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<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/a>Peter M. Rojcewicz, PhD<\/a><\/u><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Bainbridge Island, WA<\/p>\n\n\n\n Leadership Consultant; Education Management Advisor; Arts Education Specialist; Applied Humanities Mentor; Noetic Learning Theorist; Folklore Belief Materials Scholar; Award-winning Poet <\/p>\n\n\n\n _________________________________________________________________<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n 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<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n 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<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n The possible’s slow fuse is lit by the imagination. – Emily Dickinson<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n 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? \u2013 Matthew Fox<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n _________________________________________________________________<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n The core concept of noetic literacy within my healing education<\/em> 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)<\/strong> refers to as \u2018seeing through\u2019, 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 \u201cseeing through\u2019 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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.<\/em> That is to say, people perceive, feel, and think simultaneously as a cognitive ensemble. He referred to cognitive imagination as \u201cknowledge of the left-hand.\u201d 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<\/em> project. So it is that sensory perception is<\/em> thinking across the senses. Thinking is<\/em> 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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 \u201cthe greatest things by far is to be a master of metaphor\u2026that implies an intuitive perception of the similarity in the dissimilar.\u201d Similarly, Jonathan Swift knew, \u201cVision is the act of seeing things invisible.\u201d Plato spoke of the \u201ceye of the soul\u201d and Aristotle of \u201cactive intellect\u201d 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., \u201cseeing more than meets the eye\u201d) via image and metaphor and, thereby, experience the material world as an epiphanic occasion of vital spirit. This is the mythopoetic mind\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Reliable thinking always and everywhere requires deft, effective use of imaginative understanding and<\/em> reason. It is also true that mental discipline is not unrelated to innovation and originality. Healing education<\/em>\u2019s noetic literacy of the multimodal mind for a new humanity highlights the intimacy between critical and creative thought and their subsequent products. The word \u2018creative\u2019 by definition implies a critical analytical component. Creativity involves empirical production, while \u2018criticality\u2019 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 \u201can existential intimacy of learning\u201d (Rojcewicz, Academia Letters 2021) with an all-sided humanity that transforms the inner sanctum of soul, what Keats referred to as the penetralium<\/em> of unfathomable Being.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Within the healing education<\/em> narrative of what it means to be fluent in noetic modes, various terms are used here – \u2018cognitive imagination\u2019 or \u2018imaginative cognition\u2019 – to identify the hybridity of rational and suprarational knowledge and consciousness. As the optimum faculty, cognitive imagination includes and <\/em>transcends thinking in its instrumental and calculative aspects. The imagination doesn\u2019t make things up<\/em>; it makes things apparent. Alchemists referred to it as Imaginatio <\/em>(<\/strong>Jung, Mysterium Coniunctionis). Its integral modality is \u201cnot 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\u201d (<\/strong>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 (<\/strong>Averns, Imagination is Reality)<\/strong>. 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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 <\/strong>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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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 _________________________________________________________________ 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 … Continue reading COGNITIVE IMAGINATION AND KNOWLEDGE OF THE LEFT-HAND<\/span>