Effective Change
July 12, 2011
— If you want to change others, change yourself. —
Book Review: The Flying Drum by Bradford P. Keeney
June 23, 2011
The Flying Drum by Bradford P. Keeney
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Keeney is a therapist who used systems theory and cybernetics and had a national reputation with several publications in the 80′s. He was a student of Gregory Bateson and Heinz von Foerster. He has developed a radical approach to therapy which is deeply informed and shaped by shamanism.
If you are interested in this, there is an engaging podcast available that I would recommend with an interview with Keeney by Tami Simon of Sounds True. Here is a link to this podcast.
“The Flying Drum” book is a fast read. He tells his personal story of his own “professional” development and describes his way he met with shamans from all around the world, received initiations and instructions, and brings what he learned to the world. It is literally fantastic, operating in that domain of what seems unbelievable and yet here in direct experience.
While the book has similarities to New Age books like those of Lynn Andrews, etc., it feels to have more substance and is more grounded in ordinary reality while not shy of stories of the seeming impossible. It is also a bit like Carlos Casteneda’s books with many descriptions of encounters and personal experiences but without going into as much of the detail of the stories of his contact with the shamans.
I found this book to be validating and inspiring.
Feb 1, 2011
February 1, 2011
Using imagery in therapy is energy medicine. If energy medicine can be defined as the means to change subtle energy systems in the body, then the use of imagery qualifies by addressing negative emotions in a way that can lead to transformation. Guided imagery, active imagination, and art therapy all can be used in this way.
January 15, 2011 5:45 PM
January 15, 2011
Those of you who have visited here before will surely notice a change in the design of this blog. After a long period of re-imagining I have decided to change the course of this blog. It will still be named "Knowing Imagination" and subtitled "Musings on the power of the imagination" but the focus will now be quite different.
I have been posting on anything I found interesting around the internet that had to do with the subject of the imagination and I tried to pay for the costs of the hosting of the blog with Google ads and affiliations to sell products that were relevant. Since this generated no significant revenue- and served to clutter the site with too much distraction- I have dropped that for the foreseeable future.
The new content will be focussed on thoughts, ideas, and other relevant comments that will eventuate in the completion of a book I have been working on- off and on- for some time. The working title of this book is, "The Inward Eye", and is a guide to using the imagination for growing, learning, and healing.
I hope you will find this interesting. I invite you to comment with the hope that I may gain encouragement and insight from your contributions. Stay tuned.
More on Relationship in Creativity
September 14, 2010
Joshua Wolf Shenk has a new series on Slate.com on creative pairs, Two is the Magic Number. Accompanying a long essay is a 3+ minute video on John Lennon and Paul McCartney's creative relationship. Related to the previous post here on creative relationship evidenced by remixing, this article explores in depth the "myth of the lone creator". This is Part 1, here is Part 2, Part 3. Enjoy.
Everything is a Remix
September 14, 2010
Everything is a Remix
Led Zeppelin, 1968
September 16, 2010
Here is a link to a response to the above written by songwriter John Woods furthering the discussion- and some responses to him as well.
Interesting new web site
September 11, 2010
Take a look at this new web site I discovered a couple of days ago, Guided Imagery Collective. Jose Said Osio is a kindred spirit and his well constructed and attractive site is about his interest in guided imagery, art, wellness, and spirit. Check it out.
Beautiful and Strange
June 21, 2010
These photos by Anthony Wood caught my eye and my imagination. I found them to be strange and beautiful- surreal and evocative. This is Photoshop-ing that avoids over-use and shows how one can make fine art with the same tools that so often stray into harshness or kitsch. There are three sets of photos on the web site- Nudes, Angels-Visions-Visitations, and Trees. I found the Nudes to be most interesting but all three bear a close look. Enjoy.
Comments?
BBC – Creative Minds ‘Mimic Schizophrenia’
May 31, 2010
Here is a provocative article from the web site of the BBC based on some current research. But don't jump to any conclusions before reading the article. Does it suggest that creativity is based on a deficit of brain function? Or that schizophrenia is creativity run amok? Is this another example of scientific research performing its necessarily highly focused tasks of discovery and then relying too heavily on the resulting reduced variables to draw conclusions? What do you think?
Artist Salvador Dali is known for his surreal paintings and eccentric personality
By Michelle Roberts, Health reporter, BBC News
Creativity is akin to insanity, say scientists who have been studying how the mind works.
Brain scans reveal striking similarities in the thought pathways of highly creative people and those with schizophrenia.
Both groups lack important receptors used to filter and direct thought.
It could be this uninhibited processing that allows creative people to "think outside the box", say experts from Sweden's Karolinska Institute.
In some people, it leads to mental illness.
But rather than a clear division, experts suspect a continuum, with some people having psychotic traits but few negative symptoms.
Art and suffering
Some of the world's leading artists, writers and theorists have also had mental illnesses – the Dutch painter Vincent van Gogh and American mathematician John Nash (portrayed by Russell Crowe in the film A Beautiful Mind) to name just two.
Creativity is known to be associated with an increased risk of depression, schizophrenia and bipolar disorder.
Similarly, people who have mental illness in their family have a higher chance of being creative.
Associate Professor Fredrik Ullen believes his findings could help explain why.
He looked at the brain's dopamine (D2) receptor genes which experts believe govern divergent thought.
He found highly creative people who did well on tests of divergent thought had a lower than expected density of D2 receptors in the thalamus – as do people with schizophrenia.
The thalamus serves as a relay centre, filtering information before it reaches areas of the cortex, which is responsible, amongst other things, for cognition and reasoning.
"Fewer D2 receptors in the thalamus probably means a lower degree of signal filtering, and thus a higher flow of information from the thalamus," said Professor Ullen.
He believes it is this barrage of uncensored information that ignites the creative spark.
This would explain how highly creative people manage to see unusual connections in problem-solving situations that other people miss.
Schizophrenics share this same ability to make novel associations. But in schizophrenia, it results in bizarre and disturbing thoughts.
UK psychologist and member of the British Psychological Society Mark Millard said the overlap with mental illness might explain the motivation and determination creative people share.
"Creativity is uncomfortable. It is their dissatisfaction with the present that drives them on to make changes.
"Creative people, like those with psychotic illnesses, tend to see the world differently to most. It's like looking at a shattered mirror. They see the world in a fractured way.
"There is no sense of conventional limitations and you can see this in their work. Take Salvador Dali, for example. He certainly saw the world differently and behaved in a way that some people perceived as very odd."
He said businesses have already recognised and capitalised on this knowledge.
Some companies have "skunk works" – secure, secret laboratories for their highly creative staff where they can freely experiment without disrupting the daily business.
Chartered psychologist Gary Fitzgibbon says an ability to "suspend disbelief" is one way of looking at creativity.
"When you suspend disbelief you are prepared to believe anything and this opens up the scope for seeing more possibilities.
"Creativity is certainly about not being constrained by rules or accepting the restrictions that society places on us. Of course the more people break the rules, the more likely they are to be perceived as 'mentally ill'."
He works as an executive coach helping people to be more creative in their problem solving behaviour and thinking styles.
"The result is typically a significant rise in their well being, so as opposed to creativity being associated with mental illness it becomes associated with good mental health."
The thalamus channels thoughts
Where Poetry Begins
April 17, 2010
The most recent version of the Poetry Fridays email from the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation is a beautiful and well-written essay by Martin Farawell, Program Director of Poetry, called, “Where Poetry Begins”.
I reproduce this essay below with the suggestion that, if this is at all of interest to you, follow the link at the bottom back to the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation web site and explore what they have to offer. Especially, notice the upcoming poetry festival scheduled for October in Newark, NJ, USA. I have a tending a couple of these festivals in the past and can attest that they are wonderful.
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Poet Heather McHugh has pointed out that in all the photographs of 9/11, none of the witnesses covered their eyes. Instead, they covered their mouths. Their bodies said what their words could not: What they were seeing was unspeakable.
In the days and weeks following, newspaper editorial offices across the country were swamped with poems. Long-experienced editors had never seen anything like it.
Where speech stops, where syntax shatters, where prose fails is where poetry begins.
When we are most profoundly moved, our syntax not only shatters, it shatters into rhythm. We stammer and stutter and repeat ourselves. Our language, illogical and irrational and emotional, is rhythmic and repetitious.
“I love you,” is prose: clear, simple, direct, and completely understandable, but utterly inadequate to the task of conveying profound love. The instant we start, as we inevitably do, to repeat ourselves out of awareness of the inadequacy of this language to convey our meaning—“I love you. I love you. I really really love you!”—we’ve fallen into rhythm and repetition.
In any extreme—of horror, mourning, terror or ecstasy—our speech becomes rhythmic. In our most primitive, pre-verbal responses, sobbing or laughing, our entire bodies are wracked by rhythm. Shakespeare understood this. Lear’s “Howl howl howl howl howl” as he cradles his dead daughter is likely the most perfectly natural line ever written.
And yet, rhythm has also always been the gateway to the spiritual realm. All spells, incantations, rituals, and prayers are rhythmic and repetitious. The goal of chanting, in a war dance, a rite of passage, or a celebration of the mass, is to influence or communicate with the higher power, even if, as in many meditation practices, the higher power sought is within us.
All these ancient rituals originated in a time when it was believed that breath is the source of inspiration because spirit and breath are one: We expire (exhale and die); we inspire (inhale and are filled with spirit). Spiritus, the Latin word for breath, is the root of spirit and inspiration.
But this direct experience of a higher power has always required what modern psychology would describe as a letting go of the ego: that is, of that formulation our consciousness has created and named the self. Our consciousness fights like the devil to avoid this letting go. It is frightening to explore who we are without our usual habits, fears and concerns, to go beyond the narrow limits of what we’re willing to know about ourselves. Who are we in the unknown, that place made entirely of our ignorance? Almost all mystical traditions are rooted in exploring this question, as are all the arts.
All ancient spiritual traditions used rhythm in some way. Somehow they understood to be set free of the self, we must step off into that deeper place rhythm opens up in us. That place is the source of our humanity, where we are both visceral and spiritual beings, where we discover that we are the unknown, that, as Melville wrote in White Jacket, “We ourselves are the repository of the great mystery.”
On the first anniversary of 9/11, a memorial concert was scheduled to be broadcast live from Liberty State Park, just across the river from where the Twin Towers had stood. Severe thunderstorms forced the cancellation of the concert. Instead, the film of the rehearsal was aired. With ground zero as a backdrop, the New Jersey Symphony played before an amphitheatre that contained almost exactly one empty seat for every person who had died.
As Verdi’s “Requiem” rose into the clear sky, I thought of all the hours the assembled musicians had to work to master their instruments—whole lifetimes devoted to music—and of all the hours they had to rehearse together to become a symphony. And then I thought of other lifetimes, those devoted to planning the murders of complete strangers. We are the creatures who make music. And make death.
To attempt to speak of this, to try to step outside of ourselves and understand why, is where poetry, theater, music, art begin.
Martin Farawell, Program Director, Poetry
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The Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival in Newark is October 7 – 10
For more information, visit the Poetry website.
http://www.dodgepoetry.org/
Poetry Poetry Fridays 2010 Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival National Poetry Month
