Not giving our imagination away to objects and places
Transcript of this video:
Continuing my little nostalgic visit I’m standing in front of a rather grand library called the Radcliffe Camera.
I remember early in my career here I discovered a spot in this rather magnificent library where I found that I could really focus and study and I thought ah this is the perfect place to write my essays and really think deeply.
And I told all my friends about this perfect spot
But then what I noticed after three or four visits is it didn’t seem to work anymore.
And I had to go and find somewhere else to create the magic space and I think it’s only human that we vest objects and places with magic properties that don’t really belong to them but actually belong to us – a human characteristic advertising people are very fond of exploiting when they’re trying to get us to buy things as if they have magic properties.
While I’ve been here I did a wonderful variation on the Unhurried Conversation process where five of us sat down and we each had five small pebbles which my host Rob had gathered from his backyard and the idea was we would take turns in the conversation spending one pebble on each turn.
It was a simple little variation on a theme that worked rather beautifully and I found myself observing that the pebbles were rather beautiful.
We really appreciated these little everyday objects found in the backyard had become rather special but I also said – I didn’t use this term but I’m going to use it now – they’re ‘transitional objects’ and it’s rather beautiful that we’re not then going to put them into a museum case and make them sacred and turn them into what the philosopher David Bohm called ‘idols.’
We’re going to throw them back in the backyard, rather like the Buddhists do with a sand mandala.
I think it’s a lovely reminder of the importance of owning our own imagination and not allowing it to get glued or attached to external idols and objects.
(The pebble process comes from Neil Baker.)
