Mindstructures

How we Re-Cognise what we Experience

December 31, 2010

Differentiating between the functions of the left and the right hemisphere of our brain. What does each brainside actually do? Chapter two of The Master and his Emissary gives a very extensive description of the differences between the two. One of the first subchapters is about different forms of attention. Which form of attention belongs [...]

Focus vs Context and Language vs Psyche

December 20, 2010

A few weeks ago I came across a blogpost about a book called The Master and his Emissary. The writer of that post thought the book was very important, maybe even the book of the century. In that same blogpost was a video with the writer of the book, Iain McGilchrist. I watched that video [...]

The Physical, Aesthetical and Moral Stage of Development

December 11, 2010

In letter XXIV of his aesthetic letters, Schiller mentions three stages of development. He says there is a development that each individual, as well as the whole of humanity, has to go through. It is also a development that has to happen in a certain order. Each stage can be longer or shorter with each individual, [...]

Polarisation and That what is Inbetween

November 22, 2010

I was planning to write a post about ‘the medium between law and necessity’, another phrase in the aesthetic letters. But looking at the subject, I realised it was something I have been writing about again and again on this blog. Not using the same words, but the essence of those posts was mainly the [...]

The Instinct of Play

November 17, 2010

The previous post was about two different instincts, the sensuous and the formal instinct. Two instincts that are opposed and that make us struggle to integrate in our human nature. This is again a post about The Letters on Aesthetic Education of Man from Friedrich Schiller, like a few of my previous posts. I am [...]

Sensuous and Formal Instinct

November 15, 2010

At the end of part two of the Letters on Aesthetics, Schiller talks about two opposite roads that depart us from our destination. He calls it false roads and says that only the beautiful can bring us back from this twofold departure. In the beginning of part three (letter 12) he talks about those two [...]

Creativity beyond Praise and Criticism

November 5, 2010

Still reading the letters on aesthetic education, I tried to understand the beginning of part two. In that part, Schiller paints a picture of how the individual is blinded by the age in which he lives, the society in which he is born. But also about the struggle of that society itself. That has this [...]

Form becomes Independent of Meaning

November 3, 2010

Being distracted by the art of language and the definition of art in my previous posts, I now continued reading Schiller’s Letters. At the end of part one, Schiller goes a long way to describe the influence of the culture on the individual. The individual who looses the contact with the whole. The inner union [...]

The Developing Definition of Art

November 1, 2010

Art is a difficult word to define. Wikipedia defines it as ‘a product or process of deliberately arranging symbolic elements in a way that influences and affects the senses, emotions and intellect’. It also says that the word art was traditionally used for skill or mastery, but later as an intention to stimulate thoughts and [...]

The Art of Language

October 28, 2010

I love it when suddenly things start to make sense, when thoughts come together. I was again reading the book On Creativity, because I was searching for the definition of some concepts. Those of creativity, aesthetics and art. All my previous posts about aesthetics point to the importance of those concepts as an essential step [...]

Free Will Between Inclination and Duty

October 26, 2010

So I started reading Schillers letters on aesthetic education. But it is not what I would call an easy read. If I was not determined to understand what he has to say, I would have already quit. But before I started reading from the beginning, I had a quick overview. And in that overview I got [...]

Between Instinctive and Moral Behavior

October 22, 2010

Lately I am fascinated by the concept of aesthetics. What exactly does it mean? Is it subjective or objective? How important is it? I already wrote about the view of Kant, Adorno and Bohm in the posts Beauty is Not Just in the Eye of the Beholder and The Worldview of Aesthetics. And that of [...]

From Aesthetics to An-Aesthetics

October 18, 2010

Last week I saw another video of Ken Robinson. He had a TED-talk some years ago about how schools kill creativity, which I watched several times because I thought it was great. Well, he had another talk (Changing Paradigms) of which RSA made an animation. Which I also love, I really like to see a [...]

The Concept of Water

October 15, 2010

Seeing the theme for this years Blogactionday made me think of a story in the book I was reading. The book, On Creativity, is about the importance of creativity. How we all have this inner desire to discover and create something new that is whole, harmonious and beautiful. It is not something rare, it does [...]

How to Confront Inner Conflict Instead of Ignoring it

October 9, 2010

Sometimes David Bohm says so much with one sentence, that I feel the need to take it a bit apart. It is a line in the first chapter of the book On Creativity. He describes how the mind tries to avoid contradictions. It is often too confusing or painful to stay with a certain problem, [...]

Will Confusion Really be our Epitaph

October 7, 2010

Today I started reading the first chapter of the book On Creativity by David Bohm. I already wrote some posts about what struck me most in the preface of the book. And this first chapter made it even more fascinating. Many times, while reading, I wanted to go and write a post about it. But [...]

When the Mind is Trying to Escape the Awareness of Conflict

October 6, 2010

This post is about another block to creativity, a block that prevents us from expressing the creativity that is present in each of us. Self-sustaining confusion of the mind. This not the usual confusion, the confusion we experience if we just don’t understand something from outside. Bohm, in On Creativity, says that this self-sustaining confusion [...]

The Worldview of Aesthetics

October 5, 2010

With my previous post I compared different views on aesthetics. It were the views, as I understood them, from Kant, Adorno and Bohm. But I did not compare their totality. Now that is too difficult for me to do, as I only have a very general understanding of each of their views. But even if [...]

Beauty is Not Just in the Eye of the Beholder

October 4, 2010

Creativity has to do with recognizing differences and similarities. Recognize patterns that have a certain appeal to us, patterns in which we see beauty. Now it is often said that beauty is subjective. That beauty is in the eye of the beholder. But according to David Bohm in On Creativity, beauty is not purely subjective. [...]

Recognizing Patterns from an Underlying Reality

September 29, 2010

Maybe I can better change the subtitle of this blog. Since reading the book Science, Order and Creativity, creativity seems to be the main focus of my blog. But while thinking about that, I realized it always was the main focus of my blog. Of all the blogging I did so far. My focus was [...]

How Creative Energy becomes Destructive

September 28, 2010

From the moment I started reading this chapter in the book Science, Order and Creativity, I knew it would be on my mind for a long time. Looking at the posts now, I see that I read the book in June. And still, everything I do, read and hear is in the light of that [...]

Basic Ground for the Meaning of Life

September 20, 2010

So creativity is something that can only arise from within. And every outside interference can block it. At least that is what research seems to suggest. But what does that mean? And what exactly do we mean by creativity? I think that, as I already wrote in the post Inner Drive or Navigation from Outside, [...]

Creativity and the Need for Free Space

September 14, 2010

Money prevents creativity. This was one of the conclusions in the previous post. Another post was about something else that prevents creativity: the need for approval. Both conclusions were based on sound research. Of course it is all a bit more complex than that, but still the conclusions were very interesting. I think this is [...]

Autonomy, Mastery and Purpose

August 31, 2010

This weekend I saw some very interesting videos on Youtube. One of those videos Drive: The surprising truth about what motivates us, was so interesting that I wanted to take a closer look. So I uploaded the video below and took notes of the conclusions. Which were surprising, but at the same time, made very [...]

Intuition, Sensing, Thinking and Feeling

August 18, 2010

In my previous post I tried to find a model that is abstract enough to provide room for several existing models. Now in this post I want to see if it will fit Jung’s model of the four psychological types: Intuition, Sensing, Thinking and Feeling. I will not use the Introvert and Extravert part here [...]

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