Kim Hermanson's Blog, page 16

We need schools for the imagination.

Einstein famously said, “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.”

That’s a great quote, so why don’t we have schools of the imagination rather than schools where we learn within the boundaries of what is already known?

Imagination is subversive. It lives in a realm beyond social conditioning.

The realm of the imagination lies beyond social structures, institutions, academic programs, established procedures, even religion.

Clients come to me blocked and what we do together is make space for creative inspiration.

We tap the space that lies beyond established structures of thought.
 
 

If we want a new world, we need to listen to what has life.

If we want a new world, we need to learn how to listen to what has life.

What does it mean to listen to what has life? Or, we could ask, what does it mean to say something is “alive”?

Here is my definition of what is alive: People who are buzzing with gifts to share, works of art that speak to our souls, spaces that shift and move us, words that touch our hearts.

To my mind, creativity and beauty are where life resides.

May we all offer what is alive. And may we all be tapped into it.

Talented people achieve what others can’t, but genius achieves what others can’t imagine.

In his book The World as Will and Representation, Arthur Schopenhauer wrote:

Talent is like the marksman who hits a target which others cannot reach; genius is like the marksman who hits a target which others cannot even see.

People who are talented achieve what others can’t, but genius achieves what others can’t imagine.

Genius happens when one offers something–new art, research, concepts, ideas–that the rest of us haven’t seen before.

Genius requires that we see beyond the ordinary.

Chefs have to taste everything. So do scholars.

On the reality tv show Top Chef, the competing chefs can’t refuse to work with a particular ingredient.

The chefs that have the most “well-developed palettes” are the ones who go on to win the competition.

Over my years of academic teaching, I’ve sometimes had Ph.D. students who resisted reading some of the literature I assigned. They wanted to read the easy stuff, not the books or articles that require more rigorous effort and thought.

Chefs have to taste everything. So do budding scholars.

Breakthroughs happen when we open spaces we didn’t know existed

No matter how much we push, intend and effort, it’s clear that we don’t often have all the answers that we seek.

But Something else does.

We humans are brilliant when we’re aligned with Something greater than ourselves.

We don’t get breakthroughs by thinking harder or better. We get breakthroughs when we open spaces we didn’t know existed.

And to open those spaces, we need to tap into the wisdom that lies beyond the linear mind.

For more about how to tap the divine wisdom that lies beyond the thinking mind, check out my new book, Deep Knowing: Entering the Realm of Non-Ordinary Intelligence on Amazon.

 

 

For meaningful change we need the potency of the creative.

Artists have always been at the forefront of anything new. Freud confirmed this when he said that no matter where his research led, a poet had already been there ahead of him.

When I work with clients, it’s so apparent that deep creativity is not of the head or thinking mind. It comes from an entirely different place.

For meaningful change at either the individual or cultural level, we need the potency of the creative.

In his book, Sacred Economics, Charles Eisenstein wrote, “How beautiful can life be? We hardly dare imagine it.”

Let’s dare imagine it.

Pay attention to the spaces

In music, the space between the notes is what creates the melody. The beauty of a piece is formed in the pauses, the spaces in-between.

I’ve always been fascinated by these “spaces in-between” and have explored and written about them extensively in teaching (check out my book Getting Messy), art (check out my book Deep Knowing), and therapy

For example, when a work of art, performance, group space, lecture, or piece of writing doesn’t move me, I find myself saying, “It didn’t take me anywhere.”

It didn’t open a space “in-between.”

The spaces in-between are where we find healing, divine gifts, creative breakthroughs, and moments of evolutionary change.

How can the wisdom that emerges through a group process serve the collective?

In a letter to the president of the Fetzer Institute, Jacob Needleman wrote:

“[I believe] that the group is the art form of the future. In our present culture, the main need is for a form that can enable human beings to share their perceptions and through that sharing, to become a conduit for the appearance of spiritual intelligence.”

I’ve always been fascinated by the deeper intelligence that shows up in a group space and I wrote about that in my book, Getting Messy: A Guide to Taking Risks and Opening the Imagination for Teachers, Trainers, Coaches, and Mentors.

I’ve experienced the magic that can happen when groups come together in an intentional way. As Needleman writes, groups are a form and conduit for the sacred.

Some of the questions I’m still wrestling with…

How can the wisdom that emerges through a group process serve the collective?

How can it serve social change?

What larger, potent possibilities can happen in a group?

What processes and structures are necessary for groups to enter sacred space?

Creative genius involves the ability to create new worlds

In an article in Newsweek “The Creativity Crisis,” Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman describe a study of people who received MacArthur genius awards. In the study, researchers discovered that MacArthur recipients spent time in their childhoods creating “paracosms,” or alternative fantasy worlds.

These kids visited their fantasy worlds repeatedly, often creating their own unique languages and social rules for them.

Creative genius involves the ability to create new worlds.