THE INNER LIFE, THE CREATIVE LIFE

.

.

.

From THE URANTIA BOOK

Part III, 111, 4

 

THE INNER LIFE

 

   Recognition is the intellectual process of fitting the sensory impressions received from the external world into the memory patterns of the individual. Understanding connotes that these recognized sensory impressions and their associated memory patterns have become integrated or organized into a dynamic network of principles.

 

  Meanings are derived from a combination of recognition and understanding. Meanings are nonexistent in a wholly sensory or material world. Meanings and values are only perceived in the inner or supermaterial spheres of human experience.
.

 .

   The advances of true civilization are all born in this inner world of mankind. It is only the inner life that is truly creative. Civilization can hardly progress when the majority of the youth of any generation devote their interests and energies to the materialistic pursuits of the sensory or outer world.
.

.

.

   The inner and the outer worlds have a different set of values. Any civilization is in jeopardy when three quarters of its youth enter materialistic professions and devote themselves to the pursuit of the sensory activities of the outer world. Civilization is in danger when youth neglect to interest themselves in ethics, sociology, eugenics, philosophy, the fine arts, religion, and cosmology.
.

 .

   Only in the higher levels of the superconscious mind as it impinges upon the spirit realm of human experience can you find those higher concepts in association with effective master patterns which will contribute to the building of a better and more enduring civilization. Personality is inherently creative, but it thus functions only in the inner life of the individual.
.

 .

   Snow crystals are always hexagonal in form, but no two are ever alike. Children conform to types, but no two are exactly alike, even in the case of twins. Personality follows types but is always unique.
.

.

  Happiness and joy take origin in the inner life. You cannot experience real joy all by yourself. A solitary life is fatal to happiness. Even families and nations will enjoy life more if they share it with others.
.

.

   You cannot completely control the external world—environment. It is the creativity of the inner world that is most subject to your direction because there your personality is so largely liberated from the fetters of the laws of antecedent causation. There is associated with personality a limited sovereignty of will.
.

 .

   Since this inner life of man is truly creative, there rests upon each person the responsibility of choosing as to whether this creativity shall be spontaneous and wholly haphazard or controlled, directed, and constructive. How can a creative imagination produce worthy children when the stage whereon it functions is already preoccupied by prejudice, hate, fears, resentments, revenge, and bigotries?

.

. 

   Ideas may take origin in the stimuli of the outer world, but ideals are born only in the creative realms of the inner world. Today the nations of the world are directed by men who have a superabundance of ideas, but they are poverty-stricken in ideals. That is the explanation of poverty, divorce, war, and racial hatreds.

.

. 

   This is the problem: If freewill man is endowed with the powers of creativity in the inner man, then must we recognize that freewill creativity embraces the potential of freewill destructivity. And when creativity is turned to destructivity, you are face to face with the devastation of evil and sin—oppression, war, and destruction. Evil is a partiality of creativity which tends toward disintegration and eventual destruction. All conflict is evil in that it inhibits the creative function of the inner life—it is a species of civil war in the personality.

 .

.

   Inner creativity contributes to ennoblement of character through personality integration and selfhood unification. It is forever true: The past is unchangeable; only the future can be changed by the ministry of the present creativity
 of the inner self.
.

.
Your soul is all that you possess.
  Take it in hand and make something of it!
Martin H. Fischer
German-American Physician and Writer, 1879-1962
.

.
The greatest hazard of all, losing one's self, can occur very quietly in the world, as if it were nothing at all. No other loss can occur so quietly; any other loss - an arm, a leg, five dollars, a wife, etc. - is sure to be noticed.
Soren Kierkegaard
The Sickness Unto Death, 1849
.

.

 

THE INNER WORLD

.

.
.

.

.

.

.

.

.
.
Happiness and joy take origin in the inner life.

You cannot experience real joy all by yourself. A solitary life is fatal to happiness. Even families and nations will enjoy life more if they share it with others.

You cannot completely control the external world — environment.

It is the creativity of the inner world that is most subject to your direction because there your personality is so largely liberated from the fetters of the laws of antecedent causation. There is associated with personality a limited sovereignty of will.

Since this inner life of man is truly creative,

there rests upon each person the responsibility of choosing as to whether this creativity shall be spontaneous and wholly haphazard or controlled, directed, and constructive. How can a creative imagination produce worthy children when the stage whereon it functions is already preoccupied by prejudice, hate, fears, resentments, revenge, and bigotries?

Ideas may take origin in the stimuli of the outer world,

but ideals are born only in the creative realms of the inner world. Today the nations of the world are directed by men who have a superabundance of ideas, but they are poverty-stricken in ideals. That is the explanation of poverty, divorce, war, and racial hatreds.

This is the problem: If freewill man is endowed

with the powers of creativity in the inner man, then must we recognize that freewill creativity embraces the potential of freewill destructivity. And when creativity is turned to destructivity, you are face to face with the devastation of evil and sin — oppression, war, and destruction. Evil is a partiality of creativity which tends toward disintegration and eventual destruction. All conflict is evil in that it inhibits the creative function of the inner life — it is a species of civil war in the personality.

Inner creativity contributes to ennoblement of character through personality integration and selfhood unification. It is forever true: The past is unchangeable; only the future can be changed by the ministry of the present creativity of the inner self.

.

From THE URANTIA BOOK

Part III, 111, 4

.

GROWTH

.

.
Intellectual growth should commence at

birth and cease only at death.

*

Albert Einstein

-+-

The great thing in the world is not so much

where we stand, as in what direction we are

moving.

*

Oliver Wendell Holmes

-+-

When you blame others,

you give up the power to change.

*

Dr. Robert Anthony

-+-

When you're finished changing,

you're finished.

*

Benjamin Franklin

-+-

He not busy being born is busy dying.

*

Bob Dylan

-+-

Conformity is the jailer of freedom

and the enemy of growth.

*

John F. Kennedy

-+-

Change and growth take place when a person

has risked himself and dares to become involved

in experimenting with his own life.

*

Herbert A. Otto

.

WHAT CAN YOU TELL FROM A FACE?

.

The picture posted on the web site is of a man is in his 20s, with a dozen tufts of brown hair dotting his mostly shaved head. He is smiling, standing sideways to the camera in what looks like a dorm room.

The site asks whether, at the end of dinner, this anonymous person would:

a. Pay for the check

b. Split the check with you

c. Wait for you to pay

d. Put a roach in the leftovers and demand the meal for free.

Knowing no more than what you see, you click on an answer. Most respondents say he would pay the check.

This is EasyMixing.com, a two-month-old web site created by Yuri Ostrovsky, currently a graduate student of Pawan Sinha, assistant professor of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, and Timothy Nichols, who was a student of Sinha's when both were at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.

Besides being a fun site where you can upload your photo, answer questions about strangers or maybe find a date, Sinha says the site is a large-scale experiment in face perception. And the questions, while sometimes funny, are scientifically designed to pertain to different personality traits.

What information can be gleaned from a face? Ostrovsky and Nichols plan to statistically analyze the responses to assess consistency and variance across observers. As statistics accumulate, they will use them to conduct searches for faces that share similar trait profiles.

Thus, a user may be able to say, "Show me people who are trustworthy, amusing and sincere," and the site will supply them with appropriate individuals. This, Ostrovsky says, is fairly straightforward. A more intriguing question is whether individuals with matching trait profiles will also match visually. If so, users will be able to say, "Show me people who look like this person" and the site will be able to find them.

Finding similar-looking people is an ill-defined problem in computer vision. Computers cannot easily fathom what it means for two people to look like each other.

"The hope is that this new method may be more useful for certain types of face-search problems," Ostrovsky said. "This would be a significant departure from conventional face-search schemes where visual searches are based solely on image structure."

"There are two basic questions this experiment is designed to address," said Sinha, scientific advisor to EasyMixing.com. "Can aspects of an individual's traits (other than identity, age and gender) be reliably assessed just from their facial appearance (and how valid are these assessments)? Conversely, do a collection of such assessments constrain the appearance of a face? If so, can we devise new strategies for searching large databases of faces?"

The web is an ideal medium for the experiment because it provides a very large and diverse collection of faces and a large group of respondents, Ostrovsky said. While most people have preferred to post their pictures than to answer questions, and the site has not been advertised in any way, there are a few hundred members and the numbers are increasing daily.

"It's not a controlled experiment as it would be in a lab, but it's a more realistic experience. There's no experimenter bias where the very design of the experiment coaxes the subject to answer in a particular way, or the subject answers in a way he thinks will please the experimenter," Ostrovsky said.

Accompanying a black-and-white picture of a vampiress-like woman with large upcast eyes and long straight black hair is a question about how she might act in relationships. Most respondents decided that after her last relationship, she was the "psycho girlfriend." Can you really tell from someone's face whether she is a reasonable person or if he would wait 45 minutes for a table in a restaurant? "This is an ongoing project," Ostrovsky said. "We've let it take on a life of its own."

Ostrovsky's thesis is on how people process information to recognize three-dimensional objects. While this includes faces, he says EasyMixing.com is mostly for fun. The real challenge will lie in phase two of the site, in which he will try to come up with a way to use the lists of traits - and no visual cues - to search the face database.

"People may say that a person has an 'honest face' or 'looks aggressive,'" Sinha said. "These inferences may be incorrect, but it is interesting to examine what they are and which facial attributes they correspond to. How consistent are these judgments across different observers and how valid, compared to other independent measures of these traits? These are largely unexplored questions and the answers can turn out to have far-reaching implications."


A version of this article appeared in MIT Tech Talk on December 4, 2002.