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The situations we encounter in life can be subjected to the scrutiny of what we might call our administrative consciousness, which deals with those aspects of our existence which are overt, palpable, manageable by the well-tried techniques of our practical intelligence, and nearly always trivial when judged as elements in our ultimate well-being. Or they can be subjected to the more searching scrutiny of our fuller and more intense consciousness, which recognizes that … the data of sense for the most part function as cues soliciting our creative contribution as agents who schematize, conceptualize, and evaluate everything that lies before us; that we build our freshly given materials into a definite meaningful panorama by enfolding them within other, richer materials drawn from the many reservoirs of memory and structured by our ceaselessly effectual imagination; and that this whole creative activity can terminate either in a turning towards those experiences and images which symbolize possibilities of truer fulfilment at the cost of greater challenge, effort, and risk, or a turning away from these to seek refuge in the narrower but safer confines of standardized external meaning from which every reminder of existential depth and personal trial has been carefully pruned. (en) |
