Imagination Part 2

I know lots of you guys would rather see pictures of Spain… but I promised you the meat of the Ideas program/podcast on Imagination, Part 2 (with a little of my patented sauce at the end) on Nov. 29:

Buddhism, among other philosophies, tells us that the self isn’t as concrete as we think it is. Our personal identity is a bit of an illusion. What poses as a coherent individual identity is largely due to a person’s memories, and the weird thing is that those memories change; we modify (i.e. reimagine) them every time we retrieve them. What’s more: memories are the “building blocks” of imagination.

The real virtuoso imaginers are the visionaries, who possess what Jung called a mythopoeic imagination. Henri Frankfort and his wife Henriette Antonia Frankfort coined the term, mythopoeic, in the 1940’s. Frankfort, H. studied ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia – the source for most of our modern religious mythological types. Ancient Egypt is really cool, but let’s stay on topic here. Jung believed that all humans share a collective unconscious that includes bits from the memories of our ancestors – even pre-human ancestors.

Modern humans also build a community based on our common observations. Observations are really all one has to go on when one has to go – on, I mean.

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