Peter M. Rojcewicz, PhD

Bainbridge Island, WA

Leadership Consultant; Education Management Advisor; Arts Education Specialist; Applied Humanities Mentor; Noetic Learning Theorist; Folklore Belief Materials Scholar; Award-winning Poet

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Far from being just one of our cognitive powers, valid in the field of art, scientific discovery and the like, it [imagination] is our whole power the total functioning interplay of our capacities. – Robert Averns

I’m enough of an artist to draw freely from my imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world. – Albert Einstein

The possible’s slow fuse is lit by the imagination. – Emily Dickinson

Who knows what lies behind and beyond our images until we trust them enough to ride them fully, even into the darkness and into the depths like a seed in the soil? – Matthew Fox

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The core concept of noetic literacy within my healing education initiative is the cognitive imagination, the visionary power of consciousness of wholeness. It is the optimum means for evoking and reading images (Jung CW 12, para 219), discerning realities, engendering meaning, and entering into diverse cultural configurations. It is the primary tool of objective analysis and subjective assessment. It supports rationality, even as it functions differently from instrumental reason and the calculating intellect. While it is clearly evident among artists and innovative scientists, cognitive imagination is not their exclusive gift, but rather an essential endowment of creative humanity. It nurtures citizens’ capacities to move from the apparent to the less apparent and perceive veiled messages, vested interests, and pseudo-truths in politics, corporate life, news broadcasting, internet sites, and advertising. It clarifies the spiritual seekers’ judgment among iconic artifacts and sacred practices. As image literacy involves what Hillman (Re-Visioning Psychology) refers to as ‘seeing through’, a depth psychologizing process of attention moving from outside to inside and looking behind, within, or beneath the surface of appearances to deeper realities.  Citizens engaged in “seeing through’ via imaginative cognition make themselves and democratic communities less vulnerable to manipulation of surface appearances by lobbyists, special interests, or hate groups, as they perceive multiple meanings within consensus explanations. As a result, citizens are better able to make strategic decisions and realize goals in situations lacking a prescribed answer or response.

To speak of imaginative cognition is to speak of the organizing, relational, synthetic mind and its associative and patterning processes in intimate cooperation with the instrumental and critical mind and its differentiating and isolating tendencies. We continually find that our understanding is facilitated by cognitive processes that are mysterious to us as to how they function. We have hunches that lead to understandings without knowing how to explain them. Jerome Bruner (Ways of Knowing) pointed out that people perfink. That is to say, people perceive, feel, and think simultaneously as a cognitive ensemble. He referred to cognitive imagination as “knowledge of the left-hand.” The senses and all other cognitive modes are terms, forms, or ways of knowing that constitute a cojoined mutuality. Imagination is cognitive fluidity, which after Kant, is responsible for linking and organizing varieties of sensory experiences into an integral framework that is referred to in this work as the healing education project. So it is that sensory perception is thinking across the senses. Thinking is the body as an active, nondiscursive intelligence. Each cognitive faculty implicates the others. They do so, engaging one another detached and distinct; but they also explicate each other from a shared consciousness of imagination.

Ordinary thinking in its instrumental form understands polar opposite cognitive modalities as disjointed, when, in fact, they are complimentary and related. Instrumental reason appreciates life only at the antithetical poles, blind to antimonial connections and what lies in between, bypassing their mutual reciprocities. Instrumental reason is the form of rationality we utilize when we calculate the most economic application of means to ends. Its measure of success is displayed by maximum efficiency and input-output ratio. On the other hand, imaginative cognition is the mythopoetic mind. Aristotle stated that “the greatest things by far is to be a master of metaphor…that implies an intuitive perception of the similarity in the dissimilar.” Similarly, Jonathan Swift knew, “Vision is the act of seeing things invisible.” Plato spoke of the “eye of the soul” and Aristotle of “active intellect” or supra-individual component of mind which potentially can access all knowledge. These terms and phrases for the cognitive imagination designate it as the premium power to perceive the inner life of things (i.e., “seeing more than meets the eye”) via image and metaphor and, thereby, experience the material world as an epiphanic occasion of vital spirit. This is the mythopoetic mind’s power to grasp identities and the inner life of things and not merely similarities and outer relationships.  It is what makes our experience meaningful, enabling us to interpret and make sense of the oppositions, contradictions, and paradox of life. Imagination makes perception more than mere physical stimulation of the sense organs. As such, imagination is the condition of all thought.

Reliable thinking always and everywhere requires deft, effective use of imaginative understanding and reason. It is also true that mental discipline is not unrelated to innovation and originality. Healing education’s noetic literacy of the multimodal mind for a new humanity highlights the intimacy between critical and creative thought and their subsequent products. The word ‘creative’ by definition implies a critical analytical component. Creativity involves empirical production, while ‘criticality’ involves a subjective judging and assessing (Dewey, Art As Experience). When engaged in high level thought, body-mind intelligence necessarily generates and assesses its fashioned products. When we marry empirical reasoning of the sciences with the tacit and personal knowledge of the arts and humanities through creative work, we achieve “an existential intimacy of learning” (Rojcewicz, Academia Letters 2021) with an all-sided humanity that transforms the inner sanctum of soul, what Keats referred to as the penetralium of unfathomable Being.

Within the healing education narrative of what it means to be fluent in noetic modes, various terms are used here – ‘cognitive imagination’ or ‘imaginative cognition’ – to identify the hybridity of rational and suprarational knowledge and consciousness. As the optimum faculty, cognitive imagination includes and transcends thinking in its instrumental and calculative aspects. The imagination doesn’t make things up; it makes things apparent. Alchemists referred to it as Imaginatio (Jung, Mysterium Coniunctionis). Its integral modality is “not exhausted in quantitative or conceptual thought, in the mythical intuition of the symbolic images of the world, or in the experience of magical unity and power” (Jean Gebser, The Ever-Present Origin, p.99). As such, imaginative cognition is the sum of one’s perceptual-cognitive capacities to know and generate knowledge (Averns, Imagination is Reality). It involves both the forming of images essential to consciousness and making cognitive suppositions. (Guide to Human Thought, p.367). Imaginative cognition is fluid knowing, responsible for the bundling of multiple sensory experiences into a conceptual framework. It is what makes perception more than a mere physical stimulation of the sense organs. It renders our sensory life meaningful, allowing us to understand implicitly and explicitly quotidian experiences, as well as emergent numinous ones.

Cognitive imagination can be understood as the innate capacity of visionary perception displayed not only by artist, but also by children, mystics, religious intuitives, and everyday folks. It is the optimum body-mind faculty linking rational and suprarational content and processes, as essential to scientists as to artists, as well as every other sector of life. The ostensible borders separating rational and intuitive functions are ambiguous and never clearly defined. An ‘irrational’ procedure often leads to success, while a ‘rational’ procedure may cause mayhem (Feyerabend, Farewell, To Reason, p.10). As the fundamental faculty of perceiving, sensing, intuiting, whole-knowing and thinking, cognitive imagination performs a general organization of self and is the common condition of thinking in general, applicable to all manner of utilitarian and creative work. It is the key that unlocks the door to a new order of Being, belonging, perceiving, and meaning. In my story of transformation of education through noetic literacy, cognitive imagination is the hallmark of a fluid and complex intelligence essential for effectively addressing the present sickness unto education and the traumatized world of which it is an essential part.

Peter M. Rojcewicz. PhD

Bainbridge Island, WA

The discipline of folklore is a humanistic social science that interrogates existing conditions through its description and analysis of cultural accomplishments of people who might otherwise be forgotten or mistreated. Folklore asks us to consider whether we think we’re superior to people not holding incumbency status of what is considered ‘normal’ or ‘good’, and whether it is not possible to learn from societies whose values, practices, economies, arts, and norms do not reflect our own. Folklorists must know themselves and bracket that understanding when engaging others in their cultural settings, so as not to miss the unfamiliar.

Folklore points to pressure points in dominant society. Today’s political climate threatens scholars and academic disciplines that study those pressure points – ethnicity, immigration, class, social disjunction, gender, colonialism, political refugees, NEA support, international student learning, and DEI. Grant money is cut off. Renowned faculty members are leaving U.S. universities for schools in other countries. Foreign science organizations plan to employ U.S. scientists fired from federal jobs or who had their research stopped due to the administration’s withholding of funding.

The crisis demands our performance of the noble role of folklorists as irritants to the body politic through scholarship supporting those who are impeded or ‘othered’. Folklore thus subverts hatred by adhering respectfully to the worldview of those we study. In the words of Milton J. Bennett, “Consciousness is resistance.” We must teach and write in ways that move people to be conscious of the fact that society is makable, reality flexible. We must act meaningfully to overturn xenophobia and racism that dehumanize people. Through a via negativa, that is, an improvement by subtraction, folklorists contribute to positive causes through careful considerations of the lives of others. This moment calls for nothing less.

Peter M. Rojcewicz, PhD 

Bainbridge Island, WA

Leadership Consultant; Education Management Advisor; Arts Education Specialist; Applied Humanities Mentor; Noetic Learning Theorist; Folklore Belief Materials Scholar; Award-winning Poet

October 13, 2025

We reside in a fractured world, notably described by W.B. Yeats, “Things fall apart, the center does not hold.” Fragmentation is a spiritual ‘illness’ of limited growth that cripples personal and community trust. It makes us vulnerable to the weaponization of disconnection. On the other hand, integrating the shards of a fragmented self and that self with others equally fragmented – including the earth and its other than human life – is the equivalent of ‘health’. In the current state of national affairs, social commentators have noted a “death of soul.” Holderin anticipated the current paradoxical condition, “Where the danger is, there the saving power grows.” Yeats knew, “Nothing can be sole or whole that has not been rent.” The ultimate form of ‘rent’ is the tearing apart of life that is a ‘death’, understood here in its depth psychological sense as a ‘dying’ to and a letting-go of rigid one-sidedness and partial development.

Some say the nation’s soul is under grave attack. Stanley Kunitz understood, “In a murderous time/the heart breaks/and lives by breaking./ It is necessary to go/through dark and deeper dark/and not to turn.” We are challenged not to turn away but to integrate ‘death’ in the personal and collective psyche. Richard Moss noted, “wholeness is both growth and demise in a balance from which the new human/humankind emerges.” Accepting ‘death’ in all fashions as the ostensible transformation of things, we overcome the terror in the heart of a separate, autonomous self. We learn we are not simply a part of a whole, but that we are interconnected wholeness of ongoing beginnings and ends, and that a failure to develop our human completeness means we are vulnerable throughout life to endless splitting, impairment, disease, and acute suffering of identity disintegration. Where there is no acceptance of ‘death’, there are no breakthroughs, only breakdowns. John Keats endlessly pursued ‘soulmaking’ despite the abundant travails of life, “Do you not see how necessary a world of pain and troubles is to school an intelligence and make it a Soul?”

What can we effectively do retain soul under the heavy shadow of pain and troubles of the times? Theodore Roethke clears a path, “In a dark time, the eye begins to see.” What might the eye see amidst the pain of darkness? Healing-centered poets, social tricksters, intellectual outlaws, community-based artists, and indigenous transformative shamans offer us multiple forms of non-violent resistance to attacks against human dignity and freedom. In Portland, Oregon, recently identified by federal officials as a ‘war zone’ in need of police ‘forcing’, armed military were met downtown by citizens donned in colorful costumes as unicorns, gently dancing in the streets. Was that a form of lunacy, or, as in the eyes of Emily Dickinson, “divinest sense to a discerning eye.” Artists and cultural creatives know, after Dickinson, “Demur you’re straightway dangerous and handled with a chain.” And after Roethke, “What’s madness but nobility of soul at odds with circumstance.” If the vital vision and expression of fearless pro-democracy citizens is viewed by questionable authority as ‘dangerous’ to its self-interest based agendas, let us together, even as we stumble and fall, resolutely follow Roethke, “I climb out of my fear. /The mind enters itself, and God the mind,/And one is One in the tearing wind.”

REFERENCES

W.B. Yeats, “The Second Coming”

Friedrich Holderin, “Patmos”

W.B. Yeats, “Crazy Jane Talks with the Bishop”

Stanley Kunitz, “The Testing Tree”

Richard Moss, “The Individual and Collective Levels of Consciousness and Their Relationship to Health-Disease”

John Keats, “Letter to George and Georgina Keats”

Theodore Roethke, “In A Dark Time”

Emily Dickinson, “Much Madness Is Divinest Sense”

Peter M. Rojcewicz, PhD

Bainbridge Island, WA

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Current political forces continue to deliver full body blows against virtually every sector of our national life. Funding to universities, the scientific community, and international philanthropic organizations have ended or have been radically reduced. Millions of Americans have lost Medicaid coverage. The free press is under sever attack for reporting actual events of the federal takeover of Washington, D.C. by armed troops wearing masks, ICE raids at baseball games, concentration camps for immigrants in Florida’s Everglades, and Gerrymandering legislative districts for votes. Our eco-sensitive national parks are now woefully understaffed. Libraries have books on DEI and gender politics pulled from shelfs. The Smithsonian faces stiff pressure to make ‘nice’ with the inhumanity of America’s history of slavery. The nation is traumatized. Our national identity and global image lie in tatters. Many believe we are losing our democracy. Where might we find hope beyond anxiety?

Polish psychiatrist and physician Kazimierz Dabrowski believed it possible that fragmentation of the personality can lead to positive outcomes. His personality theory of Positive Disintegration (TPD) turns the tables on anxiety, tension, and trauma. Dabrowski maintains that when traumatic events strike us and shatter the structure of personality and sense of self, we may paradoxically find opportunities for recovery and growth. We ask, “What has just happened? Am I still the same person I was before this shattering?” Such disintegration calls to mind the folk and shamanic theme of ‘gathering the bones together’, wherein people reconstruct themselves from broken pieces of their lives, holding on to parts of value and letting go of all that hasn’t served. By boldly entering into the disintegration, one has the ‘advantage’ of voluntarily achieving an autonomous, re-created personality beyond ‘primary integration’. This is a type of metanoia, i.e., a reorganization of the psychological factors comprising one’s ‘developmental potential’ that lead to new bodily perceptions, life purpose, vision, and values. Does the nation possess sufficient developmental possibility to effectively move through our present fragmentation into a positive disintegration?

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Peter M. Rojcewicz, PhD

Looking currently across most sectors of American life, one sees human behavior narrowly comprehended via ‘rational choice models’. Scottish economist and philosopher Adam Smith once claimed that people make choices out of self-interest. Building upon Smith, Milton Friedman’s Chicago School proclaimed that decision-making out of self-interest is in itself ‘rational’. His view, when linked to the positivistic belief that only reason and rationality are real, lead to the assumption that materialism is a natural law. For Friedman and those influenced by that position, rational profit making is a high virtue and cultural ideal. Shana Hormann has noted that systems are self-referential and that systems across each sector of society shape one another. Organizational systems are expected to be ‘rational’ which means in the words of Friedman, “There is one and only one social responsibility of business – to use its resources and engage activities to increase its profit.”

When accepted without constraints, according to Curtis White, profit making becomes “the basis of freedom and the defining principle of American democracy.” It should be noted that Freud’s student Karen Horney once asserted that the indicators of economic behavior – competitiveness and the desire for status and power – are also strong indicators of the neurotic personality. It is hard not to agree with Horney, given what we witness daily in the national theater of operations influenced by neoliberalism. Where depth psychological principles prevail throughout our culture and can pull down the curtain on unrestrained material wealth, each of us, in the words of Mike Grady, “must be compelled to discover and relieve the sources of our own distress.” The reductive rational choice financial models of human behavior continue daily to split mind from body, the haves from the have-nots, the healthy from the afflicted, and the human from the more-than-human world. Not wholeness but illness results. We must encourage one another and our socio-political leaders to provoke those models with a preponderance of suspicion, challenge, and resistance.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Margaret H. Freeman, Co-Director of the Institute for Cognition and the Arts, an academic think-tank located in Heath, MA and dedicated to research in cognition and the arts.

Peter M. Rojcewicz, PhD

We’ve been immersed for the better part of the last year of the presidential campaign in national vitriol. Linguistic anthropology indicates that, among cultures everywhere, language initiates and holds its members within its unique discourse.

A community’s way of speaking is the unofficial but lived record of community values and acts. It presents an ideal image of how a culture sees itself and wants to be seen, as well as a shadow portrait of whom people are not, how they definitely do not live, and what topics, attitudes, practices, or perspectives are prohibited. 

For our nation to be healthy, our common discourse of engaged-citizenship and its social embodiment must make room for diverse, dissenting views. Are will up for it? Only democracy is at stake.

Peter M. Rojcewicz, PhD

In our credential obsessed culture, Waldorf’s developmental approach to learning focuses upon cognitive capacities arising in progressive stages that determine what students can authentically learn, thus avoiding educational activities appropriate to older students.

I support its fundamental shift in early childhood education away from a premature accelerated academic approach that too often creates a dread of student learning in favor a holistic approach of cognitive capacity-building and a wide range of skills acquisition via imaginative play, free time, art, and experiential learning.

Waldorf learners come to embody an intelligence not simply by arriving at ‘correct’ answers, but by discernible acts of embodied ‘presence’ within the subject of study. They discover the unknown without flinching, as they grow into different qualities of being. The key to Waldorf learning is the complete involvement of the learner’s interiority and social self that fosters a whole body thinking that fosters curiosity, inquisitiveness, discernment, and memory.

Peter M. Rojcewicz, PhD

A healthy society needs to be literate beyond language and number to support diversity of thought and expression. The current STEM-dominated academy with dependencies on calculative reason, predictability, measurement, and control disables unity of human faculties and, therefore, is both impaired and impairing.

By privileging instrumental reason over complementary learning modalities, higher education delegitimizes non-discursive and non-rational cognition associated with indigenous wisdom and the arts and humanities. This condition is enhanced when the academy prizes knowledge for its effective utility rather than its essential truth or potential for transformation.

My Healing Education initiative valorizes multiple ways of learning, knowing, perceiving, and being that includes rational mental operations of the hard sciences and subjective modalities of the arts and humanities linked together by the cognitive imagination.

Peter M. Rojcewicz, PhD

Absence of multiple-perspectives-literacy leads to Othering. By assuming roles of socially disenfranchised or politically incompatible Others and co-engaging in projects across socio-cultural borders, we step back from our bias and privilege into much of what we previously devalued or dehumanized. In that moment, we question our life and worldview, pushing back limits of our stereotypical perceptions and expanding awareness of the human condition. Human beings possess fluid, malleable identities and possess simultaneous group memberships that can serve as starting points for understanding Others.

Scientists who study the genome find no biological basis for race. Sharon Bagley reports, “Geneticists find that when they add up the tiny genetic variations that make one person different from the next, there is greater difference within races than between races.” That fact makes it ostensibly prohibitive to disdain people, causes, or alliances as outliers on the assumption that they are not ‘our kind’. Our ethical responsibility for those with whom we are existentially connected is pre-requisite for social concord and requires we stand up against fascism and all forms of xenophobia despite intimidation from powerful actors.