The Three Cornerstones of the Imagination

Einstein’s Dream
The Engineering of Conscious Experience

Chapter Six



""Learning is experience. Everything else is just information."
– Albert Einstein




Chapter Six – Three Cornerstones

“All sciences, philosophies, religions and political beliefs, ideas, whatever you want to call them, have three cornerstones. Each is concerned with what is percieved in the world around them with a code of behaviour and with who or what made all of this. For example, the science of cosmology is concerned with what is seen in the night’s sky, with behaviour of suns and galaxies, and with how these structures got to be the way they are. The big words academics use to describe these three corner stones are phenomenology, ontology, and epistemology. Phenomenology concerns itself with ‘phenomena.’ ‘Ology’ means ‘study of.’ Therefore, phenomenology is the study of phenomena. The phenomena under scrutiny can vary from what the five sense detect to moral and ehtical behaviour including all its rational social implications and ramifications, to the motion of atoms, to galaxies and the orbits of planets. Ontology, the study of being, can be summed up in the question, why do we exist? Everything living thing has sense an ontology. A cup, for instance does not. And yet we are talking about art and the ontology thereof. Of, course art as an object has a sense of being. Something of great importance transpires when witnessing a work of art. It is the theorist’s endaevor to find out about the ontology, and the phenomenology of art works. What makes a work of art avantgarde and what makes a painting, a sculpture or musical piece not a work of art? Scientists on the other hand make the same inquiry on the material world and call it epistemology 'epist' referring to the the methodological ways of knowledge building.

On the whole, epistmology, the last but not least, concerns itself with the study of knowledge and asks the fundamental question, how do we know what we know? Why do we see what we see? Why do we know things at all? How is this possible if we are just matrial things? Why do we exist?

Most sciences, religions and philsophies, art movements, sports events, or what have you are concerned with dominating and ruling these three corner stones in order to dominate and rule another persons or group of peoples three cornerstones. All are manipulating or handling these three cornerstones with abject will. Imagination engineers differ widely in that they are concerned with replicating these three cornerstones within the realm of the imagination. Which of course, becuases you’ve already done it, is no easy task. It takes a hell of lot of hard work to achieve the recreation of the three cornerstones in the imagination. And as you can attest to yourself – this is no easy task.”


*** “Everyone knows they personally exist in a world or universe that offers phenomena, offers a means of existence –ontology, and has some specific kind of epistemology. . exists. Everyone has some sense of being and are in someway concerned with why they exist. Everyone is also confronted with a phenomenology – a certain and specific conviction that they are surrouned by something that is percievable with the five senses. Thus, there are only three overall fundamentally evident features of involved in the construction of experience at any given time. Ontology, phenemology and epistemolgy exist in every single experience. For instance, imagine yoruself in your kitchen at home, You do have a kitchen don’t you?”
I nodded.

“Well then close your eyes!”

“You are in your kitchen looking about and around. Anything is yours for examination. And a most obvious feature of every object is that is was made by some kind of knowledge. Every objects has an epistemology. Even objects of nature. This is why scientists investigate objects in nature in order to know more things about how they were made. But we are scientists of perception. We are deeply and truly interested in percieving and looking and seeing.”

Epistemology is the study of knowledge and it addresses the concern as to whether or not what is known is real. Ontology is study of the nature of being. How do things come into being? Phenomenology concerns itself with the nature of perceiving. What are we perceiving and how is this made? Since they all end with ‘ology’ each one crisscrosses over the other and form the three cornerstones of nearly any conceivable philosophy, religions or political system. Take for instance, Buddhism. Buddhism is concerned with the nature of being alive; Ontology. They are concerned with what is perceived in the world around them – Phenomenology. Epistemologically they know things about the world and about their practices but their practices lead them not towards a scientific and thus, falsely believed, not a practical orientatoin towards knowledge but leads them inward toward an esoteric and more spiritual understanding of the world.” He looked at me for any kind of disagreement.

“Basically, these three big words Ontology, Phenomenology and Epistemology break down into being, percieving and knowing.”

“Do you follow me?”

I nodded.

“That’s it. Those are the three cornerstones that all philosophies, religions and political beliefs, ideas, whatever you want to call them have. They are Epistemological, Ontological, and Phenomenological in nature. That is rule number one for role for anyone traveling into the imaginatoin. But of course no one is really concerned with the being, doing and knowing of the imagination. It has largely been considered impossible to get into the imagination and experience it as an Ontological, Phenomenological, and Epistemological propositions that is just as real as this one. Do you follow me?

I nodded.

“Good!” He said smiling. “Our question then becomes; How does one behave and then act to get the conviction that they have journeyed into the imagination? Since the real world is the real world and our bodies are made of physical substances there is no magical doorway that can lead us into another world of experience.”

He stood and began to slowly pace the room. “Sure there are different cultures each with different physical and environments –different buildings, different ways of accomplishing love, marriage, birth and death, but there is no way to journey into a realm of pure imagination. The Ontological, Phenomenological and Epistemological premises for such a philosophy do not exist.
“In America, we teach our philosophy students basic premises from a historical view. We introduce them to age-old problems that have haunted Plato, St. Augustine, Descartes and Kant for centuries but we don’t teach them how to use their imaginations. A pity and a downfall for this great country. The biggest problem hauting mankind today is that we don’t know how to handle sensory information. We were robbed of the chance in our infancy. Today, We are boring creatures stuck in routine ways of thinking and acting out of tradition. For instance there is no way for a student of philosophy in any major North American University to romance his imagination with wayward utterly foreign ideas that explore one’s own personal and passionate interest’s in Ontological and Phenomenological and Epistemological terms.

“Wait a second,” I interjected. “I am just getting used to these terms your throwing around here and I do understand them but only because you’ve made them simple enough for me to comprehend. I doubt that that is the full picture because I know volumes have been written about Epistemology.”

“That is exactly what I mean. You are infused with Descartes’ Error. For Descartes to suggest in his famous phrase “I think. Therefore I am” demarcates the very downfall of humankind because it places to much emphasis on two things doubt and the self.

“Don’t get me wrong, epistemologies thrive on doubt. Doubt is the driving force behind teaching. But it is as if we are teaching students first and foremost to doubt themselves and then to do a complete turnaround and believe that their thoughts have real substance!!” He laughed aloud rolling around in his chair.

“Where did the premise go that - thoughts are real if they accompny the conviction of a percpetion. Thoughts that are not acted upon do not materilize into material world. It takes a lot of hard work to bring a thought into the world. Therefore what is the use of building an way of knowledge on doubt? You’d end up with a flimsy structure. Thinking thoughts that cannot be acted upon? I am not dismissing the contemplative mind that leands back and for hours examines decisions, pathways, choices and avenues of possiblity. That is fantastic. I applaude Decarte for his ingenuious insight in have the audacity to romance the infinite nature of thought. But what are thoughts but tiny, insignificant flashes of electrical activity in the brain? And to these we resort our greatest powers? “I think therefore I exist? There for I am? I think there for I know? Where is the premise - I think therefore I percieve?

“If Descartes had any balls on him he would have plainly noticed that an infinitly more powerful epistemology can be built on the idea that one day we are going to die. As on epistemological premise it unshakeable because you can’t doubt that one day your’ge going to die. If you take that gamble you’ll be wrong. I much better gamble is to bet that one day you will die. But don’t take this premise as a morbid thought. Think of it like as the abstract proposition that it is. Think of it as a future moment that no matter what is going to happen. There is nothing else in our lives so solidly guaranteed as that moment. What if you knew what the winning lottery numbers were going to be on a specific date and time? Would you play? What if you knew without a shadow of doubt that a certain stock was going to go through the roof one day? Would you invest? In life, we may never achieve our dreams, we may never get married, never have kids, never see costa rica, never travel to France, but for sure and without a doubt we will all one day die.”

I could see the solidity in his argument.

“The nature of Descartes method to doubt everything around him until he negates the phenomenal world and undermines the epistemological significance of the objects around him ‘till his only certainty is an ontological one - the certainty that his thought are real and that he - the thinker of his thoughts - are the only real things that exist?! Thanks to that pinprick we’ve spent two or three hundred years toiling around with mechanical nature of the world bringing us to the verge of destroying ourselves with attempts to dominate the three corner stones of others via world wars, nuclear war heads, cigarettes, and so on. Now we are on the verge of losing humankind’s subjective access to the imagination? How appalling.” He turned in disgust. A true sadness enveloped him. Then his eye’s sparked.

“If Descartes would have kept his Ontological, Phenomenological and Epistemological wits about him he would have realized that the phenomena that surrounds us on a daily basis, the phenomena of light, sound, taste, touch and smell are as REAL as can be.

“Without the phenomena of raw sensation Descartes could not convince himself that the only certainty, the only real thing he could count on was his own thoughts. Although his thoughts were, in a very real sense, tautological, circling in on themselves because the times he lived were in great peril. Everything that young man knew about the world was being overturned. He arose to be regarded as a great thinker because everyone in his time was unsure of their ontological, phenomenological, and epistemological place in the world. A new land was just being discovered and a new horizon of the unknown burgenged up upon their way of being in the world. If Descartes would have held is ground, taken responsibility for the perceptual world around him perhaps he would have been able to realize that the certainty of his thoughts derived from the physicality of the real phenomena, real raw sensation and that only perceputal phenomena is capable of offering conviction to the senses and thus to the mind and thus to thoughts. His thoughts should have been considered inadequate to the conviction of his senses.
“Imagination engineering is an edifice of knowledge that combines the ontological nature of being with the phenomenological nature of perception and perceiving with the epistemological search for new knowledge. If we were to introduce it to the cannon of wetern history and its methods of teaching we could call it - Imaginology.

“Imaginology?”

Einstein burst out laughing. “It sounds terrible doesn’t it? It sounds faint and dumb like waiter wearing a handkerchief on his wrist.”

I laughed aloud at the analogy.

“What’s worse is the word form – Imaginological.” He keeled over laughing slapping his knee repeatedly. I was giggling at how he could change from being so serious to being utterly non-serious.

“I’ve settled for the term Imagination Engineering. The engineering part denotes the integrity and awareness needed to unify the ontological, epistemological and phenomenological in that place you called. . . what was it?

“Somewhere else?”

“Somewhere else!”

Thus, the engineering part also stands for intenttionally using imaginary and abstrtact sensory data in novel ways to create a cognitive doorway into the imagination.”

I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. I was in a million places at once. I wanted to jump up and kiss him and run around the room like a fool celebrating a life long wish that had finally come true. But I simple sat their internally experiencing these emotions and then feelings of when I was younger came over me. I felt a particular sadness about the time when I was seven years old. I felt that at that time I would have lived and died a hundred times to find a way to go into the imagination. But those feelings died in me by the time I was eleven years old. I distinctly remembered talking to everyone I knew about the imagination expressing how disappointed I was because I wanted to go see the dinosaurs. I was repeatedly told that there was no actual way to journey into the imagination even if my only purpose was to see the long excint dinosaurs. Over the years, the feelings I had had for the imagination slowly drifted away and became a faint distant memory like a fog.

“I can tell that its not that you don’t believe me. It’s that you’ve lost your spirit of true adventure.”I was amazed at how completely absorbed I became in my own thoughts. I must have looked like a man who lost his best friend when suddenly Einstein spoke to me. “I would advise that you go back over your decision to give up on the imagination as realm of veritable experience by journeying there first as realm of visualization. Visualize the scene when you decided that the imagination was all guff. Try to recall every detail. The color of the room, how many windows there were, what your emotional outlook was. Then once you’ve established these rudimentary ontological, phenomenological and epistemological constructs look at the reason that forced you to show your hand. Breathe in everything you saw, heard or touched. Then do the same with the feelings that are holding you back. Keep what you want and exhale everything. Single the end of the scene with a movement of the head from left to right and to the center pausing breifly with the head in the center. This breath reduces all phenomenological, ontological and epistemological relationships to pure raw sensation or abstract sensory data. Breathe in the raw sensation and use it to make a new decision that a cognitive doorway to the imagination exists.

“And, further, if you can’t remember when or where it was that you denoted the need to escape to mere childhood fears you will have to make list of everyone you’ve ever met from the present all the way to past. Go all the way to your birth if you want to be professional about it. Go through the list and ontolgoically, phenomenologically and epistemologically, reassemble every interaction. Place yourself in the scene from a new vantage point and then and then deconstruct the scene, the light, the placement of chairs, the floor, the woolen blankets, whatever it is. Then go to the words used, the emotions you felt, the things you saw and heard. Breath it all out. Reduce all of it to raw sensory conviction but also scoop up and decide to keep anything you want.”

“But I don’t want to erase all my memories!”

He nearly died laughing. He had to scramble to his feet to keep himself from falling out of his chair. “ Trust me they don’t go away. If anything they become clearer more powerful. Instead of your memories being logdged in you unconscoiusly now you will be aware of the best of your memories and more importantly you will be able to hold them in theh plams of yoru hand and rotate them with your fingers. Your life would become expansive and powerfull because the breath itseslf creates the necessary cognitive spce for these experiences to happen.”

“Mother nature has not evolved us into being who can naturally get rid of cognintive waste. All thos memories bricked up, and bricked in by the three-dimensional cognitive arrangements of time and space hold us down. They pin us to the wall. For instance, thinkg about the person who believes assuredly that he’s been hurt beyond repair by his mother’s yelling at him. He holds it as a true injustice for the rest of this life and dies not only beliving but knowing his pain is real. There is no 360 degree rotation of the memory. He never ‘sees’ for instance how she struggled and was beat down at work and came hoime only to find her only son committing atrocities and yells at the person in question out of a need to protect the only thing left that she has affection for. The memory holds him there. Unable or unwililng to breath the three-dimensional solidty of the memory of himself he is pinned down and thuroughly believes his tragic state of affaris. If he were to get back to how the senses regheter the world – as pure phenomena, he could plainly gather up all the abstract sensory information in the scene or repeated scence wherein he felt he was treatly so badly and the essence of whatever lesson had to be learned becomes moveable and can become a position of power and great learning which may of may not eventually lead to a source of wisdom. We hall have things to learn. And we will all learn whether we like it or not right up until the day we die. But learning can be a joyous, highly romantic affair when you can see those past moments as ontological, phenomenologocal and epistemological constructs – free from the victimization of the self. Then the tears of the universe will be in your eyes and maybe for the first time in your life the pin is removed and the weight is shouldered the pain is no longer a hinderance to learning and maturing to a righteously curious person.

“We are perceivers. And if we are not daring enough to percieve our own past memories then we will never acquire the training to make into the imagination as a place of experience. We are built to perceive but we live our lives like washing machines that never do the washing. We live like dryers who are too afraid to dry! We don’t believe ourselves to be perceivers when I know for a fact that we are. The five senses we have and share with others in our world are not the only means by which we can perceive. Anything imaginable or unimaginable can be perceived but only if we put our minds to it. Put the mind to it and the body will follow.