Ideas and Imagination

Ideas lie behind behind all our actions. Unfortunately many of the ideas many people live by have been enforced upon them and many people are unaware of holding the ideas that they do, which motivate the harmful actions that they make. Thus what I am trying to do on this blog and what I encourage other people to do is take hold of the power to imagine and promulgate ideas.

We have the ability to sing, imagine, realities into existence. In a sense the human race has sung and imagined itself into its current unhealthy state.

Behind such thinking as this is the notion that reality is not fixed or absolute, that reality is mutable, indeterminate, open, which I deem to be a highly positive and accurate notion.

I find it difficult to tolerate the pessimistic and deterministic attitude found in such phrases as "get real" or "dream on" or "that's just human nature and there's nothing we can do about it". These are destructive institutional ideas and attitudes that we are sadly singing into existence and that keep people down, that discourage people from waking up to and standing up for their individuality and worth.

Post 21

It is significant, by thinking clearly, thoroughly and intelligently, to get ones actions and decisions, ones practical and social life, in accord with ones emotions, intuitions and fundamental ideas. To achieve this aim, and concomitant with thinking clearly, we need to perceive beyond the abstract systems and ideologies that usually govern us and reconnect with our actual immediate experiences.

We are pushed around by ideologies and systems which disconnect us from raw experience. We clothe and mask the world with constructs, like spoken or written words, and confuse such constructs with the naked things they are intended to denote. We have come to do this on a massive scale to the extent that many of us are ruled by constructed systems which are usually charged with detrimental (patriarchal, for example) assumptions and opinions.

On a recent post I stated that one of the main solutions to the current cultural dilemma is to open the doors of perception, meaning that we must perceive beyond the languages and ideologies that come between us and reality in its raw state. The raw state of reality would include the rawness of our subjective inner life, of our intuitions and thoughts, and the rawness of our objective outer life, of our environment.

Sadly we are not usually encouraged to connect with naked experience. We are not taught to be properly aware. In fact it takes a (seemingly) subversive unorthodox individual to teach us to mistrust or let go of everything we've been taught and reconnect with immediate experience.

In educational institutions we certainly aren't encouraged to be properly aware. In educational institutions one must not answer back! One must submit, must submit their thoughts and experiences to established paradigms.

In the mainstream news media we aren't encouraged to be fully aware either, here select external events are presented in an ostensibly impartial manner, while they are actually highly subjective presentations with underlying agendas, this is something we simply aren't encouraged to be aware of.

We are being fed through mainstream media abstract solely external information and grow up to feel, due to improper education, that such information is the truth and is all there is, that this is where all our answers come from.

If we were encouraged to be aware of ourselves and our environment in a direct unmediated way then all the events we here of occurring in the world would affect us in much deeper more meaningful ways, they would not be just abstract images and words on a newspaper page, TV or computer screen and we would not simply say from the comfort of our living rooms "oh isn't that terrible" of some horrific happening and carry on as normal with our day to day lives.

I feel that if more people thought clearly and thoroughly about their lives and the world around them they would not go around thinking they were correct, imposing their views onto others; they would be considerate and aware of, they would work in cooperation with, nature, their neighbours, their environment; they would ultimately be far more in touch with their feelings, emotions, thoughts and surroundings.