Tuesday, 30 July 2024 ------------------------ Hello. All is well. God is love. Sorry for the cliffhanger in the last entry, hehe. Let's talk about the imagination part of my III model. Well, let me set the stage first. Intuition and intellect. We associate intuition with the body or instincts, and intellect with the mind or reasoning. To master a physical act, like playing a sport or an instrument, it generally must be learnt to be intuitive. However, we must remember that there aren't clear boundaries between how much intuition/instinct or intellect/reasoning an act requires. Intuition and intellect are intertwined, interconnected, and dependent on each other. We can use intuition in more executive or abstract actions, such as whether to invest in a business. Likewise, we can use intellect to initially learn a technique for something less abstract, like how to hold and aim a bow. Now, where does imagination fit into this? It's the frame. The frame in which your acting self and thinking self exists. It's what you may say unconsciously drives you. Imagination is what guides you. It creates meaning. It's what sets the frame for your affective feelings. It's easy to get confused because intuition, intellect, and imagination are interconnected, creating a seamless state of mind. Your intuitive/tangible stimuli in the present moment will affect your intellective/intangible stimuli and your imagination/affective feelings. However, the more you understand how your imagination impacts your state of mind, the more agency you have over your state of mind. I know I didn't explain this part perfectly. I'm still thinking it through. To improve your agency, you must notice the frame. If you don't know there's a frame, you can stay stuck forever in misery with the low-level agency. This is why, no matter how intelligent you may be in terms of IQ if you don't notice the frame driving your intellect, you'll always hit a wall. An invisible wall. An imagination can be a disservice for one in different ways to various degrees. I'll talk about that a little later. Note that framing takes place on many levels. All the levels of sensory abstraction or conceptualization. This is why you could say imagination is a bit different than intuition and intellect. We usually say that affective feeling is an intuitive thing, but I think that doesn't give the right understanding. It's simply that our more tangible senses are more easily framed or given meaning to, yet you'll notice the context or your framing of the sensation will impact how affective feeling is applied to that sensation. Some of this is instinctually framed, like a toothache, but can that even be reframed? Maybe even deframed? Is it possible to detach from the frame? This is where the idea of attachment and detachment comes into play, but I won't go into details of that, perhaps indirectly, as I now want to give some tangible or practical examples to illustrate how powerful imagination is in terms of agency. Actually, let me talk about why I called imagination our spiritual self in my 74th entry. People talk a lot about spirituality, and I gather that the thing we usually associate spirituality with is the imagination part of my model. It also makes sense because I called our affective feelings our spirits of mind in my 67th entry. Why do I associate affective feeling with this thing I call imagination. It's because it's where it exists when you realize how when you allow yourself to become detached from one imagination, you see your affective state is not quantifiable. It's infinite, just like imagination. However, on a practical level, it's not so simple. It also requires competence. It's a skill. People get lost in imagination all the time, with not so practical outcomes. As it's the most powerful in shaping our state of mind and perception, it's also the most dangerous one. Your intuition and tangible senses should keep you grounded in what's reality. There's a lot to talk about when it comes to imagination, and to be honest, I don't really understand it, but on the levels that I somewhat comprehend something about it, I've seen how it's key to having agency. My objective with this model was for me to have a practical way to improve agency. It's not meant to accurately represent any truth, but so far it's personally helped me a lot, but I still have a lot of stuff to figure out. A good example of why it's a good idea to be mindful of your imagination is to consider whether you're attracted to something even if it may be harming you and making you not feel so goodie overall. Our imagination is very malleable. A good example is video games with some quantifiable metric. You may not enjoy playing the game for most of the time but you've attached yourself to the frame the video games has created where this single metric becomes all that matters to you in life. On my Minecraft servers, there was a special currency called gold. People exchanged their national currency for it. People were filled with joy when I simply incremented a number in a database out of goodwill. The more you were attached to my server, the more it would make you happy. What overall story or imagination may you be driven by in your life? Is it quantifiable? How much friction do you experience? The interesting thing is that you can still receive joy from if it genuinely serves you (who is you?), and you can more easily obtain it by detaching yourself from it. It's a bit counterproductive, well not really, but it has something to do with your perception of reality and how radically your framing of stuff can change, making you see things you didn't notice before, but I don't really want to write anymore, so chicken pancakes!