Price: 25 zł
Author: Jadwiga Magnuszewska
Number of pages: 142
Holistyczny Umysł.
Studium Przypadku
(A Holistic Mind. A Case Study)
This book is a one-of-a-kind journal documenting the creative process culminating in the creation of the Panstructural Theory of Everything. Readers have the rare opportunity to get a behind-the-scenes look at how a holistic mind works. The curious will find included here a description of activities that positively influenced the author's creativity, and which can be successfully undertaken by anyone individually. Jadwiga Magnuszewska—as she herself states—has built her creative muscles and tamed inspiration to the degree that it is not a fleeting gift for her anymore: it has become a skill that she has developed. Some of the notes concern the peculiarities of a holistic mind, and thus also skills that will not be accessible to everybody. The text preserves the dates of notes made on an ongoing basis by the author, which makes it possible to follow subsequent stages in the development of her mind and the whole range of its specific features. Reading this publication leads to the conclusion that Jadwiga Magnuszewska's exceptional creativity is not, however, only a matter of the particular features of her mind, but of many years' practice. The Panstructural Theory of Everything was born both from this creativity and from observation of life. Penetrating daily observation of life (and her mind) is the author's source for more and more data, which allow her to constantly, arduously work on the improving the model of reality. Holistyczny umysł is a book that is strongly recommended to all those who are interested in issues related to creativity and the mind. It is also a compulsory position for those who in their professional practice daily encounter tasks requiring creativity and wish to increase their creative potential.
Introduction
Describing a process in which great things are formed is valuable, because it shows the stages of their development. It provides an opportunity to become familiar with the solutions discovered and apply them during work on other topics.
This book contains posts published on my blog, psteoria.salon24.pl. The posts were written on an ongoing basis, as my understanding of the creative process occurring in my mind during the creation of PSTheory increased. (…)
41. Concepts close in meaning, i.e. defining by finding differences
04.02.2015
Today I will write about two peculiarities characterising my creative process.
You can say that I grab insights in flight and write them down, because they immediately disappear from by consciousness, without lodging themselves in memory.
When I start to hash out a new topic, and I have the feeling that it involves something structural, I write out all its associations, I have the impression of being suspended in a vacuum. Then I have to leave the subject to let those associations root themselves in memory. Afterwards, some time later, I return to those topics and from the scrap heap of associations concepts emerge, which I treat as directions for study. A direction does not say: here is something, it says: move in this direction to find something.
Then I have to give my unconscious mind more time to assemble these concepts into something of a model of superordinate quality, which unifies those concepts.
Finally all that remains is work on the model, concept names and detailed definitions.
Names are very important, they have to open the mind, the mind must flow over the names and not stop to labour at deciphering the meaning of a given concept, because its name is complicated or ambiguous, or remote from daily experience. It seems to me that inappropriate names are what often blocks the development of scientific theories, because they push it in the wrong direction. In the next phase, I write down those concepts and wait to see what story (model) my unconscious mind will tell, in which those concepts are the heroes.
This all happens in several attempts, so that the mind has time to work in the background. I have created comfortable conditions for such work, I have no responsibilities weighing on the mind and I allow it to be occupied only with the General Structural Theory of Everything. Perhaps the effect is that my mind is constantly working on it—in the background, of course.
I also exercise my creative muscles by writing poems—daily training to keep myself in shape creatively.
I noticed that to clarify a definition it is worth writing down several concepts at a time, which concern the same issue or have, at first glance, a common semantic field. Searching for differences between these concepts and searching for shared relationships helps clarify the definition.
Example:
We have an Entity System and an Entity Identity. Both describe the Entity. But what makes my mind consider both concepts to be significant, differing from one another, to be structural concepts? And here clarifications appear: The Entity System is a structural model, the Entity Identity is a comprehensive identification of the Entity.