"Creative Visualization"
To: nominal@topica.com Subject: creative visualization From: David McDivitt <dmcdivitt@yahoo.com> Date: Wed, 13 Mar 2002 21:14:08 -0600
When I was a realist I derided creative visualization. You know, that's when you picture in your mind whatever it is you want, visualize yourself having it, and doing it, and by magic it is supposed to happen. Never could understand the logic of that. Still do not.
So how does nominalism differ from creative visualization? For one thing, nominalism is a description. It is an explanation of what or how things exist. Creative visualization on the other hand is a methodology to get what you want, supposedly.
In my opinion physical reality is not a set of absolutes. It is the current evolutionary state of intellectualism. Rather than however many objects, it is the set of intellectual definitions of those objects. The glue holding our physical world together is the time required for new concepts to gain widespread acceptance, and how evolutionary processes are seldom if ever sidestepped. Ideas come from other ideas. Ideas are precipitated as a response to some stimulus in the environment, however intellectual that environment may be.
The question then is: If a person holds a nominalist slant rather than a realist slant, might that person have inclination to be less restrained with thoughts, and thus more creative? I think so. The good thing about nominalism is each person has his or her own reality, and ultimately there is nothing to argue about. It is freedom. Maybe it is the only true freedom there is. How bad is it when several realists get together and fight over the current state of reality, because they all feel they must think alike? They feel they must all share the same thoughts at the same time. How ridiculous.
If a person chooses to practice creative visualization, why should that matter to me? How can I rate whether creative visualization is effective for that person? We can only rate such things for ourselves. As a nominalist I must concede nominalism opens the door to such things as creative visualization. I choose to be more pragmatic. Maybe creative visualists say they are, too. Even so, the intellectual freedom afforded by nominalism is well worth the cost of criticism given by a few anal retentive realists. I adapt and respond to my environment much quicker than I did as a realist. I have much less frustration. I am not always driven to bond with, identify with, and fixate as realists often do.