michael's blog > imagination

Marley Is Dead.

Posted on Fri, 12/25/2015 - 16:35

This must be distinctly understood, or nothing wonderful can come of the story I am going to relate.

Themes: 
hope
imagination

Reacing For A New World - Carly and Me - 3.5 Months New

Posted on Fri, 11/14/2014 - 12:56

Carly, born Tuesday, July 29, 2014. Today is Friday, November 14, 2014, 108 days, almost three and a half months new depending on how we calculate the equinox. There is a distilling of awareness and attention, a distinct and growing capacity to balance, to see, to be startled by a sharp sound or emotion and reaching to grasp. Carly’s attention, how stimulation moves from her eyes into her brain creating intention, extending down her arm, past the elbow and wrist to the outreached hand, tiny fingers grasping is today’s lesson.

Themes: 
brain
imagination
intelligence
pleasure
self image

We Are The Sorcerer’s Apprentice 2

Posted on Thu, 06/06/2013 - 20:00

My intent (whim) has been to awaken parents from the spell and implicit trap created by our cultural identity. I would not have described it as such twenty years ago, but that is an up-to-date and accurate description.

By encouraging adults to become more aware of our self-generated trap we might free the children who come under our spell and with that, culture, or at least lessen the entrapment produced by the enchantment. After all; kids are not the problem. Child development is dependent on adult development.

This spell or enchantment is the normal and natural function of the relatively new neocortex, the 3rd brain using Paul D. MacLean’s triune brain model.

The Sorcerer’s Apprentice symbolizes our immature mastery of the image making power generated by this 3rd brain complex. The imagery produced by this center is so vast and so new biologically that we simply get caught, again and again, in the images we create, forgetting that we have created them. Not a good thing given the creative power these images represent, which is what the Sorcerer symbolizes.

Themes: 
brain
culture
imagination
self image

We are the Sorcerer’s Apprentice

Posted on Sat, 05/25/2013 - 19:17

Human development is ‘model dependent.’ Every generation stands upon the shoulders of the previous. Nature assumes that the adult model, each individual and the collective culture, is sane, intelligent and wise. She could not do otherwise.

Unquestioned acceptance of the given was Piaget’s observation. That is nature’s agenda.  And it worked perfectly for billions of years until the neocortex evolved and with it the capacity to imagine. Imagination is the most powerful tool in the known universe.  Ah, but what if the user hasn’t a clue what it is or how to use it – sanely, consciously? We all then become the Sorcerer’s Apprentice.

Themes: 
brain
culture
imagination
parenting
violence

Not So Smart After All

Posted on Sun, 04/14/2013 - 09:14

Four twenty-something’s sit together pushing their happy meals around the table oblivious to each other and the environment. Each is enchanted by a different view of the same virtual-reality. Not so smart after all. I am suspicious of brands that merge the image of ‘smart’ with ‘technology’. Quick, convenient, multi featured yes, but smart, no.

Joseph Chilton Pearce claims that humanity is growing up in a virtual-reality with a corresponding loss of empathy and care for nature.

We assume that technology and science are highpoints of evolution. But evolution has been involved with the development of greater neural structures of the brain and the subsequent human capacities to move beyond the limitations and constraints of the lower animas… A rocket to the moon does not represent an evolutionary expansion… A discovery of humanity's immunity to fire or cold or our freedom from having to eat food [awareness of telepathy, development of intuition and insight, not to mention daily doses of empathy and kindness] – these are clear cases of evolutionary expansion. Our move beyond violence, war, and hatred would be a high-water mark of human evolution.

Joseph Chilton Pearce
The Death of Religion and Rebirth of Spirit

At the heart of my caution about virtual-reality technologies is the way they percolate into the lives of children before their bodies and brains have matured, not in a virtual-reality but in an organic one. Cool, quick, convenient and multi-featured is not enough. Discrimination and making appropriate choices are not possible without a strong, steady, living-reality as a reference. And that is, by objective measure, slipping away. Keep in mind that technological induced virtual-reality is dead. What the developing body and brain needs most of all are intimate experiences and relationships with life. The more children relate with dead things the more like them they become.

Themes: 
brain
imagination
media
television-computers

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