Rainer Maria Rilke tells us that a good poem can only emerge from a lifetime of experiences, which are not only remembered but, you might say, inhabited. (Or you might say that they inhabit you.) Continue reading Creativity and karma
Imagine
Polyversity provides that a word can be taken in various ‘senses.’ In the context of the previous sentence, the word ‘sense’ means something different from what it means when we speak of ‘sense experience.’ Yet there is a connection linking the various senses of sense, as a study of the history of the word will show. Continue reading Imagine
Untitled
Every convention was once an invention – though probably not by an inventor conscious of being one.
Expression and transformation
Expression relates to assertion as creation to description. Continue reading Expression and transformation
I and I, Creator and Creation
When the mystic ‘knows his Lord,’ he knows that he has a God in the same way that an organism has a world: he dwells within it, owns up to the condition of being owned by God. Nevertheless it is his God, his creation, since his Lord is his very singularity turned inside out. Continue reading I and I, Creator and Creation
Seeing things
We see what we focus on: what we see distinguishes itself from the visual field: the dynamic object determines the sign to determine its interpretant. Cognition begins by making distinctions; recognition continues with emergence of relations from the phaneron, now that things have emerged from the phaneron. Continue reading Seeing things
The medium is the context
To understand a sentence means to understand a language.
— Wittgenstein, (Philosophical Investigations I.199)
Attention
The greatest gift you can offer anyone is your undivided attention.
— gnox
Radical readings
If an innovative interpretation of scripture becomes a revelation to a community, it may then become a scripture in turn. New religious movements can arise from radically new readings of established scripture. Continue reading Radical readings
Imagination and experience
After the initial basis of a rational life, with a civilized language, has been laid, all productive thought has proceeded either by the poetic insight of artists, or by the imaginative elaboration of schemes of thought capable of utilization as logical premises. In some measure or other, progress is always a transcendence of what is obvious.
— Whitehead (1929, 9)
‘Productive thought’ then is bound to be imaginative. But it is an imaginative response to (or reading of) actual experience – not imaginary experience – that is most productive, in science, art and religion.
Continue reading Imagination and experience