flaw in the materialist-assumed determinism/randomness dichotomy is that it does not take the mystery of consciousness into account.