Pacific Union College - Diogenes Lantern Yearbook (Angwin, CA)

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help train the imagination of his students. There's very little that's really been nowadays in our modern culture to train it. Everything is so explicit. Tele- vision programs tell us how to react, how to feel. Advertising is based on manipulating our feelings, our thoughts, our imaginations. We have really very little understanding of how the imagination works in life and how it is related to the other mental activities. Now in selecting material, one needs to select the kind of works that give the imagination the kind of training that one wants. Per- haps the most important thing here is disciplining the imagina- tion. An undisciplined imagina- tion leads to fantasies, day- dreams and just mindless or frivolous activity. And so it means then to be reined in and subordinated to other powers of the mind so that it can be This is both a doctrinal matter and an imaginative one focused on the subjects that one wants to, or that need to be focused on. Things like feeling sympathy for people, under- standing nature sensitively, be- yond the mere factual thing. And so the first thing one does is to select selections which dis- cipline and enable one to com- mand his imagination instead of enabling it to command him. This of course means that the works which are chosen are works which are purposeful in their exercise of the imagina- tion. We wouldn't choose por- nography, because it merely manipulates. And so a person avoids various kinds of things which use the imagination for a specific kind of end which is either dishonorable, or dis- honest, or not valuable. DL: In your choice of materials, have you encountered any ad-

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