imagination

Evolved states of being

The person who exhibits the most kindness in a group often possesses great intelligence. When we encounter someone who differs from us in appearance, behaviour, love preferences, or lifestyle, our initial reaction tends to be either fear or judgment, and this response is rooted in our evolutionary history. As a species, we survived by being cautious of unfamiliar beings, and in order to display kindness, we must suppress this instinctual response and redirect our thinking. I think empathy and compassion are advanced emotional states that necessitate the ability to transcend our primal urges. Unfortunately, those in positions of power perceive empathy and kindness as weaknesses and view vulnerable individuals as mere stepping stones to further their own ambitions.

““People appreciate when you’re curious about them, rather than focusing on your own needs and what you can get from them.””
— Burrellism

Ideas and imagination

Everyone has great ideas and the better your vocabulary the better you can share ideas that are meaningful. Imagination is the first thing we must cultivate to manifest anything in our life. All ideas start with imagination, and I think all our joy has its origin in the imagination. And when we take the first step, those ideas can become reality with the proper execution strategy.

““Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand.” ”
— Albert Einstein

Active imagination

Imagination is more important than knowledge because imagination is the only thing that can open up our minds and our hearts to the possible - to the successful and fulfilling future we all envision for ourselves but that may seem out of reach because we currently don't have the knowledge to see the exact path to that.

“I am enough of the artist to draw freely upon my imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.”
— Albert Einstein

Sunday exercise

When we close our eyes, or even if our eyes are open and start to use our imagination - the Einstein brain - we have just activated one of the bigger centres of our brain, the occipital lobe that’s connected to the motor cortex. It’s also connected to the motivational circuit; the nucleus comes and releases that dopamine that makes you feel good and makes you want to act. So, if you visualise yourself achieving the goal, if you visualise yourself behaving in ways that match the new belief, even if you visualise the words or you take the words on a sheet of paper and you read them. 

 

Try it: Close your eyes, see it, and feel it, your brain will begin to create a mental movie with the words and as it creates a mental movie with the words that’s happening in your subconscious mind. And when you give the subconscious mind these instructions a couple of things happen because of the way the brain hierarchy works. Number one is survival; number two is safety and number three is energy conservation. When you do something consistently, it takes between 60 and 365 days of repetition to override an old habitual circuit. Therefore, if you visualise yourself achieving the goal, feeling the success you want to feel, seeing the belief on the screen of your mind, you are actually creating an artificial numeral network through the science of neuroplasticity. And since your brain wants to conserve energy, if you do this on a consistent basis, your brain will automatically set aside the old beliefs and replace them with new beliefs, and then you will have deliberately and consciously evolved yourself.

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Facts on Friday

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The real difference between us and chimpanzees is the mysterious glue that enables millions of humans to cooperate effectively. This mysterious glue is made of stories, not genes. We cooperate effectively with strangers because we believe in things like gods, nations, money, and human rights. Yet none of these things exists outside the stories that people invent and tell one another. There are no gods in the universe, no nations, no money, and no human rights – except in the common imagination of human beings. You can never convince a chimpanzee to give you a banana by promising him that after he dies, he will get limitless bananas in chimpanzee heaven. Only Sapiens can believe such stories. This is why we rule the world, and chimpanzees are locked up in zoos and research laboratories.

From “Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind” by Yuval Noah Harari