This book explores a dimension of mind that is only a potentiality at birth. This in itself is not so unusual as all adult capabilities are only developed with time and practice as we grow. The translucent imagination is different, however, in that it usually goes not only undeveloped but completely unnoticed throughout the entire course of life. It differs in how it functions once it is noticed and developed. The imagination we are all familiar with I call the reflective imagination. It functions at the confluence of memory and motivation, and allies itself with the self promotional strategies of self nature. It is reflective in that it configures or images the world in accord with the conceptual outlook of the ordinary mind. In this sense, it reflects the beliefs and fictions of our conceptual world view. By contrast, the translucent imagination at first appears subversive. It arises and allies itself with a dimension of mind that is not structured or limited by concepts. This dimension of mind is our pure and natural timeless awareness. Once the translucent imagination has been developed and is fully functioning through expert tutelage and disciplined practice, it functions to see through the conceptual fictions of the ordinary dimension of mind. It is subversive because it subverts the self promotional strategies that ego would have us believe are in our best interest. The translucent imagination unites aspects of Eastern and Western spiritual traditions, and is a powerful tool that offers a way out of the chaos that contemporary consciousness creates for itself.

Most adult believers would acknowledge that the absolute reality of God is unimaginable, and yet the ordinary mind cannot think about divinity without creating images of that reality. This book explores a variety of ways in which our imagination influences what we believe and think we know about God. Even as some theories and the methods behind them yield better results in practice, so certain forms of the imagination yield a truer connection to the divine. Curiously, cutting-edge scienceoften viewed as inimical to engagement with the divineis itself creating new images for a conception of divinity that intimately penetrates all that is. Frontier cutting-edge science will thus become one of three interpenetrating streams that impact the influence of the imagination on the knowledge of God. The other two are the conceptual dimension of mind and what I distinguish as the awareness dimension of mind. The application of my theory about the influence of the imagination on the knowledge of God is whether the reader can make practical connections to their experience of suffering in the world and find some diminishment of that suffering. If that does not happen, I apologize to my readers for wasting their time.

In Teilhard’s view, however, evolution is necessarily benign because of the elemental influence that the Christic Incarnation has upon all matter. Cosmologically, in his view, the map allows for only one destination. The development of my book will examine whether and to what extent the essential philosophical elements assumed by Teilhard’s science permit, foster, favor or inhibit the realization of the utopian vision. Therefore, we will examine the thought of Teilhard de Chardin as exhibited principally in The Human Phenomenon as to its usefulness as a Big Map leading from the paramesium to paradise. The reader might find it helpful, in this extended examination, to keep Samuel Huntington’s five criteria in mind when examining a map, a model or a paradigm. Is it able to do the following: 1. order and generalize about reality; 2. understand causal relationships among phenomena; 3. anticipate and even predict future developments; 4. distinguish what is important from the unimportant; 5. show us what paths we should take to achieve our goal. (Huntington, p.30)

Material Imagination in Architecture draws on history and the visual arts, and contemporary architecture to explore this popular theme in architectural practice and education. In the context of a discipline increasingly driven by digital production, this text explores architecture and making and the diverse influences on the material reality of architectural form: it argues that the crafts, fabrication and assemblage of its making remain vital elements of contemporary architectural language. This broad-ranging text bridges the gap between a technical or otherwise fragmentary knowledge of materials of the specialist, and the tacit or instinctive understanding of materials that the artist, sculptor or architect may have. It identifies key material themes pertinent to contemporary architectural debate and develops a discourse about future practice that is framed by environmental imperatives and grounded in a historical understanding of the meaning and use of materials. Material iconology in architecture is a well-established tradition and this book draws on that background to investigate the possibilities, and limits, of using materials in contemporary design to communicate the themes and contexts of an architectural project, a material’s relationship to context, and to the history of practices that belong to the traditions of making buildings. Each theme is explored in case studies from twelve countries around the world, including the UK, USA, Spain, Italy, Germany, Australia and China.

Over 2 million copies sold worldwide! Be inspired to create and build amazing models with your LEGO® bricks! The LEGO Ideas Book is packed full of tips from expert LEGO builders on how to make jet planes reach new heights, create fantastic fortresses, swing through lush jungles, have fun on the farm and send space shuttles out of this world! This awesome ideas book is divided into six themed chapters - transport, buildings, space, kingdoms, adventure, and useful makes - to inspire every member of the family to get building. With over 500 models and ideas, this book is perfect for any LEGO fan - young or young at heart - who want to make their models cool, fun and imaginative. ©2020 The LEGO Group.

Although the concept of productive imagination plays a fundamental role in Kant, German Idealism, Romanticism, Phenomenology and Hermeneutics, the meaning of this central concept remains largely undetermined. The significance of productive imagination is therefore all-too-often either inflated or underrated. The articles collected in this volume trace the development of productive imagination through the history of philosophy, identify the different meanings this concept has been ascribed in different philosophical frameworks, and raise the question anew concerning this concept’s philosophical significance. Special attention is given to the historical background that underlies the emergence of productive imagination in modernity, to Kant’s concept of productive imagination, to the further development of this concept in German Idealism, Wilhelm Dilthey, Edmund Husserl, Ernst Cassirer and Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre and Paul Ricoeur. A group of leading scholars present a systematic and comprehensive reference tool for anyone working in the firsl of social imaginaries.

Boldly original and boundary defining, The Topological Imagination clears a space for an intellectual encounter with the shape of human imagining. Joining two commonly opposed domains, literature and mathematics, Angus Fletcher maps the imagination’s ever-ramifying contours and dimensions, and along the way compels us to re-envision our human existence on the most unusual sphere ever imagined, Earth. Words and numbers are the twin powers that create value in our world. Poetry and other forms of creative literature stretch our ability to evaluate through the use of metaphors. In this sense, the literary imagination aligns with topology, the branch of mathematics that studies shape and space. Topology grasps the quality of geometries rather than their quantifiable measurements. It envisions how shapes can be bent, twisted, or stretched without losing contact with their original forms—one of the discoveries of the eighteenth-century mathematician Leonhard Euler, whose Polyhedron Theorem demonstrated how shapes preserve “permanence in change,” like an aging though familiar face. The mysterious dimensionality of our existence, Fletcher says, is connected to our inhabiting a world that also inhabits us. Theories of cyclical history reflect circulatory biological patterns; the day-night cycle shapes our adaptive, emergent patterns of thought; the topology of islands shapes the evolution of evolutionary theory. Connecting literature, philosophy, mathematics, and science, The Topological Imagination is an urgent and transformative work, and a profound invitation to thought.

I have long admired the mythopoetic tradition in curriculum studies. That admiration followed from my experience as a high-school teacher of English in a wealthy suburb of New York City at the end of the 1960s. A “dream” job—I taught four classes of 15–20 students during a nine-period day—in a “dream” suburb (where I could afford to reside only by taking a room in a retired teacher’s house), many of these often Ivy-League-bound students had everything but meaningful lives. This middle-class, Midwestern young teacher was flabbergasted. In one sense, my academic life has been devoted to understanding that searing experience. Matters of meaning seemed paramount in the curriculum field to which Paul Klohr introduced me at Ohio State. Klohr assigned me the work of curriculum theorists such as James B. Macdonald. Like Timothy Leonard (who also studied with Klohr at Ohio State) and Peter Willis, Macdonald (1995) understood that school reform was part of a broader cultural and political crisis in which meaning is but one casualty. In the mythopoetic tradition in curriculum studies, scholars labor to understand this crisis and the conditions for the reconstruction of me- ing in our time, in our schools.

Imagining the University seeks to address each of the issues facing higher education and does so by first, identifying a very wide range of ideas of the university as it is now unfolding and could become; secondly, by evaluating those conceptions of the university with a classification of ideas of the university; and thirdly, by reflecting on the imagination itself, its current impoverishment and its possibilities. Whether studying, researching or deciding policy, this book is vital reading to all those involved in the planning and delivery of higher education.

In The Emerald City, Dan Willis takes us on a flight of imagination that paradoxically never strays far from the most tangible, even intimate subjects. His essays range from the Tower of Babel to the Wizard of Oz, from Christo to Christmas trees, from the "lightness of being" to the "weight of architecture." This ultimately optimistic book suggests that architecture is as vital as ever: "It is tempting to say that our present cultural situation...has rendered architecture nearly impossible if not unnecessary. But it is also possible to look to what our lives, at the turn of the millennium, typically lack-fulfillment, spirituality, a sense of belonging, weight-and to conclude that the ground for architecture has never been more fertile. The texts-intelligent and readable-draw equally from literary sources, architectural practice, philosophical analyses, pop culture, and everyday experiences. Willis's perspective as a writer, architect, artist, and teacher informs his work; his texts are at once reflective and proactive, as they challenge readers to rethink their participation in the built environment. Accompanying the text are the author's original illustrations, which link the forms and forces surrounding architecture at the end of the twentieth century in novel, thought-provoking ways.