Whorled Peas

Idea is the currency in which the imagination trades. Ideas are the matchsticks with which mind builds its intricate models. An idea is a specific, uniquely identifiable, construct of the imagination; and regardless of the relative validity or congruity to objective fact: all ideas are imaginary. Any single idea will be found in an aggregate of its fellows in an elaborate tinker-toy structure: a world-view. The fact that world-view is a construct of imagination is not a bad thing. It is the only way world-views can occur. Everybody’s got one whether they are aware of it or not, and even inspiration must enter imagination as idea if it is to make itself known.

A world-view is a complex ice palace of conceptualization. Were that ice to all melt away the objective world would be the same, but we would not. Real is real whether we have an idea about it or not, and it matters hugely if our efforts are to make conceptualizations as contiguous as possible to the real; or if we gloss the real with a paste of preconception. The world-view can be seen as a house of cards: one idea-card supporting another, supporting another, and so on in an elaborate mutually supportive structure. What if some cards are not from the print shop of objective fact? What are the implications if some elements are wholly invented: products of the imagination having no referents in objective reality? In such a case the house of cards stands only with continuous effort of imagination. Should some shock from the real dispel said imaginary element, the whole bit must collapse. Unless said shock occurs in the form of an epiphany.

Epiphany is the lightbulb moment: that moment when under the unseen influence of pattern recognition our conceptualization suddenly finds itself in magnetic alignment with previously unseen elements of the self-evidently real. A light comes on. This real element or potential was there all the time, but its existence could not enter our imagination to work its work upon our world-view as its existence was sub-liminal. Subliminal: existing (or potentially existing) but beneath the limiting horizon of our conscious awareness.

Misunderstandings of every stripe, from world wars to marital strife, are the inexorable side effects of incongruent world-views: of unsympathetic stacks of imaginings. Violence is most usually an attempt at problem solving. And it’s not going to happen: that nations or organizations or individuals will voluntarily subject the complex house of cards, which is their very intellectual existence, to the simple non-imaginary universal inner appeal for dignity and self-determination.

The situation is quite hopeless. And by the time the obvious becomes apparent to the hopelessly occluded the world will be a shambles: chaos. Epiphanies are where they find you, and though horses can be led to water they cannot be made to drink. But if there is any hope for humanity it is that individuals are subject to epiphany. I saw a sign once, painted on the window of an empty storefront in Eugene Oregon. It said, “visualize whorled peas.”


I'm on it.