{"id":2072141,"date":"2023-10-18T17:51:02","date_gmt":"2023-10-18T21:51:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/the-space-where-imagination-exists-and-the-spirit-continues\/"},"modified":"2023-10-18T17:57:00","modified_gmt":"2023-10-18T21:57:00","slug":"the-space-where-imagination-exists-and-the-spirit-continues","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/the-space-where-imagination-exists-and-the-spirit-continues\/","title":{"rendered":"Imagination&#8217;s Realm, Where the Spirit Thrives"},"content":{"rendered":"<aside class=\"mashsb-container mashsb-main mashsb-stretched\"><div class=\"mashsb-box\"><div class=\"mashsb-count mash-medium\" style=\"&quot;\"><div class=\"counts mashsbcount\">12<\/div><span class=\"mashsb-sharetext\">SHARES<\/span><\/div><div class=\"mashsb-buttons\"><a class=\"mashicon-facebook mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/sharer.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.conservativenewsdaily.net%2Fbreaking-news%2Fthe-space-where-imagination-exists-and-the-spirit-continues%2F\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Facebook<\/span><\/a><a class=\"mashicon-twitter mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/intent\/tweet?text=&amp;url=https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/?p=2072141&amp;via=ConservNewsDly\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Twitter<\/span><\/a><a class=\"mashicon-subscribe mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"#\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Subscribe<\/span><\/a><div class=\"onoffswitch2 mash-medium mashsb-noshadow\" style=\"display:none\"><\/div><\/div>\n            <\/div>\n                <div style=\"clear:both\"><\/div><\/aside>\n            <!-- Share buttons by mashshare.net - Version: 4.0.47--><h2>The Uniting Power of Story: Understanding Stories Through\u2063 Abstractions<\/h2>\n<blockquote>\n<p><em>The following is a transcript excerpt from Dr. \u200cJordan Peterson\u2019s \u200dconversation \u200bwith Angus Fletcher on how we understand stories through abstractions. You can <a href=\"https:\/\/www.dailywire.com\/podcasts\/the-jordan-b-peterson-podcast\/s4-e62-the-uniting-power-of-story-angus-fletcher-jordan-b-peterson-podcast\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">listen to<\/a> or <a href=\"https:\/\/www.dailywire.com\/episode\/s4-e62-the-uniting-power-of-story-angus-fletcher-jordan-b-peterson-podcast\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">watch<\/a> the full podcast on DailyWire+.<\/em><\/p>\n<p><em>Start \u2063time: \u200b34:43<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<h3>Dreams: The \u2064Abstract Representation of Patterns<\/h3>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Dreams are precognitive \u2062in some\u2062 sense. This is how I think it works: We are watching people act all the time \u2014 all the time \u2014 in small groups, in large \u200bgroups,\u200c as individuals, in fiction, all the time. So we have this vast knowledge of embodied action. Now, that is not propositionalized. It is imagistic. It is like \u200cthe movie that \u200cruns in your head. It\u2063 is like a dream, and we cannot propositionalize all that. That is partly what a great storyteller does, [a storyteller] takes a great set of images\u2064 that reflect a compelling pattern of\u200d behavior and turn it into verbalized propositions.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Imagine you\u200b have these images of behavior, and in those images,\u200d there are patterns. But we do not know what the patterns are because they are extremely\u200c sophisticated, and \u200bwe are \u200bnot intelligent enough to\u200d fully understand them, which is only to say that human behavior, at the individual and the social level, supersedes our explicit grasp. No one would dispute that. That is why you have to learn about yourself, which is kind \u200bof a strange thing. You are <i>you<\/i>, but you do not know\u200b who \u2064 <i>you<\/i> are. So, we have these patterns of behavior at hand.\u2062 Then we abstract\u200b out images of those patterns of behavior, \u2064and that is, \u200cat least in part, the source of\u200c dreams. It is the abstract representation of the patterns \u2014 not of \u2064the \u2062actual \u2063behaviors themselves \u2063but of the commonalities \u2014 the commonalities between behaviors.<\/span><\/p>\n<h3>The Power of Fantasy Play and\u200c Religious Conceptions<\/h3>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">You \u2064talked\u200c about the Greek\u200d gods as being super humans. So imagine this: There are patterns of \u200cbehavior that strike us as admirable. Those are in\u200b our zone of proximal development; otherwise, we do not understand them. Our brain \u2014 and maybe this is a right <a href=\"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/the-space-where-imagination-exists-and-the-spirit-continues\/\" title=\"Imagination's Realm, Where the Spirit Thrives\">hemisphere\u2064 function \u2014 makes\u200b associations<\/a> between these patterns\u2062 of admirable behavior based on their emotional commonality. Then it abstracts out a pattern that constitutes that set of admirable behaviors. OK, that is a super stimulus\u2064 that is a hero or, perhaps, someone who is successful at romance.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">I will go back \u200bto childhood. I was\u2064 struck \u2063when my children \u200dwere young about their fantasy play. I was very interested in fantasy play as a psychological phenomenon. One of the things that is \u200cinteresting about watching children pretend play is that we tend to say that what they are doing is imitating. So, say\u200b they are playing \u201cfather\u201d\u200b when they play house.\u200c But they are not actually imitating because they never do exactly what they \u200bsaw their father do. What they do is watch their father across multiple manifestations of father behavior, and they combine that with\u2063 fathers in books and fathers in movies. They \u200bare pulling out a pattern of the father, \u2064and that is made out of all these representations of these behavioral patterns. Then the fantasy is trying to \u2064represent that abstractly\u200c in images to draw\u2064 out the central spirit, and the spirit \u200cis the thing that is imitated.\u200c That is what drives the fantasy play.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">I will jump one more place here. I also think that is the source of the\u200c abstraction of religious conceptions. Imagine that you extract out the Father as such. It is not characteristic of any one human being. It is that ideal spirit that \u2064transcends the individual that is immortal in some sense because it manifests itself in body\u200c after body throughout time. [Carl] Jung talked about this space where these transcendent spirits existed. This is something almost \u2063no one knows about his work.\u200b He called that the Pleroma, \u2062and the Pleroma was the space where abstracted figures of imagination exist \u2064above temporality and death. It \u200bis a very weird way\u2062 of thinking \u2063about it. You can imagine there is this space that is composed \u200cof the collective imagination. In that collective\u200c imagination, there \u200dare beings, and\u200b those beings outlast all of us. I am not making a case that that place is material the same way that we think of materiality, but all \u2063the human \u2063nervous systems are constituent elements \u200cof that space, and\u2063 those characters inhabit that. It does not matter if one person dies; the spirit continues. You can think \u2062about the spirit of evil that way. And you can think about our attempts \u200dto represent\u2063 it.<\/span><\/p>\n<h3>The Role of Stories in Artificial Realities<\/h3>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Here is another interesting thought: My brother-in-law is a \u2063<a href=\"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/virginia-dem-defends-multimillion-dollar-stock-holding-that-even-pelosi-thinks-is-too-controversial\/\" title=\"Virginia Dem Defends Multimillion-Dollar Stock Holding That Even Pelosi Thinks Is Too Controversial\">computer chip designer<\/a>. He is one of the best computer chip designers in the world. I have had very interesting conversations with him about computation and <a href=\"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/from-impeaching-incitement-to-canceling-conservatism\/\" title=\"From Impeaching Incitement to Canceling Conservatism\">artificial intelligence<\/a>. To your point about the \u200bimportance of stories, much of what drives the demand for higher and higher computational resources is the economic viability of producing artificial realities for fantasy simulation to play out scenarios like \u200dthe eternal battle between good and evil. Those Marvel movies, the superhero\u200d movies, cost hundreds of millions \u200bof dollars; they are unbelievably technologically sophisticated. They gather huge audiences. That is part of the representation of \u2064that Pleroma.<\/span><\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p><em>To hear the rest of the discussion, continue by listening or watching this episode on <a href=\"https:\/\/www.dailywire.com\/watch\/browse\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">DailyWire+<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p><em><a href=\"https:\/\/www.jordanbpeterson.com\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Dr. Jordan B. Peterson<\/a> is a clinical psychologist and professor emeritus at the University of Toronto. From 1993 \u200bto 1998 he served as assistant and then associate professor of psychology\u2063 at Harvard. He is the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/fact-check-was-a-chicago-restaurant-closed-after-the-owner-killed-and-cooked-a-person\/\" title=\"FACT CHECK: Was A Chicago Restaurant Closed After The Owner Killed And Cooked A Person?\">international bestselling author<\/a> of Maps of Meaning, 12 Rules For Life, and Beyond Order. You can now <a href=\"https:\/\/www.dailywire.com\/podcasts\/the-jordan-b-peterson-podcast\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">listen to<\/a> or <a href=\"https:\/\/www.dailywire.com\/watch\/jordan-peterson\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">watch<\/a> his popular \u200blectures on DailyWire+.<\/em><\/p>\n<p> <\/p>\n<h2>Straction, extracting\u2064 the underlying patterns, and adopting them in our lives, we can \u2063find meaning and agency. In a divided world, stories have \u200dthe potential to unite us and remind us of our shared humanity and experiences.<\/h2>\n<p><span>  \u200d Ature\u200d of<\/p>\n<p>experience, all the products \u2064of human culture, are \u2063generated within that \u2064weird space\u2062 in \u200dsome sense.<\/p>\n<p>That is where you have \u2063to go \u200b\u2014 and I have been \u200dthere,\u2063 and a lot of people have been there \u2014 to experience<\/p>\n<p>\u2063the collective storehouse of\u2064 imagination.<\/span><\/p>\n<h3>Understanding Stories Through Abstraction<\/h3>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">When we listen to stories, we are abstracting out \u200cpatterns of behavior. A great<\/p>\n<p>story allows us to\u200c abstract\u2061 out\u200c the patterns of \u200cadmirable\u200b behavior \u200cthat\u2062 we would adopt if we\u2064 were playing the<\/p>\n<p>role of [[the hero]], say. Not simply because the hero\u2062 is strong and admirable, but also because of the abstract<\/p>\n<p>pattern that the hero \u2063represents. That is a pattern that we take out of the story, and \u2063we carry that pattern forth<\/p>\n<p>into our lives. That is what truly\u2062 great stories do:<\/span><\/p>\n<ol>\n<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"><em>They\u200d present us with\u2063 a representation\u200d of admirable\u2062 behavior.<\/em><\/span><\/li>\n<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"><em>They allow us to extract out the abstract pattern that underlies that behavior.<\/em><\/span><\/li>\n<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"><em>They motivate us\u2064 to adopt \u2063that pattern \u2062in\u200d our \u2062own lives.<\/em><\/span><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Stories give us a map of how to\u2063 be successful in the world. They give us \u200dan<\/p>\n<p>ideal abstract pattern \u200bof \u2063success, \u200band then we can \u2062transform that into \u2064action in the world. Great stories can<\/p>\n<p>give\u2062 us meaning because they allow us to\u200c derive a \u2063meaningful\u200b pattern\u2062 of behavior, and then\u200b \u200bwe can practice<\/p>\n<p>enacting that pattern. That is where agency comes from \u2014 the capacity to bring something \u2063about in individual<\/p>\n<p>and social\u200c experience. That is the \u200bgoal of human life, to be able\u2063 to bring something noble into being \u2014 to bring<\/p>\n<p>something righteous into being, something that confronts the way things are and makes them better.<\/span><\/p>\n<h3>The Power of Story to Unite<\/h3>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Finally, stories have the potential to unite us. \u2062Stories \u2063have an underlying abstract<\/p>\n<p>structure that all human beings can resonate with. They operate at that fundamental level\u2064 of abstraction that<\/p>\n<p>is accessible to all. That is why they can transcend individual differences and bring people together. A truly<\/p>\n<p>great story can resonate with\u2062 everyone, regardless of their cultural or linguistic background, because it speaks<\/p>\n<p>to those fundamental patterns \u200dand archetypes that are common to \u200dall human beings.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">In a world that is increasingly divided and fragmented, stories have \u2063the \u200cpower to<\/p>\n<p>bridge \u2064the gaps between us. They have the power to remind us of\u2063 our shared \u200chumanity, our shared desires, \u200bour<\/p>\n<p>shared \u200cstruggles. When we engage with stories, we tap into that deeper level of understanding and empathy,<\/p>\n<p>and we realize \u200bthat despite \u200dour surface-level differences, we are all \u2063connected by our common experiences,<\/p>\n<p>our shared joys and sorrows.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">So, let us embrace the uniting power of story. Let us \u200brecognize the abstract patterns<\/p>\n<p>that stories offer \u2063us, and let us use\u200b those patterns to guide our actions and \u2062shape our lives. By understanding<\/p>\n<p>stories through ab<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The transcript excerpt is from Dr. Jordan Peterson&#8217;s conversation with Angus Fletcher on understanding stories through abstractions. The full podcast is available on DailyWire+. Dreams have a precognitive aspect. Here&#8217;s my theory: We observe people&#8217;s actions in dreams, which helps us comprehend stories. Listen or watch the podcast from 34:43 onwards.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1006,"featured_media":2072142,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mo_disable_npp":"","fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/cndimages.nyc3.digitaloceanspaces.com\/breaking-news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/01\/IMG_2758-scaled-1.jpg","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[541],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2072141","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-the-daily-wire"],"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/cndimages.nyc3.digitaloceanspaces.com\/breaking-news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/01\/IMG_2758-scaled-1.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2072141","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1006"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2072141"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2072141\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2072142"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2072141"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2072141"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2072141"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}