Peter M. Rojcewicz, PhD                                                     December 29, 2014

Our global economy increasingly relies upon change, innovation, and renewal. A disciplined imagination is required for innovation to support value creation in all sectors and industries. Creativity is the essential ingredient for workforce investment, economic development, and financial prosperity. Today the market value of products and services derives as much from uniqueness and aesthetic appeal as it does from function and performance. Excellent products inspire us with their artistry, design, or beauty.

Creativity and talent provide a competitive advantage, reaching across businesses. Organizations seek employees who can creatively solve problems, communicate, and work in teams. Reflecting the state of the creative economy, David Pink declared in the Harvard Business Review that the “MFA is the new MBA.” Pink meant that a graduate degree in art is highly compatible with doing business. For example, nonverbal forms of knowing exemplified by artists are increasingly important for a company’s success. The arts are complimentary partners with many professions, creating conditions cognitive psychologists identify as ideal for learning.

Art plays an essential role in the holistic education of people as whole beings, capable of thinking with and through mind, heart, and hands. The variety of learning styles promoted by art and art making offer deep cognitive channels required for effectively ordering the self. By projecting ourselves in and through the arts, we fashion ourselves in salutary ways that align with the human spirit’s longing for wholeness. How does this happen?

To study the arts is to learn to “read” images across a spectrum of intellectual, artistic, cultural, and environmental domains, perceiving life through all mediums in which meaning is expressed. Artists regard their craft as a form of knowledge expressed in a language of images. Musicians think in music and not simply about music. Painters and sculptors think critically in color and forms, making choices, say, with pigment or stone. By thinking in the intersensory domain of images, we reconnect with our primal humanity and the basic impulses behind an aesthetic-artistic experience.

Innovators in all fields are “artists” not because they are prone to fantasies or states of disassociation, but because, like children, they harness playfulness to productive ends. Imaginative play is a capacity for shifting experience of reality. Walt Whitman wrote, There was a boy who went forth every day;/And the first object he look’d upon, that object he became;/And that object became part of him …” Imaginative play, like art, constitutes a poetic intelligence that is not a matter of right answers or the correct use of language; it probes the essence of things, moving awareness into different qualities of being. Poet Cid Corman highlighted this poetic power of artists and children when he wrote: Follow/the stream:/Don’t go -/ but be/going.

Masters of modern art – Klee, Kandinsky, Picasso, Miro – found inspiration in the art of children. They understood that they must return to their child-like mind, tapping the wellspring of creative consciousness to support their personal and professional well-being. “All children are artists; the trick is to reclaim this when we grow up,” stated Picasso. Similarly, Baudelaire knew that “Genius is childhood recovered at will.” Children, artists, entrepreneurs, and designers share the principle of creative appropriation, freely using images for creative purposes of art, work, and life.

Poetic thinking in images allows us to see life as simultaneously literal and imaginal, subject to interpretation and change. This “seeing through” the literal to the possible carries evolutionary power, an antidote to the crippling attitude of this is the way things are. Realizing the danger posed by the illiteracy of radical literalism, Robert Frost asserted that unless we have a “proper poetical education,” we are “not safe anywhere.” Poetic intelligence is vitality and is life.

My point is that the arts are not simply expressive; they develop the very tools of thinking. Image making is the mind’s most fundamental activity of knowing. Learning results when our experiences provide, confirm, or modify images of the world and ourselves. As primary units of consciousness, images are not simply metaphors for ideas but relate to how we acquire, organize, and use information. This is as true for scientists as it is for artists.

Scientists, like artists, note the function of imagery in their work. A distinctive power of the poetic mind mentioned above is its ability to grasp the inner life identity of things and not simply to perceive similarities or outer relationships. Eugene Wigner, recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physics said, “The discovery of the laws of nature require, first and foremost, intuition, concerning pictures and a great many subconscious processes.” Jerome Friedman, another Nobel Prize recipient in Physics asserted, “Reasoning is constructed with movable images, just as poetry is.” Albert Einstein, who began playing violin at age six, said his discovery of the theory of relativity was the “result of musical perception.”

In addition to poetic thinking through images, prominent artists and scientists share other mental skills and operations: accurate observation, spatial thought, kinesthetic thought, identification of essential components of a complex whole, recognition and invention of patterns governing a system, empathy with objects of study, and visual, verbal, or mathematical synthesis and communication of results. When mathematical capacities of mind fuse with aesthetic perception through artistic experience, we undergo holistic transformations that generate inspiring images of animated, embodied thought and a fuller humanity.

Peter M. Rojcewicz, PhD                                       December 19, 2014

Is technology anathema to soul? Does it necessarily reduce people to objects? Can technology engage us sensuously with others in a feeling community? Are computers a psychic extension of the mind-body-spirit instrument?

In trying to find the soul of technology, Robert Sardello positions technology within the context of culture.  He views technology as story, image, and value, as much as it is a mechanical means for getting work done. By viewing technology as culture and philosophy, he identifies technology as part of cultural systems of symbols developed over millennia. Following Sardello, It is helpful to the present discussion to speak of “poly-technology” to include mechanical, natural, and spiritual technology.

Today we use the word “technology,” derived from techne, to mean a mechanical ordering of things. For the ancient Greeks, however, techne did not mean technology in the mechanical sense, nor did it mean art in the sense of skill or proficiency. Techne meant knowledge that resulted from grasping beings as emerging out of themselves in the ways that present themselves in their essence. As an understanding of what it means to be at all, techne is identified with wonder, the basic disposition of philosophy and knowledge. For the ancient Greeks, as for Heidegger, to be technological meant to be aware of being, aware of soul.

An intimate relationship between technology and soul can be found within folk and indigenous traditions. Shamans, medicine men, sorcerers, and priests contact the world of spirits by use of ancient technology: drumming, dancing, or ritual music that narrates ecstatic flights of the soul. Sacred rattles, drums, and gongs trigger illuminating visions. Shamanic instruments of technology also include rock crystals, eagle feathers, magic sticks, bells, helmets, shields, and spears, animal skins and furs. Totems impart a natal kinship with powers of the earth. Herbology, pharmacology, and dream interpretation are also potent technologies.

In many ancient wisdom systems, technology is a tool of learning and knowledge, valued not simply for its utility but also for its essential truth and potential to trigger transformation.  Tools of technology in shamanic contexts also include embodied modalities of learning: seeing, feeling, touching, moving, hearing, and tasting – intersensory means of disclosing spiritual reality.

The ultimate “instrument” of transformation is the shaman herself: body-mind-spirit. Chanting of the Inuit involves an accelerated, rhythmic hyperventilation. Circular or continuous breathing is required to play the didgeridoo of the Australian aborigines and the long curved horns of the Tibetans. In Indian and Tibetan yoga traditions mantras realize effects upon consciousness with their sound quality alone, quite apart of their meaning content. Vision fasts and acts of sensory deprivation and stimulation among Ojibwa shamans initiate spirit contact. Directed imaging, personal and collective visualization, breath control techniques, and physical postures are used to develop special states of awareness that generate healing, insights, dreams, or visions.

Rather than dehumanizing shamanic practitioners, their technologies make them “theoretical” (thea-horetical), that is, possessing insight into truth and reality of Being. A law well known in the history of religions is referred to as “sympathetic magic”: one becomes what one displays, or like attracts like. Shamans are the mythical ancestors portrayed by their masks, ceremonial costumes, and ritual hats, undergoing a total transformation of the soul’s essence into something other. They are simultaneously not-themselves and not-not-themselves.

Soul is not simply individual and subjective; it is present whenever people enter into communal relationships wherein their feelings are engaged. John Seely Brown points out in New Learning Environments for the 21^st Century that college students with classroom laptops can engage in a transformational shift from “learning about” information to  “learning to be” practitioners in a community of practitioners.

Soulmaking via social learning platforms requires that students assimilate values, sensibilities, attitudes, and worldviews embodied in communities of practice. As such, computers and digital tools provide powerful forms of distributed cognitive apprenticeship that function globally and parallel the situation of shamans who apprentice themselves to power animals and tutelary spirits in supra-sensible worlds. Like shamans whose transformational learning is facilitated by tools of their technology, today’s students may undergo technology-assisted alterations of being, constructing new forms of the self as cognitive apprentices and members of immersive communities that are highly expressive, sensuous, and collaborative.

Peter M. Rojcewicz, PhD                            December 5, 2014

 He who knows only his own side of the case, knows little of that… Not the violent conflict between parts of the truth, but the quiet suppression of half of it … is the formidable evil: there is always hope when people are forced to listen to both sides; it is when they attend only to one that errors harden into prejudice.                          John Stuart Mill, On Liberty                                                                

Multiple perspectives inform broad understanding. Possessing a repertoire of true but partial worldviews is an essential part of social literacy for diverse communities. When human action is viewed through the lens of perspective taking, caring, understanding, and inclusion, we may achieve a picture of humanity transcending bigotry, sexual minority harassment, neglect of people with disabilities, nationalism, economic chauvinism, and misanthropy. Diversity is an educational issue and social justice issue, a key to learning about our full humanity in community.

Race, class, sexuality, and gender are unstable categories whose nature and influence are not fixed. Holding global perspectives can make clear that we possess fluid, malleable identities and possess simultaneous group memberships that can serve as starting points for understanding others. Geneticists who gather data about genetic variations and diversity insist that there is greater difference within races than between races.

An intimacy of self and other is inherent in the African word Ubuntu, translated as, “I am because we are.” Similarly the Japanese word Ningen means “between or among people” and points also to our inter-relational nature as beings who do not fully realize ourselves alienated from others. Thich Nhat Hahn argues that intersubjectivity emerges when self-regarding impulses are modified by knowledge that we are simultaneously intrapersonal and interpersonal. But while our human condition is “diverse,” it hardly guarantees racial harmony.

Dissent is kin to diversity, and so a diverse community is not conflict free; it is a place where conflicting perspectives offer opportunities to learn and change. “No” may be the start of a conversation about what constitutes someone’s commitment. People can let go of doubts that lead to violent resistance only if they can name and express them. Voicing dissent may lead to alternatives as to how we see, structure, and value things. Affirming “No” may start a conversation about what constitutes commitment, one’s constructive first step toward finding a positive role within a troubled context.

A healthy diversity-activated community provides historically slighted groups meaningful assurance that “community” is a living and authentic value with a plan of implementation of inclusion and not code for paternalism, colonialism, or chauvinism.

A community as a living system needs limiters and inhibitors of dissent and difference to grow and sustain itself as an interdependent entity. There can be no lasting transformation without inclusiveness, nor holistic learning without diversity.

A living system that has but one party empowered in ways that others cannot bring new and different information forward becomes pathological. Homogeneity means the part subverts difference and traumatizes the whole.

John Stuart Mill argued that any position, even if correct, is a “dead dogma” until one has to defend it against someone who believes the opposite just as fervently. Likewise, the Colville tribal people from Okanagan value a perspective referred to as En’owkin, understood as “Give me the viewpoint opposite of mine to increase my wisdom.”

We are in deep need of communities of vision beyond separate enclaves of unchallenged perspectives. For as Cass R. Sunstein, Law Professor, University of Chicago wrote, “There is the general risk that those who flock together…will end up both confident and wrong, simply because they have not been sufficiently exposed to counterarguments. They may even think of their fellow citizens as opponents or adversaries in some kind of ‘war’.”