My parents always threatened me with the
following statement:
” If you don’t study hard and work hard you will end up a secretary and
have to type all the time and you know how much you hate that!”
Well we studied hard, we made the grade and for a few years in the 70’s
we lived the dream, with your own secretary, screening calls, mail, appointments
and meetings, etc..
Then along came the computer and we have been typing ever since, thankful
we took typing in High School, we have also been students in an ever
changing environment.
From PageMaker to Quark, Freehand to Illustrator, Quark to InDesign,
Illustrator to Fireworks, Photoshop to AfterEffects, Flash to Dreamweaver,
HTML to HTML5, ActionScript 2 to 3, CSS to CSS, Joomla to WordPress and all
over again the task is constant as is the discovery and learning.
My parents are laughing at the fact that I am reading and typing/writing all
the time, and saying, “You work to live not live to work”
I ask us all to reflect on the fact, we must absorb information knowledge
And all that we need to be able to give our contribution to the creative pool.
As conduits of creative thought we often forget that we must place ourselves
in a place were we can recharge and imagine and travel the unknown places in our
brains, thoughts and surroundings.
Take a moment everyday to find your ZEN ZONE and take a deep
breath for creativity.
The word ZEN is derived from the Japanese pronunciation of the Middle Chinese/Mandarin:
Chan, which comes from the Sanskrit word dhyana, which can be approximately
translated “absorption” or “meditative state”
Find Your Zen Zone!
Philosophers and their thoughts for you To Zen On
Plato
Plato was one of the earliest philosophers to provide a detailed discussion of ideas.
He considered the concept of idea in the realm of metaphysics. He asserted that there
is a realm of Forms or Ideas, which exist independently of anyone who may have thought
of these ideas. Material things are then imperfect and transient reflections or
instantiations of the perfect and unchanging ideas. From this it follows that these
Ideas are the principal reality. In contrast to the individual objects of sense
experience, which undergo constant change and flux, Plato held that ideas are perfect,
eternal, and immutable. Consequently, Plato considered that knowledge of material
things is not really knowledge; real knowledge can only be had of unchanging ideas.
René Descartes
Descartes often wrote of the meaning of idea as an image or representation,
often but not necessarily “in the mind”, which was well known in the vernacular.
“Some of my thoughts are like images of things, and it is to these alone that
the name ‘idea’ properly belongs.”
In contrast to the individual objects of sense experience, which undergo constant
change and flux, Plato held that ideas are perfect, eternal, and immutable.
Consequently, Plato considered that knowledge of material things is not really
knowledge; real knowledge can only be had of unchanging ideas.
John Locke
In striking contrast to Plato’s use of idea is that of John Locke.
Locke defines idea as “that term which, I think, serves best to stand for
whatsoever is the object of the understanding when a man thinks, I have used it to
express whatever is meant by phantasm, notion, species, or whatever it is which the
mind can be employed about in thinking; and I could not avoid frequently using it.”
Immanuel Kant
Immanuel Kant defines an idea as opposed to a concept. “Regulator ideas” are ideals
that one must tend towards, but by definition may not be completely realized. Liberty,
according to Kant, is an idea. The autonomy of the rational and universal subject
is opposed to the determinism of the empirical subject.[9] Kant felt that it is
precisely in knowing its limits that philosophy exists. The business of philosophy
he thought was not to give rules, but to analyze the private judgements
of good common sense
Rudolf Steiner
“Thinking … is no more and no less an organ of perception than the eye or ear.
Just as the eye perceives colors and the ear sounds, so thinking perceives ideas.”
He holds this to be the premise upon which Goethe made his natural-scientific
observations.
Charles Sanders Peirce
He proposed that a clear idea (in his study he uses concept and idea as synonymic)
is defined as one, when it is apprehended such as it will be recognized wherever it
is met, and no other will be mistaken for it. If it fails of this clearness, it is
said to be obscure. He argued that to understand an idea clearly we should ask
ourselves what difference its application would make to our evaluation of a
proposed solution to the problem at hand.
G.F. Stout and J.M. Baldwin
It should be observed that an idea, in the narrower and generally accepted sense
of a mental reproduction, is frequently composite. That is, as in the example given
above of the idea of chair, a great many objects, differing materially in detail,
all call a single idea. When a man, for example, has obtained an idea of chairs in
general by comparison with which he can say “This is a chair, that is a stool”,
he has what is known as an “abstract idea” distinct from the reproduction in
his mind of any particular chair (see abstraction). Furthermore a complex idea
may not have any corresponding physical object, though its particular constituent
elements may severally be the reproductions of actual perceptions. Thus the idea
of a centaur is a complex mental picture composed of the ideas of man and horse,
that of a mermaid of a woman and a fish.
Dr. Samuel Johnson
Johnson claimed that they are mental images or internal visual pictures.
As such, they have no relation to words or the concepts which are
designated by verbal names.
A Book that Puts all that Zen together
Imagine: How Creativity Works “Jonah Lehrer”
Did you know that the most creative companies have centralized bathrooms?
That brainstorming meetings are a terrible idea? That the color blue can help
you double your creative output? From the New York Times best-selling author of
How We Decide comes a sparkling and revelatory look at the new science of creativity.
Shattering the myth of muses, higher powers, even creative “types,”
Jonah Lehrer demonstrates that creativity is not a single gift possessed
by the lucky few. It’s a variety of distinct thought processes that we
can all learn to use more effectively…