idea entry: week 03: sept 16

word of the week: TRANSFORMATIONAL[Photoblog. Web. 16 Sept. 2010. .]
I want to be able to see that as "a scar in the sky" again.
quotes:
"Most people soon find themselves drifting into imagination and thought associations, demonstrating that man is not conscious of himself for most of the time. The illusion of his being conscious is created by memory. We actually remember only moments of consciousness, although we do not realize that this is so. In retrospect we remember those moments and assume we were fully awake the whole time... Man does not know himself. He does not know his own limitations and possibilities. He does not even know to how great an extent he does not know himself. So he assumes his mental state to be "conscious", fully aware and self-determined, when in fact he is acting to a very great extent on automatic responses and continuously dramatizing all the influences of his past. "

["Transforming the Mind - Transpersonal Psychology." Personal Development at Trans4mind. Web. 16 Sept. 2010. .] "First comes thought; then organization of that thought, into ideas and plans; then transformation of those plans into reality. The beginning, as you will observe, is in your imagination. " - Napoleon Hill "It is all very well to copy what one sees, but it is far better to draw what one now only sees in one's memory. That is a transformation in which imagination collaborates with memory." - Edgar Degas

annotated source:
"The psychologist Howard Gardner provides the following examples: To one four-year old child, a streak of skywriting is "a scar in the sky"; to another of about the same age, her naked body is "barefoot all over"; to a third, a flashlight battery is a "sleeping bag all rolled up and ready to go to a friend's house"; and so on. Much of the magic of childhood is expressed by, and owned to, these metaphors and metaphorical - that is, transformational - ways of seeing." (Phillips, Escapism, 169)

[Tuan, Yi-fu. Escapism. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins UP, 1998. Print.]

This passage leads me to another quote, "Although maturation is desired and desirable, not all of it is gain. There are also losses - losses of innocence and of wonder." (Phillips, Escapism, 161) I makes me think that sometimes we tend to see only on the surface, we tend to want to be so grounded that we become dull and lack that youthful feature of children, imagination and simplistic deciphering. I want to have a nice balance between the two, innocence and maturation of the mind.

summary:
This passage here scares me, "The illusion of his being conscious is created by memory. We actually remember only moments of consciousness, although we do not realize that this is so." I feel that with long exposures and time lapse images, it is like breaking across all those rules and boundaries. The element that fascinates me the most in long exposures and light drawings is the inability to recreate the exact same image again. Memory is the same. Once you have passed through the moment of experience, everything you think, breath, thought of, talk about, remember will never be precise and exact like that first intake of life. And each time you remember an event, the memory grows further and further from the "raw" truth, the raw data from the first moment it entered your mind. We are not as conscious and alive as we think we are... are we?