“Change Your Conception Of Yourself And You Will Automatically Change The World In Which You Live.

~Some Thoughts on Fantasy, Music, and Resonation~

I was recently listening to a friend talk about why philosophy was pointless, the idea that it was just discussion and no real change came of it. Unreal, impractical, useless. Overall, his reasons were undeveloped, underthought, and devoid of any real conviction and it seemed to me that he was far more confused as to why it was a source of study and the purpose it served than he was actually critical of the practice as a whole. But it got me thinking about the "unreal" and the impossible.

And it caused 2 thoughts to spring into my mind. First, fantasy at its core is the unreal. It is so magnificent because it simply cannot be. We explore the worlds made of a different yarn than our world. There are similarities, some things that are shared, but the rules of nature itself is the difference. A new world is made by using the mysterious pieces of our own world. Yet, the interesting thing about this phenomenon isn't the created thing, but rather the reaction to it. People love it, obsess over it, delve deeper into the lore and history of these unreal worlds. The feeling of exploration and the other feelings that those worlds inspire, the auras, the "vibes" are what pull people in.

Which brings me to my second thought, which is what those vibes invoke in me from other forms and mediums. Music, for instance.

Most people who I have spoken to listening to music are far more drawn to the lyrics of the song, than its ambiance, or its emotion in the music. Music draws forth an emotion in it's own right, which the lyrics add voice and thought to. Both are of immense importance to a song's creation, and neither can be of lesser value. Yet, those emotions which are incited by the music still exist, even if unrecognized. Thus, the musical vibe and the lyrical emotions are not only separate, but also shift how we resonate with the songs themselves.

All of this brings me to 2 unanswerable questions.

1. Does fantasy invoke the emotional response of a uniquely philosophical need for limitless potential?

And by that, I mean that as fantasy is outside of the realm of possibility, is it due to our natural inclination of creation? Or our need to explore the unknowns? The exploration of a new limitless-ness, rather than the confines of our universe?

2. Does our individual resonation with music reflect our adherence or non-adherence to artistic intentions? (In other words, is the way we enjoy the song predicated on how the author wanted us to interpret the song?)

02/13/2021

I feel so relatably lonely.

Surrounded by others,I’m able to laugh and have fun,yet I’m so alone.

Truly,deeply,alone.

That was it all along.Loneliness.

Craving for a soul that matches your own.

Yearning for somebody that makes you feel right.

Longing for a meaningful connection to someone.

Silence feels so foreign to the point that i can’t breathe in it.

It’s helplessly eating me alive.

I want so much to happen just to fill this void i have inside of me.

Oh.It feels so compelling.Numbness seems a divine state of being right this moment.

How good would it be to be back to the old me?

Too much.And yet nothing at all.

Who am I in this life?

Who am I in this moment?

What am I supposed to be living for?

“You’re going to love it.

You’re going to love the you that has always wanted to be you.”

Right?

“If you’re going through hell, keep going.”

— Winston Churchill

Everything you did to me, I remember.

Mama, I made it out of your home alive, raised by the voices in my head.

— Warsan Shire, from “Extreme Girlhood,” Bless the Daughter Raised by a Voice in Her Head

I find myself opposed to the view of knowledge as a passive copy of reality.

- Jean Piaget 1896-1980

How do we learn things? The answers to this age-old question have been examined and analysed by many scientists. There are plenty of prominent theories explaining cognitive development and helping us to understand the foundation of knowledge.

One of the most prominent answers to the question has come from a Swiss psychologist, Jean Piaget.

The legacy of Jean Piaget to the world of early childhood education is that he fundamentally altered the view of how a child learns. And a teacher, he believed, was more than a transmitter of knowledge she was also an essential observer and guide to helping children build their own knowledge.

As a university graduate, Swiss-born Piaget got a routine job in Paris standardising Binet-Simon IQ tests, where the emphasis was on children getting the right answers. Piaget observed that many children of the same ages gave the same kinds of incorrect answers. What could be learned from this?

Piaget interviewed many hundreds of children and concluded that children who are allowed to make mistakes often go on to discover their errors and correct them, or find new solutions. In this process, children build their own way of learning. From children’s errors, teachers can obtain insights into the child’s view of the world and can tell where guidance is needed. They can provide appropriate materials, ask encouraging questions, and allow the child to construct his own knowledge.

Piaget’s continued interactions with young children became part of his life-long research. After reading about a child who thought that the sun and moon followed him wherever he went, Piaget wanted to find out if all young children had a similar belief. He found that many did indeed believe this. Piaget went on to explore children’s countless “why” questions, such as, “Why is the sun round?” or “Why is grass green?” He concluded that children do not think like adults. Their thought processes have their own distinct order and special logic. Children are not “empty vessels to be filled with knowledge” (as traditional pedagogical theory had it). They are “active builders of knowledge-little scientists who construct their own theories of the world.”

Piaget’s Four Stages of Development

Sensorimotor Stage: Approximately 0 - 2 Infants gain their earliest understanding of the immediate world through their senses and through their own actions, beginning with simple reflexes, such as sucking and grasping.

Preoperational Stage: Approximately 2 - 6 Young children can use symbols for objects, such as numbers to express quantity and words such as mama, doggie, hat and ball to represent real people and objects.

Concrete Operations: Approximately 6 - 11 School-age children can perform concrete mental operations with symbols-using numbers to add or subtract and organizing objects by their qualities, such as size or color.

Formal Operations: Approximately 11 - adult Normally developing early adolescents are able to think and reason abstractly, to solve theoretical problems, and answer hypothetical questions.

Albert Einstein once called Piaget’s discoveries of cognitive development as, “so simple only a genius could have thought of it”. As the above shows, Piaget’s theory was born out of observations of children, especially as they were conducting play. When he was analysing the results of the intelligence test, he noticed that young children provide qualitatively different answers to older children.

This suggested to Piaget that younger children are not dumber, since this would be a quantitative position – an older child is smarter with more experience. Instead, the children simply answered differently because they thought of things differently.

At the heart of Piaget’s theory then is the idea that children are born with a basic mental structure, which provides the structure for future learning and knowledge. He saw development as a progressive reorganisation of these mental processes. This came about due to biological maturation, as well as environmental experience.

We are essentially constructing a world around us in which we try to align things that we already know and what we suddenly discover. Through the process, a child develops knowledge and intelligence, which helps him or her to reason and think independently.

For Piaget his work was never just for a closeted coterie of scholars and researcher but had real world application. Piaget was able to put his work in a wider context of importance. He said, “only education is capable of saving our societies from possible collapse, whether violent, or gradual”. Piaget’s theory centres on the idea that children, as little scientists, need to explore, interact with, and experiment in order to gain the information they need to understand their world.

“One has either to take people as they are, or leave them as they are. One cannot change them, one can merely disturb their balance. A human being, after all, is not made up of single pieces, from which a single piece can be taken out and replaced by something else.” - Franz Kafka, Letters to Felice‎

“I can’t tell you exactly what I’m looking for, but I’ll know it when it happens. I want to be breathless and weak, crumpled by the entrance of another person inside my soul.”

— Aimee Bender, The Girl in the Flammable Skirt

“So the myth in our society is that people are competitive by nature and that they are individualistic and that they’re selfish. The real reality is quite the opposite. We have certain human needs. The only way that you can talk about human nature concretely is by recognising that there are certain human needs. We have a human need for companionship and for close contact, to be loved, to be attached to, to be accepted, to be seen, to be received for who we are. If those needs are met, we develop into people who are compassionate and cooperative and who have empathy for other people. So… the opposite, that we often see in our society, is in fact, a distortion of human nature precisely because so few people have their needs met.”

— Gabor Maté

Whoever first said that poetry is dead failed to provide the autopsy. If poetry is dead, what a rowdy and glorious ghost. Poetry haunts. Poetry permeates the walls we put up. Poetry startles us awake and into our own aliveness. Poetry rustles the hairs on the backs of our necks and chases us into more compassionate rooms. Though it is difficult to change a stubborn mind, poetry can change our hearts in an instant.

Andrea Gibson and Megan Falley, from How Poetry Can Change Your Heart