My Mama Don’t Told Me

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…

 

Zen for the Zen Of It…