THE THEOSOPHICAL PUBLISHING HOUSE Adyar, Madras, India • Wheaton, Illinois, USA First Edition 1892 Second Edition 1897 Third and Revised Edition 1898 Fourth and Revised Edition 1905 PREFACE FEW words are needed in sending this little book out into the world. It is the second of a series of Manuals designed to meet the public demand for a simple exposition of Theosophical teachings. Some have complained that our literature is at once too abstruse, too technical, and too expensive for the ordinary reader, and it is our hope that the present series may succeed in supplying what is a very real want. Theosophy is not only for the learned; it is for all. Perhaps among those who in these little books catch their first glimpse of its teachings,, there may be a few who will be led by them to penetrate more deeply into its philosophy, its science, and its religion, facing its abstruser problems with the student's zeal and the neophyte's ardour. But these Manuals are not written for the eager student, whom no initial difficulties can daunt; they are written for the busy men and women of the work-a-day world, and seek to make plain some of the great truths that render life easier to bear and death easier to face.

Written by servants of the Masters who are the Elder Brothers of our race, they can have no other object than to serve our fellow-men. Introduction 1 The Meaning of Reincarnation 8 What it is that Reincarnates 11 What it is that does not Reincarnate 21 The Method of Reincarnation 28 The Object of Reincarnation 45 The Cause of Reincarnation 52 The Proofs of Reincarnation 68 Objections to Reincarnation 89 A Last Word 94 INTRODUCTION IF it be difficult for a new truth to gain a hearing amid the strife of tongues that marks our modern civilisation it is yet more difficult for a truth to make itself heard which has become new only by force of age. If our eye could sweep over the intellectual history of the race, unrolled before us for centuries of millenniums, then a gap in the dominance of some world-wide idea, stretching over some few hundreds of years among a small number of the nations, would but slightly impress us. But when that gap—a mere partial fissure in an immemorial past—includes the intellectual development of Europe, and is scanned by Europeans, it assumes an importance quite out of proportion to its relative extent in time, its relative weight in argument. Great and valuable as is the contribution brought by Europe to the mental treasurehouse of mankind, we Europeans are very apt to overestimate it, and to forget that 2 the very brief period of intellectual achievement in Europe cannot rationally be taken as outweighing the total mental fruitage of the non-European races, gathered over thousands of centuries.

This looming large of our own recent past, until, as a plate held before our eyes shuts out the sun, it hides the past of the world from our mental gaze, is a danger against which we should be on our guard. The wise listen most readily to those whose habits of thoughts are most alien from their own, knowing that thus they may chance to catch a glimpse of some new aspect of truth, instead of seeing once more the mere reflection of the aspect already familiar. Men's racial habits, traditions, surroundings, are as coloured glasses through which they look at the sun of Truth; each glass lends its own tint to the sunbeam, and the white ray is transmitted as red, or blue, or yellow—what you will. As we cannot get rid of our glass and catch the pure uncoloured radiance, we do wisely to combine the coloured rays and so obtain the white.

Now Reincarnation is a truth that has swayed the minds of innumerable millions of our race, and has moulded the thoughts of the vast majority for uncounted centuries. It dropped out of the 3 European mind during the Dark Ages, and so ceased to influence our mental and moral development—very much, be it said in passing, to the injury of that development. For the last hundred years it has from time to time flashed through the minds of some of the greater Westerns, as a possible explanation of some of life's most puzzling problems: and during recent years, since its clear enunciation as an essential part of the Esoteric Teaching, it has been constantly debated, and is as constantly gaining ground, among the more thoughtful students of the mysteries of life and of evolution. There is, of course, no doubt that the great historical religions of the East included the teaching of Reincarnation as a fundamental tenet.

In India, as in Egypt, Reincarnation was at the root of ethics. Among the Jews it was held commonly by the Pharisees,1 and the popular belief comes out in. Various phrases in the New Testament, as when John the Baptist is regarded as a reincarnation of Elijah or as when the disciples ask whether the man born blind is suffering for the sin of his parents or for 1Josephus, Antig., xviii. I., § 3, says the virtuous 'shall have power to revive and live again.' 4 some former sin of his own. The Zohar, again, speaks of souls as being subjected to transmigration. 'All souls are subject to revolution (metempsychosis, a'leen b'gilgoolah), but men do not know the ways of the Holy One; blessed be it!

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They are ignorant of the way they have been judged in all time, and 'before they came into this world and when they have quitted it.' 1 The Kether Malkuth evidently has the same idea as that conveyed by Josephus, when it says: ' If she (the soul) be pure, then shall she obtain favour and rejoice in the latter day; but if she hath been denied, then shall she wander for a time in pain and despair,' 2 So also, we find the doctrine taught by eminent Fathers of the Church, and Ruffinus 3 states that belief in it was common among the primitive Fathers. Needless to say that the philosophic Gnostics and Neo-Platonists held it as an integral part of their doctrine.

If we glance to the Western Hemisphere we meet Reincarnation as a firmly rooted belief among many of the tribes of North and South America. The Mayas, with 1 Zohar, ii., fol. Quoted in Myer's Qabbalah, p. 2 Quoted in Myer's Qabbalah, p. 3 Letter to Anastasius, quoted by E.

Walker, in Reincarnation: A Study of Forgotten Truth. 5 their deeply interesting connection in language and symbolism with ancient Egypt, held the traditional doctrine, as has been shown by the investigations of Dr. To these, the name of many another tribe might be added, remnants of once famous nations, that in their decay have preserved the ancestral beliefs that once linked them with the mightiest peoples of the elder world. It could scarcely be expected that a teaching of such vast antiquity and such magnificent intellectual ancestry should fade out of the mind of mankind; and accordingly we find that the eclipse it suffered a few centuries ago was very partial, affecting only a small portion of the race. The ignorance that swamped Europe carried away belief in Reincarnation, as it carried away all philosophy, all metaphysics, and all science. Mediaeval Europe did not offer the soil on which could flourish any wide-sweeping and philosophical view of man's nature and destiny.

But in the East, which enjoyed a refined and gracious civilisation while Europe was sunk in barbarism; which had its philosophers and its poets while the West was densely illiterate; in the East, the great doctrine held undisputed sway, whether in the subtle metaphysics of the Brahmans, 6 or in the noble morality which finds its home under the shadow of the Buddha and His Good Law. But while a fact of Nature may in some part of the world for a time be ignored it cannot be destroyed, and, submerged for a moment, it will again reassert itself in the sight of men. This has been demonstrated anew in the history of the doctrine of Reincarnation in Europe, in its occasional reappearances, traceable from the founding of Christendom to the present time, in its growing acceptance today. When Christianity first swept over Europe, the inner thought of its leaders was deeply tinctured with this truth. The Church tried ineffectually to eradicate it, and in various sects it kept sprouting forth beyond the time of Erigena and Benaventura, its mediaeval advocates. Download Filter Breaker Psiphon 5 For Pc. Every great intuitional soul, as Paracelsus, Boehme and Swedenborg, has adhered to it.

The Italian luminaries, Giordano Bruno and Campanella, embraced it. The best of German philosophy is enriched by it. In Schopenhauer, Lessing, Hegel, Leibnitz, Herder, and Fichte the younger, it is earnestly advocated. The anthropological systems of Kant and Schelling furnish points of contact with it. The younger Helmont, in De Revolutions Animarum, adduces in two hundred problems all the arguments which may be urged in favour of the return of souls into human bodies, according to Jewish ideas. Of English thinkers, the Cambridge Platonists defended it with much learning and acuteness, most conspicuously Henry More; and in Cudworth and Hume, it ranks as the most rational theory of immortality.

Glanvil's Lux Orientalis devotes a curious treatise to it. It captivated the minds of Fourier and Leroux. Andre Pezzani's book on The Plurality of the Soul's Lines works out the system on the Roman Catholic idea of expiation.1 1 E. 7 The reader of Schopenhauer will be familiar with the aspect taken by Reincarnation in his philosophy.

Penetrated as was the great German with Eastern thought from his study of the Upanishads, it would have been passing strange had this corner-stone of Hindu philosophy found no place in his system. Nor is Schopenhauer the only philosopher from the Intellectual and mystical German people who has accepted Reincarnation as a necessary factor in Nature. The opinions of Fichte, of Herder, of Lessing, may surely claim to be of some weight in the intellectual world, and these men see in Reincarnation a solution for problems otherwise insoluble.

It is true that the intellectual world is not a despotic State, and none may impose his opinion on his fellows by personal authority; none the less are opinions weighed there rather than counted, and the mightier and more instructed intellects of the West, though they be here in a small minority, will command respectful hearing for that which they deliberately advance, from all whose minds are not so hide-bound by modern tradition as to be unable to appreciate the value of arguments addressed to the support of an unfashionable truth. 8 It is interesting to note that the mere idea of Reincarnation is no longer regarded in the West— at least by educated people—as absurd. It is-gradually assuming the position of a possible hypothesis, to be considered on its merits, on its power of explaining puzzling and apparently unrelated phenomena. Regarding it myself as, to me, a proven fact, I am concerned rather to put it forward on these pages as a probable hypothesis, throwing more light than does any other theory on the obscure problems of man's constitution, of his character, his evolution, and his destiny. Reincarnation and Karma are said by a Master to be the two doctrines of which the West stands most in. Need; so it cannot he ill done for a believer in the Masters to set forth an outline, for the ordinary reader, of this central teaching of the Esoteric Philosophy. THE MEANING OF REINCARNATION Let us start with a clear understanding of what is meant by Reincarnation.

So far as the derivation of the word is concerned, any repeated entering into a physical, or fleshly covering, might be included THE MEANING OF REINCARNATION 9 thereunder. It certainly implies the existence of something relatively permanent that enters into and inhabits successive somethings relatively impermanent. But the word tells us nothing of the nature of these relatively permanent and impermanent somethings, save that the impermanent habitations are of ' flesh '.

Another word, often used as synonymous with Reincarnation, the word Metempsychosis, suggests the other side of the transaction; here the habitation is ignored, and the stress is laid on the transit of the Psyche, the relatively permanent. Putting the two together as descriptive of the whole idea, we should have the entry of a Psyche or ' soul' into successive ' bodies ' of flesh; and though the word ' soul ' is open to serious objections, from its looseness and its theological connotations, it may stand for the moment as representing in the minds of most people a form of existence which outlasts the physical frame with which it was connected during a life on earth. In this general sense, apart from any special exoteric or esoteric teaching, Reincarnation and Metempsychosis are words which denote a theory of existence, according to which a form of visible 10 matter is inhabited by a more ethereal principle, which outlives its physical encasement, and, on the death of the latter, passes on, immediately or after an interval, to dwell in some other frame. Never, perhaps, has this doctrine, in its loftiest form, been put more clearly or more beautifully than in the famous encouragement of Arjuna by Krishna, given in the Bhagavad-Gita: These bodies of the embodied One, who is eternal, indestructible and boundless, are known as finite... He who regardeth this as a slayer, and he who thinketh he is slain, both of them are ignorant.

He slayeth not nor is he slain. He is not born, nor doth he die; nor having been, ceaseth he any more to be; unborn, perpetual, eternal and ancient, he is not slain when the body is slaughtered.

Who knoweth him indestructible, unborn, undiminishing, how can that man slay, O Partha, or cause to be slain? As a man, casting off worn-out garments, taketh new ones, so the dweller in the body, casting off worn-out bodies, entereth into others that are new. Weapons cleave him not, nor fire burneth him, nor waters wet him, nor wind drieth him away. Indivisible he, incombustible he, and indeed neither to be wetted nor dried away; perpetual, all-pervasive, stable, immovable, an-cient, unmanifest, unthinkable, immutable, he is called; therefore knowing him as such thou shouldst not grieve.1 The theory of Reincarnation, then, in the Esoteric Philosophy, asserts the existence of a living and individualised Principle, which dwells in and informs the body of a man, and Which, on the death of the body, passes into another body, after a longer or 1 From the translation by Annie Besant, Discourse ii, 18-25. WHAT IT IS THAT REINCARNATES 11 shorter interval. Thus successive bodily lives are linked together like pearls strung upon a thread, the thread being the living Principle, the pearls upon it the separate human lives.

WHAT IT is THAT REINCARNATES Having grasped the idea that Reincarnation is the indwelling of a living something in a succession of human bodies, we naturally make the inquiry: What is this living something, this persistent reincarnating Principle? As our understanding of the whole teaching hinges on thorough understanding of the answer to this question, it will not be wasted time to dwell a little on the circumstances which led up to and surrounded the first incarnation of this living Principle in the human form.

To make this incarnation thoroughly intelligible, we must trace the steps of the evolution of man. Those who have read the first of these Manuals will remember that the Monad or Atma-Euddhi is described as the ' mainspring of all evolution, the impelling force at the root of all things.' 1 Those to whom the technical name is unfamiliar will 1 P.

12 seize the idea conveyed by the name to the Theo-sophist, if they will think of the Universal Life, the Root of all that is, gradually evolving as its own manifestation the various forms which make up our world. We cannot here retrace our earth's story in former stages of its aeonian evolution: that will, I hope, be done in one of this series of Manuals. But here we must be content to pick up the thread at the beginning of the present stage, when the germ of what was to become man had appeared, as the result of previous evolution, on this, our globe. Blavatsky, in the volumes of The Secret Doctrine, has drawn the evolution in detail, and to that work I must refer the earnest and thorough student.

Let it suffice to say that the physical form of what was to be man was slowly and very gradually evolved, two great Root-Races passing through their full development, and a third Root-Race having run half its course, before humanity had reached completion so far as its physical, or animal, nature was concerned. This nature, rightly called animal, because it contains that which man has in common with the brute— a dense physical body, its etheric double, its vitality, its passions, appetites and desires—this nature was 13 built up by terrestrial and other cosmic forces through millions of years. It was brooded over, enveloped in, permeated by, that Universal Life which is ' the Force back of Evolution ', that life which men have in all ages called Divine. An Occult Commentary, quoted in The Secret Doctrine? Speaking of this stage of evolution, mentions the forms, technically called ' astral doubles', which had evolved into the physical bodies of men, and thus describes the situation at the point we have reached: Rupa (Form) has become the vehicle of Monads (Seventh and Sixth Principles) that had completed their cycle of transmigration in the three preceding Kalpas (Rounds).

Then they (the astral doubles) become the men of the first Human Race of the Round. But they were not complete, and were senseless. Here were, we may say, the two poles of the evolving Life-manifestation: the Animal with all its potentialities on the lower plane, but necessarily mindless, conscienceless, errant aimlessly over the earth, unconsciously tending onwards by reason of the impelling force within it that drove it ever forward: this force, the Divine, itself too lofty in 1 Vol. I, 235, 1962 Edition. 14 its pure ethereal nature to reach consciousness on the lower planes, and so unable to bridge the gulf that stretched between it and the animal brain it vivified but could not illumine.

Such was the organism that was to become man, a creature of marvellous potentialities, an instrument with strings all ready to break into music; where was the power that should make the potentialities actual, where the touch that should waken the melody and send it forth thrilling into space? When the hour had struck, the answer came from the mental or manasic plane. Whilst this double evolution above described, the monadic and the physical, had been going on upon our globe, a third line of evolution, which was to find its goal in man, had been proceeding in a higher sphere.

This line was that of intellectual evolution, and the subjects of the evolution are the lower of the Sons of Mind (Manasaputra), self-conscious intelligent entities, as is implied by their name. The Manasa-putras are spoken of under many different names: Lords of Light, Dhyan Chohans, Kumaras, Dragons of Wisdom, Solar Pitris, etc., etc., allegorical and poetical names, that become attractive and familiar to the student in the course of his reading, but 15 which cause much trouble and confusion to the beginner, who cannot make out whether he is dealing with one class of beings or with a dozen. As a matter of fact the name covers many grades.

But the one thing that the beginner needs to grasp is that, at a certain stage of evolution, there entered into, incarnated in men. Certain self-conscious intelligent entities, with a long past of intellectual evolution behind them, who found in physical man the instrument ready, and fitted, for their further evolution. The coming of these Sons of Mind is given in poetical phrase in the Stanzas from the Book of Dzyan:1 The Sons of Wisdom, The Sons of Night, ready for rebirth, came down.... The Third Race were ready. ' In these shall we dwell,' said the Lords of the Flame. The Third Race became the Vahan (Vehicle] of the Lords of Wisdom. These Lords of Wisdom incarnated as teachers, and became the fathers of the reincarnating Egos of men, while Solar Pitris of a lower grade became themselves the reincarnating Egos of the leading races; these are the Mind, or rather Minds, in 1 The Secret Doctrine iii, 168, 179, 1962 Ed.

16 REINCARNATION men, the Manas, or Fifth Principle, sometimes described as the Human or Rational Soul. I prefer to speak of the reincarnating Ego as the Thinker, rather than as Mind, in man; for the word Thinker suggests an individual entity, whereas the word Mind suggests a vague generality.

It is interesting and significant that the word man, running through so many languages, is related back to this Manas, to its root man, to think. Skeat 1 gives the word in English, Swedish, Danish, German, Icelandish, Gothic, Latin (mas, for mans), deriving it from the Sanskrit root man, and therefore defining man as a ' thinking animal'. So that whenever we say Man, we say Thinker, and are carried back to that period at which the Thinkers ' came down ', i.e., became incarnate in the physical vehicle built for their reception, when the senseless animal became the thinking being, by virtue of the Manas that entered into him andr dwelt in him. It was then that the Man became clothed in his ' coat of skin', after his fall into physical matter in order that he might eat of the Tree of Knowledge and thus become a ' God.' 1 Etymological Dictionary, under ' Man '. 17 This man is the link between the Divine and the Animal, that we have viewed as essentially connected and yet held apart from close intercommunion.

He stretches one hand upwards towards the Divine Monad, to the Spirit whose offspring he is, striving upwards, that he may assimilate that loftier nature, that his intelligence may become spiritual, his knowledge wisdom; he lays his other hand upon the Animal, which is to bear him to conquest of the lower planes, that he may train and subdue it to his own ends, and make it a perfect instrument for manifestation of the higher life. Long is the task that lies before him; no less than to raise the Animal to the Divine, to Sublime Matter into Spirit, to lead up the ascending arc the life that has traversed the descending, and has now to climb upwards, bearing with it all the fruits of its long exile from its true home. Finally he is to reunite the separated aspects of the One, to bring the Spirit to self-consciousness on all planes, Matter to be its perfect manifestation. Such his sublime task for the accomplishment of which reincarnation is to be his tool. This Man, then, is our real Human Self, and we err when we think of our body as ' I', and too 18 much exalt our temporary ' coat of skin '.

It is as though a man should regard his coat as himself, himself as a mere appendage of his clothes. As our clothes exist for us and not we for them, and they are only things rendered necessary by climate, comfort and custom, so our bodies are only necessary to us because of the conditions that surround us, and are for our service, not for our subjugation. Some Indians will never speak of bodily wants as theirs: they say, ' My body is hungry,' ' My body is tired,' not ' I am hungry,' or ' I am tired.' And though in our ears the phrase may sound fantastic, it is truer to facts than our self-identification with our body. If we were in the habit of identifying ourselves in thought, not with the habitation we live in but with the Human Self, that dwells therein, life would become a greater and a serener thing. We should brush off troubles as we brush the dust from our garments, and we should realise that the measure of all things happening to us is not the pain or pleasure they bring to our bodies, but the progress or retardation they bring to the Man within us; and since all things are matters of experience and lessons may be learned from each, we should take the sting out of griefs 19 by searching in each for the wisdom enwrapped in it as the petals are folded within the bud.

In the light of reincarnation life changes its aspect, for it becomes the school of the eternal Man within us, who seeks therein his development, the Man that was and is and shall be, for whom the hour will never strike. Let the beginner, then, get firm grip of the idea that the Thinker is the Man, the Individual, the reincarnating Ego, and that this Ego seeks to become united to the divine Monad, while training and purifying the animal self to which it is joined during earth-life.

Although studying is considered a legitimate scientific nowadays, it is still a very young one. In the early 1970s, a psychologist named J. Guilford was one of the first academic researchers who dared to conduct a study of creativity. One of Guilford’s most famous studies was the nine-dot puzzle. He challenged research subjects to connect all nine dots using just four straight lines without lifting their pencils from the page. Today many people are familiar with this puzzle and its solution. In the 1970s, however, very few were even aware of its existence, even though it had been around for almost a century.

If you have tried solving this puzzle, you can confirm that your first attempts usually involve sketching lines inside the imaginary square. The correct solution, however, requires you to draw lines that extend beyond the area defined by the dots. At the first stages, all the participants in Guilford’s original study censored their own thinking by limiting the possible solutions to those within the imaginary square (even those who eventually solved the puzzle). Even though they weren’t instructed to restrain themselves from considering such a solution, they were unable to “see” the white space beyond the square’s boundaries. Only 20 percent managed to break out of the illusory confinement and continue their lines in the white space surrounding the dots. The symmetry, the beautiful simplicity of the solution, and the fact that 80 percent of the participants were effectively blinded by the boundaries of the square led Guilford and the readers of his books to leap to the sweeping conclusion that creativity requires you to go outside the box. The idea went viral (via 1970s-era media and word of mouth, of course).

Overnight, it seemed that creativity gurus everywhere were teaching managers how to think outside the box. Consultants in the 1970s and 1980s even used this puzzle when making sales pitches to prospective clients. Because the solution is, in hindsight, deceptively simple, clients tended to admit they should have thought of it themselves. Because they hadn’t, they were obviously not as creative or smart as they had previously thought, and needed to call in creative experts. Or so their consultants would have them believe. The nine-dot puzzle and the phrase “thinking outside the box” became metaphors for creativity and spread like wildfire in, management, psychology, the creative arts, engineering, and personal improvement circles. There seemed to be no end to the insights that could be offered under the banner of thinking outside the box.

Speakers, trainers, training program developers, organizational consultants, and university professors all had much to say about the vast benefits of outside-the-box thinking. It was an appealing and apparently convincing message. Indeed, the concept enjoyed such strong popularity and intuitive appeal that no one bothered to check the facts. No one, that is, before two different research —Clarke Burnham with Kenneth Davis, and Joseph Alba with Robert Weisberg—ran another experiment using the same puzzle but a different research procedure. Both teams followed the same protocol of dividing participants into two groups. The first group was given the same instructions as the participants in Guilford’s experiment.

The second group was told that the solution required the lines to be drawn outside the imaginary box bordering the dot array. In other words, the “trick” was revealed in advance.

Would you like to guess the percentage of the participants in the second group who solved the puzzle correctly? Most people assume that 60 percent to 90 percent of the group given the clue would solve the puzzle easily. In fact, only a meager 25 percent did. What’s more, in statistical terms, this 5 percent improvement over the subjects of Guilford’s original study is insignificant.

In other words, the difference could easily be due to what statisticians call sampling error. Let’s look a little more closely at these surprising results. Solving this problem requires people to literally think outside the box. Yet participants’ performance was not improved even when they were given specific instructions to do so.

That is, direct and explicit instructions to think outside the box did not help. That this advice is useless when actually trying to solve a problem involving a real box should effectively have killed off the much widely disseminated—and therefore, much more dangerous—metaphor that out-of-the-box thinking spurs creativity.

After all, with one simple yet brilliant experiment, researchers had proven that the conceptual link between thinking outside the box and creativity was a myth. Of course, in real life you won’t find boxes. But you will find numerous situations where a creative breakthrough is staring you in the face. They are much more common than you probably think. *From Copyright 2014 Drew Boyd. There are many theories of creativity.

What the latest experiment proves is not that creativity lacks any association to thinking outside-the-box, but that such is not conditioned by acquired knowledge, i.e., environmental concerns. For example, there have been some theories such as those of Schopenhauer (see his remarks about Genius) and Freud (see his remarks about Sublimation) that propose creativity is something more like a capacity provided by nature rather than one acquired or learned from the environment. Rather than disproving the myth, in other words, the experiment might instead offer evidence that creativity is an ability that one is born with, or born lacking, hence why information from the environment didn't impact the results at all. It's an interesting experiment, but the author's conclusion cannot possibly follow from the results of it.

I conduct soft skills training and outbound training for Corporates and individuals. To enhance creativity we motivate the participants to approach the problems from variety of vantage points. Even repeatedly checking the boundary conditions we are able to come up with variety of ways of solving the problem. This is akin to checking the walls of the box. Looking inside the box for additional information, additional resources also helps. Looking at the box from bird's eye view triggers some different creative solutions. Let us not get tied down to the mechanics but free ourselves to find the solution.

I will give an example. You are playing football with family and friends at a distant ground and someone gets bruised badly. No first aid kit is available.

Your priority is to get the person to a hospital ( at a distance of 2 hours ). The wound is bleeding and needs to be kept clean and bacteria free till the person reaches the hospital. What will you do? Think of a solution. It is quite close to you.

With all due respect, Professor Boyd, your argument is not at all compelling. It seems that you are taking the 'thinking outside the box' (TOTB) metaphor much more literally than it is intended (or, at least, as I and may others infer).

Let me point out a few false and/or negligent statements that you make: 1. To refer to TOTB as 'dangerous' is naive, at best.

I, personally, have seen the positive, tranformative effects of not only the 9-dots exercise, but also the occasional use of the term to remind individuals after-the-fact about the value of thinking differently. The experiment you refer to doesn't even come close to proving what you suggest that it does. To use the term 'proving' in an argument like this is laughable.

In real life, you absolutely WILL find boxes.that is, if you understand what the term 'box' refers to. Here, the term is not literal; rather, it refers to a mindset, a perspective, a belief, or an assumption.

It is precisely how the human mind works. We all think in boxes all the time. The 'sin,' if you will, is not in thinking inside of a box.but the neglect to readily switch from one box to another, nimbly (see Alan Iny's new book, 'Thinking in New Boxes'). A different -- and very healthy, positive, and productive -- way to think about TOTB is to understand that it merely represents an insight that can remind an individual to consciously become aware of limiting assumptions. And, upon such awareness, to open ones mind and imagination to actively explore new possibilities beyond the obvious or initial answer. If you don't regard this as valid contribution to creativity, then I suggest you consider spending a bit more time outside of that 'box' that you've presented here.

I couldn't have said it any better. TOTB is a beautiful skill to have. We are born into multiple boxes that are created upon social agreements (e.g. Illustrated by the hermeneutic circle) but the ones who dare to think outside of what is considered as social or scientific correct (all the boxes together) are the minds whom are absolute free and open towards new moralities, paradigms, innovations and creativity in general. Saying that TOTB is a negative thing is a very conservative statement and someone who has such a belief is scared of change, scared of diversity and scared of anything that is abstract and out of order.

I'm all about TOTB and the best way to TOTB is to fully understand the box in the first place and why some people are scared of TOTB hence also lacking the ability to do so. Fold the paper so all the dots ovelap. Use four lines to connect four dots.

Hold the folded paper up to the light.all dots connected; Thinking outside The Box. For that matter, you could fold the paper until all the dots overlapped and you would not need to waste any pencil lead; Thinking outside The Box. Use a very wide pencil lead or charcoal block for that matter, connect all the dots in one fell swoop; Thinking outside The Box. Forego a pencil altogether and use a bucket of paint to create a huge blot over all the dots; Thinking outside The Box. Question the dots and why they need to be connected in the first place; Thinking outside The Box. Erase the dots; they are a distraction to Thinking outside The Box. Create your own dots and lines in any fashion you desire; Thinking outside The Box.

People that say, it's a misguided idea,, do not know how to think outside the box, I can look /listen/ at anything an tell you how to fix it. I play chess with my pc, an beat it all the time, and the reasoning is I do not think logically, like the pc does. It has a set of rules that it was programed with an you were in college, I do not play by the rules, I can play without the queen.Also when you go the a school that teaches how to think about something, that is all you know how to do.I have had engineers come to my deck, hand me a set of blueprints, because that was the way they were taught. They are never taught to look at it, in there mind to see it working.

What I do is show them how wrong they are, an ask them what tool in the world can cut a square hole inside the middle of two long tubes. They can not think outside the box, that they were taught to do. Le Petit Robert 2009 Isotoner. If was going to tell you about an airplane the TR-3B, it travels a little bit under light speed, an it uses nuclear fusion, which turns into plasma an powers the craft, that was built outside the box. An if you do not believe me type it into your search engine, you can also look it up at the library of congress under new patients.

You my brother, do not have the inkling of understanding to think outside the box. That's why you are a psychologist an nothing more.