Squirrel Tao

Voluntary Attention

Jennifer Franklin Elrod — Wed, 11 Oct 2006 01:23:34 +0000

This post is the third in a series on creativity and visual thinking. This time, voluntary attention is the issue. Most people in contemporary Western society do not pay very much attention to the here and now. Alan Watts wrote eloquently of this problem in The Book.

“As it is, we are merely bolting our lives - gulping down undigested experiences as fast as we can stuff them in - because awareness of our own existence is so superficial and so narrow that nothing seems to us more boring than simple being. If I ask you what you did, saw, heard, smelled, touched, and tasted yesterday, I am likely to get nothing more than the thin, sketchy outline of the few things that you noticed, and of those only what you thought worth remembering. Is it surprising that an existence so experienced seems so empty and bare that its hunger for an infinite future is insatiable?”

We do not have to live this way. We can learn to pay more attention to the here and now. Learning to pay attention need not be painful or boring, as it may have been when you were told as a child, “Pay attention!” Paying attention requires something more than simple exertion of will. Trying to pay attention because you think you should is less effective than paying attention because you want to. When you pay attention because you want to, you are not easily diverted.

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Internal Transfer from Right to Left Brain

Jennifer Franklin Elrod — Tue, 12 Sep 2006 10:56:00 +0000

This is the next post in my series on creativity and visual thinking. It relies upon the premise that creativity involves mental ambidexterity, or a sort of internal transfer from right to left brain. The ability to do this kind of internal transfer can be practiced. One way to begin practicing it is to find a setting that is pleasant and comfortable for you. Relax and spend at least ten minutes attending only to your sensations and feelings. Avoid inner speech - don’t label anything. Do not make judgements of any kind at this phase. Listen to all the sounds first, without associating any words with them. Labeling will act to restrict full sensory experience. After doing nothing but listening for several minutes, begin walking around slowly. First touch things, and touch them just as you practiced hearing them, without labeling your sensations. Then smell things. Then see them. If you find your mind at any point breaking down into internal chatter, just relax and go back to focusing on the sensation of the moment. Don’t worry about it.

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Creativity on the Web and Relaxing the Eyes

Jennifer Franklin Elrod — Sat, 29 Jul 2006 19:54:28 +0000

This post is going to be a departure from my previous blog entries so far. I’ve decided to start writing about the creative process once in a while. Technology will not make us creative. It is not deterministic. It can constrain and enable us within a set of parameters. But it’s up to us - individual human beings with minds - to direct our intentions creatively within those parameters. The topic of creativity is therefore an important topic if we are serious about using the potential inherent in our brave, wondrous, new wired (or wireless) world. What I’ve learned on the web is that my own intentions are everything (or almost everything), here in this virtual ocean of electrons that places so few filters between my impulses and my actions.

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