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Imagination and the Shaping of the Self
Dec. 1st, 2014 11:10 pmA few weeks ago - a month? - I listened to an episode of the CBC radio show "Ideas" that explored human imagination. Dr. Ross Woodman, Professor Emeritus at at Western University in London, Ontario, said some fascinating things about imagination and memory. Then in his late 80s, he found himself going over events from his life in his mind and thinking about how things might have been different. Sometimes, he played those changed events out in his head, letting them happen in a new way; resolving mistakes he had made and regretted. This does not, of course, change reality. It doesn't change how other people experienced those events and how it changed their lives. But it does change the way those events were, and are, experienced by him.
http://www.cbc.ca/ideas/episodes/2012/10/17/imagination-part-1-2/
I may be misinterpreting Professor Woodman to some extent here. It was a complicated topic, and he was a deep thinker. I'm going to listen to the show again one of these days. But it seems that rather than bear the burden of these past moments, he thought through them again and with the wisdom of the present and created a better outcome. Resolving these mistakes in his past was comforting and helped him see himself differently, even if those changes only took place within his own mind.
Does this sound illegitimate? If so, I think it is only if the world of the mind is less legitimate than the physical world. And for some purposes, of course, it very much is. But I've thought about what Woodman said, off and on, for a while. I still do. I keep putting it in the context of other realizations. That the constant, unchanging self is an illusion. That our memory is deeply malleable and unreliable.
Our internal world is forever being remade and reshaped by our own thoughts. Today, I wrote a letter about the way certain experiences in my past shaped me. After I did so, I wondered how much of that shaping came from my experience then, and how much came from reexamining it right now, in the present moment? What if those experiences could have shaped me in several different ways; a set of ways that exist in a quantum superposition of outcomes. Maybe, this evening, when I thought about what happened and how it shaped me, my conclusion had something to do with how I want it to have shaped me? Perhaps I'm subconsciously putting my own subjective frame around those events that helps align them with who I see myself as now.
Is it legitimate to think about past experiences and reshape them, making the internal world a better place to live? Who's to say that they happened exactly the way you think they happened to begin with?
http://www.cbc.ca/ideas/episodes/2012/10/17/imagination-part-1-2/
I may be misinterpreting Professor Woodman to some extent here. It was a complicated topic, and he was a deep thinker. I'm going to listen to the show again one of these days. But it seems that rather than bear the burden of these past moments, he thought through them again and with the wisdom of the present and created a better outcome. Resolving these mistakes in his past was comforting and helped him see himself differently, even if those changes only took place within his own mind.
Does this sound illegitimate? If so, I think it is only if the world of the mind is less legitimate than the physical world. And for some purposes, of course, it very much is. But I've thought about what Woodman said, off and on, for a while. I still do. I keep putting it in the context of other realizations. That the constant, unchanging self is an illusion. That our memory is deeply malleable and unreliable.
Our internal world is forever being remade and reshaped by our own thoughts. Today, I wrote a letter about the way certain experiences in my past shaped me. After I did so, I wondered how much of that shaping came from my experience then, and how much came from reexamining it right now, in the present moment? What if those experiences could have shaped me in several different ways; a set of ways that exist in a quantum superposition of outcomes. Maybe, this evening, when I thought about what happened and how it shaped me, my conclusion had something to do with how I want it to have shaped me? Perhaps I'm subconsciously putting my own subjective frame around those events that helps align them with who I see myself as now.
Is it legitimate to think about past experiences and reshape them, making the internal world a better place to live? Who's to say that they happened exactly the way you think they happened to begin with?
