We assume in our search that word is just word, but the phenomenon is always dual: we assume the word to be what it is supposed to be and not what it really is, an image at the same time. When we accept the plurality of words and images, that words do become a way of reaching the images or vice versa, we come to appreciate the experience the way it really exists. The idea is not negative, that since we are con-fusing words and image all the time we can never find the truth. The ultimate truth is the desire toward expression. This “con-fusion” process embodies this truth. In expressional experience, one and many are not at odds, that in some way they are being fused and they represent a form of truth. In the con-fusion process, what is still being said has not yet been fully said, and it is the attempt which is the value of the con-fusion since it has consequences. We delight in it because in this we find many incarnations. Con-fusion, in a way, is pantheistic.~ Akhter Ahsen, New Surrealism, p63
Eidetic images move from the outer to the inner world of the self, and as they come back out again, they deal with the external world. The central emphasis in these images is how to break through old structures in the mind and build new ones and how to get a burst of newness, of creativity, revitalizing the way we perceive the world and can change the world.
~ Akhter Ahsen, ABC of Imagery, pp 8-9
It is universal knowledge that conflict in human beings continues from childhood into adulthood and later on into old age. In fact, adults appear to be more conflicted than children and as such more in need of enactment of this special type of sensory imagery revealed in the eidetic. Once we accept the role of eidetic imagery in the replay of a sensory stimulus for children, we cannot get rid of it as a necessary function in later life, because the need for replay of a sensory stimulus never really ceases at any state of life. Here lies the fundamental importance of the eidetic in the empirical theory.
The eidetic places a different accent on the approach to and status of memory in psychology, posing the question whether memory is central or peripheral in the study of developmental processes. For a child it would be difficult to reflect on pure memory. It is more adult to deal with memory and to reflect on it in order to make something out of it. The child has almost no capacity to treat memory as memory because he still finds himself attached to the previous experience in a manner that he cannot extricate himself from the ongoing nature to reflect upon it. The capacity for a special type of reflection is preserved in the eidetic image in that it is not yet memory per se but an ongoing experience. The struggle in the first perception which continues on in the eidetic is reflected upon in a more involved and dramatic fashion. If we look at the nature of a child’s reflection during eidetic imagery, we find that the reflection in the child is very profoundly empirical, relating to and examining sensation, and the operations appearing in it are the ongoing type rather than of the sealed type as in intellectual thinking. One would suppose that reflection always begins that way and with the passage of time becomes more constricted, more fossilized and more like memory, a mere remembrance of the shell rather than a slice of life. However, the original reflection never loses the quality of being a part of the inherent operations of the mind, that is, the real empirical core. Thus, in a deep philosophical sense child’s reflection is the real empirical model in which the object and subject are closely united yet sufficiently free to play upon each other in a more experimental way.
~ Akhter Ahsen, Behaviorists’ Misconduct in Science, pp116-117
The striped tiger in the image in the mind is more active than its flat photograph would be if printed on a page. Perhaps I cannot count the stripes of the tiger in my mind because they mingle in the graceful movement. It is not unclarity that I am talking about either, because the blur is due to the movement, not because the photograph in the mind is dull. The striped tiger is not out of focus but in a different terrain, which is mind. … I cannot count the stripes because the tiger is on the move. The static images in the mind are signs of an uneasy, constricted control which cannot deal with a living memory with all its intentionalities intact.
~ Akhter Ahsen, Imagery Paradigm, p47
Our hand, if not moved, can go to sleep, but the eye skips away without us noticing it. Of all the sense organs, the eye remains radiant in a very special and explicit way, for which it has become the symbol of imagination, even of the creative imagination.
~ Akhter Ahsen, Imagery Paradigm, p53
Why does a person feel that he or she has to control the mind? It may be a sign that there is something in it that needs to be watched and there is something the person doesn’t want to be let out. Rather than attend to control of the heads or the mind, the better thing would be for the person to free them. The word “control” in this sense means limitation, because by controlling the mind and the heads, they will again do only what the person wants and lets them do. By freeing the heads and the mind, on the other hand, a person can come to be more creative, more open, less limited, and perhaps even more efficient in certain ways. The many heads and the mind should be fed, not controlled, since control leads one back to the way most people already function with their one head.
The most beautiful aspect of imagery is that in an image the mind is as free as it can be. You can see whatever you see and because it is an image and it is not going to hurt anyone, you can have all the fun and joy you want with it. The mind is free because you have basically given up control and are letting it be spontaneous. Allowing the mind sometimes to image freely and just see where it goes, what it does, is very restful.
~ Akhter Ahsen, New Surrealism, p326
I wish to know my mind so that when I am in the presence of anyone who is unable to hear what I say and unable to know what I know to be true, that I will continue to be connected to my own mind’s illumination and not cover my eyes in shame.
~ Akhter Ahsen, Imagery and the Internet
We are dealing here with the issue of elegance in a deep sense of the meaning. In the deepest way we can assert that nature is elegant, and any procedure which aims to bring out nature has to be likewise elegant. It should carry out the nuances of the original nature by establishing an approach which is itself elegant. From beginning to end this natural elegance must be explicitly maintained. The approach must assert that the person who is undergoing this fundamental revision of personal life has the elegant part inside as a given from nature that has only been thwarted during the developmental time. The elegance of the approach should maintain further that the nature in the person never dies and will surface when the person chooses slow time. Thus it will be the elegance in its most natural mode which will bypass the defense mechanisms and will spot the material when it is there to be seen. Our job is to make the moment a recognizable reality which can be contacted and re-created and re-lived consciously in the current time. When we have all met in the same moment of elegance and spotted the same elegant material and can re-create it through the same free will, we have achieved our civic goal.
When the elegance is present at so many levels one has been finally brought to nature at all those levels. When elegance has reached this final form, we have a perfect time made of all the cycles, slow as well as speedy. The use of the word “perfect” is not incautious here but fully descriptive of the essence of nature as perfection in all time rhythms. During participation in history where the conflict resides we may have difficulty defining experience, but at that time of presented chaos the hologram that sleeps blissfully, knows completely.
~ Akhter Ahsen, Menstruation & Menopause, p126
The common bond between the two chess players remains the image. The predictive ability which this image harbors is deep and far-reaching; it reaches into the underworld as well as to the sky. In the image, both the profane and the sacred meet. It depends entirely on the person, what he will contribute through it, evil or good.
~ Akhter Ahsen, Trojan Horse, p246
