|
The database for the Creative Process Blog has been deleted in order to get rid of inappropriate material (actually perfect examples of ‘Fuss, Worry, Clutch and Grab’) by the “petty, lowly, incapacitated and underdeveloped” individuals who intruded into the original blog. When I have time I will redo the blog but until then if you wish to see Fred Culver's posts from late 2006 and early 2007, please read on after my original introduction and several comments... (sorry, I lost the precise dates).
Where to start - not with some profound statement because I (Rae) can’t come up with anything more profound than I am delighted to have gotten The Creative Process blog at least ready to start.
The Creative Process of creativeprocess.net is a publisher of posters, notecards, and bookmarks of great individuals as exemplars of the creative process. We also host pages for Collegium, The Heart Forest, The Future Is Now, the Center for Global Community.
I want(ed) the blog to be a record of the process of being creative, of accepting the responsibility, and the freedom, of creativity, and being able to share these experiences, not as externals that can be matched to a model of how creativity “happens”, rather realization we are all creative by virtue of the choices we make every day. Every choice is creative.
2 comments »
1. Rae, you say to begin . . . the blog about creativity is in itself profound. “In the beginning” is as profound as it ever gets . . . creation out of no-thing will never be explained . . . it is inexplicable . . . calling forth reverence for life. Albert Schweitzer said that reverences for life is to be grasped by the infinite, inexplicable, forward urging will within which all being is grounded.
Comment by fred — December 14, 2006 @ 1:51 pm
2. Hi Rae,
I really like “The Creative Process” as the title for your blog. Creativity and process are each words that have taken on a greater depth of meaning for me in recent years. Creativity as a responsibility is an interesting angle. Sometimes I think I pull back from the reponsibility by not having the courage to share, by not bringing some of my more creative ideas into life.
Dave Watkins Comment by David Watkins — January 3, 2007 @ 11:09 am
DIPOLAR instead of BIPOLAR
Many intensely creative people suffer from bipolar disorder . . . with the list going on and on. My advice to many of my suffering friends, “Do not let them call you sick!” This is not meant to diminish the concern I have for them, nor to lessen the intensity by which they live and struggle.
When Yin and Yang split apart . . . pain, pain, pain , . . . what is important is to commit to the ‘middle way’, the constructive and integrative process. Yang (active) is ‘turned on’ and Yin (passive) is ‘turned off’, the one is aggressive to an extreme the other is concilatory to an extreme.
Creativity is constructive and integrative, keeping tension with the extremes, until a symbol forms the ‘middle way’. Dipolar replaces bipolar through aggressive conciliation, sustaining the ‘play of opposites’.
QUOTE: William Butler Yeats 1865-1939 (Nobel Prize in Literature)
“The mystical life is the centre of all that I do and all that I think and all that I write. … I have always considered myself a voice of what I believe to be a greater renaissance - the revolt of the soul against the intellect.”
‘Acting out’ or ‘repression’, by themselves, do not produce personal growth; what is required is to stay with ‘both’: dark/light, inside/outside, good/evil, highest/lowest, yes/no until integration occurs; then, giving ’style’ to existence is possible.
Normal people unfortunately live external lives, unable to accept the responsibility of creating who-they-are, living imitative and adaptive lives (norms). Bipolar people at least experience the spiritual demand of existential freedom; and consequently, they have the possibility of overcoming the neurotic split. Being a “divided-self” is never easy . . . but it can be joyous if you are able to overcome the ego’s need for external support; only the free person creates.
QUOTE: George Bernard Shaw, (Nobel Prize in Literature)
“Life isn’t about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.”
Creative Vocation
QUOTE The Meaning of the Creative Act by Nicolas Berdyaev
“Creativity is something which proceeds from within, out of immeasurable and inexplicable depths, not from without, not from the world’s necessity. The very desire to make the creative act understandable, to find a basis for it, is failure to comprehend it. To comprehend the creative act means to recognize that it is inexplicable and without foundation.”
“Inexplicable and without foundation” means that we are radically free, having no idea to tell us who-we-are or how-to-be. We are alone with the Alone, responsible on the level of Being. Meaning comes from doing art with our existence, risking even our integrity to interpret Truth with and among others.
We are in existence and we are above existence; our vocation is to bring Nature to perfection by creating values. Situated between freedom and necessity, we move into the coming-to-be of reality, taking from the old and the new, uncovering infinite quantitative and qualitative possibilities.
We are the evolutionary process becoming conscious, liberating wisdom through humility; we are the ‘originating process’ by which existence manifests, uniting our will with the almighty Will. The entire creation is waiting for us to realize our vocation.
Poem or Profit
Joyce Kilmer
I think that I shall never see
A poem lovely as a tree.
Hum, I wonder how many board feet it has
. . . and how much it is worth in today’s market?
And then, how much for the Amazon?
Infinite Qualitative Difference
The word ‘beyond’ is primary to my spiritual thinking: the Infinite cannot be grasped; God is beyond any and all thoughts; there is no idea that contents the intensity by which I know; . . . joy, joy, joy.
Humility is more than saying, “I am not adequate,” or “Who I am is not suitable.” Humility is staying open to ‘profound knowing’ even when there is an “infinite, qualitative difference.”
Søren Kierkegaard said that faith is after “infinite resignation”, requiring radical commitment. When we take God as our measure, an infinite qualitative difference falls upon us, and then we live as suprahumans, individualizing divine transcendence. As early Christians wrote, “The Son of God became man, that we might become God.”
Humanity has this evolutionary task to go ‘beyond the human’ to the God/human. Dialogue becomes for us our collective vocation, the process of liberating wisdom among ourselves . . . on a transcultural basis, celebrating the diversity of the One.
We are called to be solitary educators . . . who stand out from the crowd in radical freedom and responsibility. A Collective Ego is not adequate for the world to come to potential greatness . . . for realizing the Unique, historic, and unrepeatable. Subordination is not a basis for a community; it is a basis for a ‘crowd state of mediocrity’; only freedom ‘beyond necessity’ creates communion within the One.
QUOTE SØREN KIERKEGAARD
http://www.ccel.org/k/kierkegaard/untruth/untruth.htm
“The crowd is untruth. There is therefore no one who has more contempt for what it is to be a human being than those who make it their profession to lead the crowd. Let someone, some individual human being, certainly, approach such a person, what does he care about him; that is much too small a thing; he proudly sends him away; there must be at least a hundred. And if there are thousands, then he bends before the crowd, he bows and scrapes; what untruth! No, when there is an individual human being, then one should express the truth by respecting what it is to be a human being; and if perhaps, as one cruelly says, it was a poor, needy human being, then especially should one invite him into the best room, and if one has several voices, he should use the kindest and friendliest; that is the truth. When on the other hand it was an assembly of thousands or more, and “the truth” became the object of balloting, then especially one should godfearingly - if one prefers not to repeat in silence the Our Father: deliver us from evil - one should godfearingly express, that a crowd, as the court of last resort, ethically and religiously, is the untruth, whereas it is eternally true, that everyone can be the one. This is the truth.”
To the Single One
Transcendence Means Vitality
‘Transcend’ is often thought of as ‘getting out of here’; while transcend can also mean ‘getting in here’ through creativity (i.e. transcend any situation with vitality: over, under, around, through, and beyond). Spirituality creates creativity with transformational processes; we aspire to transcend matter with life, life with mind, and finally, mind with Spirit.
Meaning or Money
“Make a profit at any cost!” We are ‘competing ourselves to death’, (which is not a very ‘competent’ thing to do). This criticism requires, of course, understanding that economy is the way to build community, not simply a way to make money. Almost everyone is aware that the global economy is so severely ‘out of balance’, that in some instances, it is creating a psychotic world. (see note below)
Meaning or money, which facilitates a viable community? Humanity has a choice: celebrate diversity within the whole, or force separate and competing interests into a ‘total system’. Are the parts self-aware creating the whole together? (responsibility), or does the whole tell the parts how-to-be? (accountability). This choice determines whether the Earth will be coerced and exploited, resulting in fragmentation and alienation, or brought to mutuality and community.
ACCOUNTABILITY (SRI AUROBINDO QUOTE)
“An external unity with others must always be an outward joining and association of external lives with a minor inner result; the mind and heart attach their movements to this common life and the beings whom we meet there; but the common external life remains the foundation, - the inward constructed unity, or so much of it as can persist in spite of mutual ignorance and discordant egoisms, conflict of minds, conflict of hearts, conflict of vital temperaments, conflict of interests, is a partial and insecure superstructure.”
RESPONSIBILITY (SRI AUROBINDO QUOTE contined)
“The spiritual consciousness, the spiritual life reverses this principle of building; it bases its action in the collective life upon an inner experience and inclusion of others in our own being, an inner sense and reality of oneness. The spiritual individual acts out of that sense of oneness which gives him immediate and direct perception of the demand of self on other self, the need of the life, the good, the work of love and sympathy that can truly be done. A realization of spiritual unity, a dynamization of the intimate consciousness of one-being, of one self in all beings, can alone found and govern by its truth the action of the divine life.”
The ethic by which community forms depends on “that sense of oneness which gives him immediate and direct perception of the demand of self on other self, the need of the life, the good, the work of love and sympathy that can truly be done.” Just as Søren Kierkegaard said that each individual would be asked only one question, “Did you live in despair, and did you win or did you lose?”, so the community will be asked: “Did you realize that you were not a community, that everyone was ‘out for themselves’, or did you win by celebrating “the joy of an intimate self-revealing diversity of the One, the multitudinous union and happy interaction within the One, will give a fully perfected sense to the gnostic life.”?
(NOTE: PSYCHOSIS) from Wikipedia
Psychosis is a generic psychiatric term for a mental state in which thought and perception are severely impaired. Persons experiencing a psychotic episode may experience hallucinations, hold delusional beliefs (e.g., grandiose or paranoid delusions), demonstrate personality changes and exhibit disorganized thinking (see thought disorder). This is often accompanied by lack of insight into the unusual or bizarre nature of such behaviour, difficulties with social interaction and impairments in carrying out the activities of daily living. A psychotic episode is often described as involving a “loss of contact with reality”.
Beyond Power
In order to be, there must be ‘the-power-to-be’; and how we understand this power determines who-we-are and how-we-live.
Power can be ‘originating power’ coming from within, or ‘manipulative power’ coming from without. The power that comes from within is spiritual, free and responsible, enabling us to transcend; the power that comes from without is mental power, controlling and coercive, conforming us to the commonplace and dull. Understanding power involves understanding the way in which we are situated in existence, how we are related to Being, or more forcefully said, how we are related to the Beyond.
Are we connected through Essence, which tells us who-we-are or how-to-be; or do we have a capacity to live deeper, prior to createdness, enabling us to give style to our existence. Beyond Power does not mean “no power’, rather it means living originally, much in the way that an artist is not stuck in technique.
Overcoming fallen power is the will to originating power, or ‘immediate power’ instead of ‘mediated power’. (cf. Friedrich Nietzsche: “It is not the works, it is the faith that is decisive here, that determines the order of rank…: some fundamental certainty that a noble soul has about itself, something that cannot be sought, nor found, nor perhaps lost. The noble soul has reverence [Ehrfurcht] for itself”)
To the noble one!
Perfection
“What alone can regenerate us? Envisionment of what is perfect.” Friedrich Nietzsche
The world is in trouble. When saying this, no one is able to say what the trouble is. Duane Elgin in his book, Promise Ahead, offers extremely disturbing symptoms, which he calls ‘adversity trends’. Will we ‘crash’ or will we ‘bounce’?
The answer will be determined by our assessment: Is the Earth dying, or is a radical shift in consciousness occurring? Every indication is that we have more power than we have maturity. “Envisionment of what is perfect” is what will regenerate us. Technology has developed way beyond our capacity for evaluation (viz. our values are inadequate)! We are dangerous!
Nietzsche was one who saw this coming; he said that we are more than ‘rule keepers’; we are the creators of value. We are called upon to envision the perfect and give style to life. “The grand style consists in contempt for trivial and brief beauty; it is a sense for that which is rare and lasts long.”
The Grand Style asked of us is made possible by the Grand Politic. Our problem today is that we lack the political will to give style to life. We settle too quickly for the trivial and brief . . . who among us will commit to envisioning the perfect?
Ecstatic reason is required, as well as, technical reason; thinking only on the surface of things is not adequate. We need to ‘ground’ our consciousness in Being; ‘Intentions’ need to be based on ‘intentionality’, which requires integral thinking.
Technology is neither our problem, nor our answer; we must be grounded within an integral community. Grounding our consciousness awakens and liberates forces that propel us into a new realm, forces that undertake bold deeds. An integral community is the opposite of alienation and fragmentation; it is the dynamic in which all people can live to capacity and creativity.
What alone can regenerate us? Envisionment of what is perfect (whole). When we realize that we are all one-within-the-One, we will have created “an enabling, unified understanding” by which the ruinous forces will be overcome. Mastery of Nature and her transformation will have been realized for a greater perfection in the earthly existence itself.
Narrowly Brilliant
Does anyone know enough . . . ? There has been an ‘explosion’ of knowledge, and our consciousness is being challenged, (even threatened), since availability of information is also increasing! We are confronted with events from all parts of the world; and then from light years away in deep space.
Not one of us would want to be ‘narrowly brilliant’, but does anyone think we can bring all of the forces into an “enabling, unified understanding?” Do we comprehend the impact of one advance in technology after another; and, are we keeping up with increasing demand? Is our economy managing the Earth? One question after another!
In my recent post, ‘Revere Life’, I admitted I have only one idea that keeps changing, and that I still do not know what it is. Also, in my post on ‘Perfection’, I said the world is in trouble, with no one able to say adequately what the trouble is. As difficult it is to admit, I do not know what I am doing and do not even know what the problem is . . . it just seems to me . . . we do not have an integral understanding that will assure a sustainable impact!
Some are suggesting that an increase in math and science are essential, and who can doubt but that is so. However, will that not simply increase our difficulty in being narrowly brilliant? Scientists and engineers have done wonders, and they will solve some of our more serious problems; and yet, . . .
An ethical dialogue among all the people of the Earth is imperative. We must learn how to be global thinkers, which means we must consider the whole. Capacity for evaluating must increase, since the canvass the artist is painting on is increasing tremendously. Contemplatives must ground our existence in the vast consciousness of Spirit beyond the mental constructions with which we are trying to comprehend and control existence.
E. F. Schumacher, in his book, A Guide of the Perplexed, discusses this in terms of the difference between convergent and divergent thinking. “Many people today call for a new moral basis of society, a new foundation of ethics. When they say “new,” they seem to forget that they are dealing with divergent problems, which call not for new inventions but for the development of man’s higher faculties and their application.”
He finally concludes: “All great works of art are “about God” in the sense that they show the perplexed human being the path, the way up the mountain, providing a Guide for the Perplexed. We may again remind ourselves of one of the greatest examples of such art, Dante’s Divine Comedy. Dante wrote for ordinary men and women, not for people with sufficient private means to be interested mainly in fine feelings. “The whole work,” he explains, “was undertaken not for speculative but a practical end . . . the purpose of the whole is to remove those living in this life from a state of misery, and lead them into a state of felicity.” The pilgrim —Dante himself— nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita, that is, at the height of his powers and outward success, suddenly realizes that he is not at the height at all but, on the contrary, “in a dark wood, where the right way is lost.”
Are we lost in the midst of too many facts? We seem to be getting more and more concise, gathering incredible amounts of information; and yet, we are struggling to comprehend. Do we know enough to effectively use the knowledge we are gaining in ways that are beneficial, leading us to a state of felicity? I think not! Perhaps, our question is, “Do we know too much . . . ?
Sacred / Secular
The universe is the creative process! Divine consciousness is originating ‘what-is’ eternally from the Origin ( i.e. Spirit creating creativity).
I AM participates in all beings as the Ground-of-Being, which is prior to and more than the Creation. I AM THAT I AM; or also, I WILL BE THAT I WILL BE is experienced as ‘beings’ participate within the power of Being, immediately originating who-they-are in a moment of Origin.
The revelatory process fails when separation and isolation occur, having the result that the sacred becomes secular and/or the secular becomes sacred. The redemptive process is a dynamic encounter between sacred/secular whereby wisdom is liberated (i.e. evil is perpetually overcome by good).
Nicolai Berdyaev quote:
“Man’s essential nature is distorted because he fell away from God; beings separated from God and from one another have no immediate experience of spiritual life; they suffer from the disease of isolation. Instead of the immediate experience which reveals the life of the subject, of the existential self, distorted reason develops a way of cognizing the world in an OBJECTIVE form. Man exteriorizes his subjective sensations, projects them and builds out of them objects which stand over against him, form a system of external reality, forcibly act upon him and enslave him. The world system created by such objectificaton is nature as opposed to spirit; it is the world of appearances, of phenomena, while the true, fundamental reality is spirit, the world of NOUMENA, i.e., a world cognized in and through immediate spiritual experience and not through objectivization.”
(quote continued)
“Man is a “dual entity, living both in the phenomenal and the noumenal world” (ibid., 79). Hence, “the noumena can break through into the phenomina, the invisible world into the visible, the world of freedom into the world of necessity” (ibid.,67). That victory of spirit over nature is achieved through sympathy and love overcoming isolation by communication of the “I” and “thou” in immediate spiritual experience which is of the nature of intuition and not of objectivization. “This knowledge is ‘the conjugal’ union of personalities based upon true love”
AN ESSAY ON ESCHATOLOGY AND METAPHYSICS, by Nicolai Berdyaev
Dialogue enables Form to suspend itself in ‘occasions of soul’, so Form become Soul, which perpetually becomes Form, only to become Soul again. Mystics refer to this as a ‘wheel of fire rolling out of itself’. Novelty occurs with infinite qualitative and quantitative possibilities.
The ethic of freedom is finally expressed as creativity within community, requiring dialogue and synergy among solitary people.
Radical Reversal
I say unto you: one must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star. I say unto you: you still have chaos in yourselves. Alas, the time is coming when man will no longer give birth to a star. Alas. the time of the most despicable man is coming, he that is no longer able to despise himself.
Behold, I show you the last man. Friedrich Nietzsche
Friedrich Nietzsche was misunderstood by endless numbers of people when he used ‘beyond’ (über) as the basis for the new humanity (übermensch). He sought to revere life with tremendous passion, living immediately in the Abyss of freedom, in order to ‘overcome the fallen power’ that seeks to dominate and contain life.
Most people are simply not willing to ‘turn inward’, convinced that the ‘real world’ is outside; they warn others not to go off the deep-end. They encourage conforming, fitting-in, adapting, being well-adjusted by insisting that it is not healthy to take oneself so seriously. Unable to be aware of who-they-are, these neurotic people are living external, ego-adaptive-lives with only a persona (sham personality).
External values are contrary to the freedom of human personality. We are situated with a consciousness of things ’seen’; and then, occasionally, we are aware of deeper and more profound aspects of things ‘not seen’. We are to become one with the Creator, sharing responsibility for destiny, legislating the Being of beings by doing art.
On the contrary, a few are self-aware, self-creative, and self-transcending, still having chaos within, are able to have a cosmic sense of themselves. Having been asked to be more than they know how to be, they despise themselves in order to overcome themselves, looking forward to a time when they live according to their own individual wills, seeking a community based on individual differences, while enjoying the uncertainties of human life, including the spirit of gravity.
Art becomes the stimulus of life that excites and enhances, “that eternally compels us to life, to eternal life.” What have you done to overcome yourself?
Realize Transcendence
The ‘collective ego’ replaces the ego, which results in a mechanistic mentality . . . ‘conformity rules!’ . . . creativity dies, soul is dominated, and the environment gasps!
Expected to be what ‘they’ tell us to be (Mental health words are conformist) most people adapt, are well adjusted, fit-in, function, produce, consume, and ‘buy tickets for excitement’). However, there are a few who ’step out’ of collective consciousness (i.e. herd mentality); thereby, risking confrontation with a dominating economy that contains, coerces, and controls. The question they are asking, “How is it possible to be free in an unfree world?”
‘Realizing Transcendence’ is not usual; committed to security and comfort people are not prepared to be autonomous, courageous, creative, improvising, process oriented, self-trusting, etc.
MASLOW QUOTE
“The new education-through-art movement with its stress on non-objectivity is one subject in which right and wrong are much less involved, in which correctness and incorrectness can be pushed aside, and in which therefore the child can be confronted with himself, with his own courage or anxiety, with his stereotypes or his freshness, etc. A good way to say this is that where reality has been withdrawn, we have a good projective test situation, and we therefore have a good psychotherapeutic or growth situation. This is exactly what is done both in projective testing and insight therapy; i.e., reality, correctness, adaptability to the world, physical and chemical and biological determiners are all removed, so that the psyche can reveal itself more freely. I might even go so far as to say that in this respect, education through art is a kind of therapy and growth technique, because it permits the deeper layers of the psyche to emerge, and therefore to be encouraged, fostered, trained, and educated.” A. H. Maslow
Unthinking bureaucracies would surely disappear if people were educated to be ‘artists of life’. Compliance would be replaced by commitment, allowing all communities to become learning communities. We do not need one world government, one world corporation, or even one world religion . . . what we need is an ethic that is based on transcultural commitment to the Mystery of the One, within which diversity is desired rather than sameness.
The god contained in mental structures is overcome by the Living God. Chaos of integral thought replaces rigidity of fear! The economy must flow, education must flow, all resources must flow. . . so all people can live to capacity and creativity.
For My Sake
My life has been ‘preoccupied with’ Jesus (inspired, confused, disturbed, ruined, challenged, questioned, committed, dominated, engrossed, obsessed, concerned, absorbed, wrapped-up, . . . on and on!).
Jesus, who said he was at-one-with the I AM, brought down ‘power of transformation’ into the Earth. What he meant by this has not been fully understood. He asked his followers to be transformed: “You must be perfect (compassionate) even as your Father in heaven is perfect;” and thereby, he established an ethic of divinity.
During the first decades, the question simply was, “Who was he?”; and then followed the question, “Who are we?” ‘The many’ had been called to follow him, asking them to get lost into the work of the I AM (lose your life). Only ‘the few’ were willing to be suffering servants, willing to forget external comfort and security to be chosen for the I AM working in and through them.
Unfortunately, ‘the radical community of faith’ was replaced by mental systems of belief, putting off the ‘Kingdom of God’ to another time and place. Instead of being “at hand”, breaking into the everyday, the spiritual was understood as occurring after death. Spiritual came to means ‘otherworldly’, not the transformation of this world.
Instead of projecting Christ into a mental system, the Christ was (and is) the subject to be lived. “For my sake” is the willingness to do the work of becoming the ‘revelatory process’, realizing the I AM immediately, transforming the world into a community of Spirit.
The transcultural ethic by which this work is done is beyond religion, trusting that all religions, anthropologies, depth psychologies, . . . are working toward an ethic of the diversity of the One. We do not need one world government, one world corporation, and not even one world religion, but we do need one world ethic, which Einstein called “an enabling, unified understanding.”
“For my sake” finally means living as friends . . . “Love one another, even as I have loved you. Greater love has no man than to lay down his life for his friends.” We are called to do the work of creating a community within which all people live to capacity and creativity as One.
Radical Reversal
I say unto you: one must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star. I say unto you: you still have chaos in yourselves. Alas, the time is coming when man will no longer give birth to a star. Alas. the time of the most despicable man is coming, he that is no longer able to despise himself.
Behold, I show you the last man. Friedrich Nietzsche
Friedrich Nietzsche was misunderstood by endless numbers of people when he used ‘beyond’ (über) as the basis for the new humanity (übermensch). He sought to revere life with tremendous passion, living immediately in the Abyss of freedom to ‘overcome the fallen power’ that seeks to dominate and contain life.
External values are contrary to the freedom of human personality. We are to become one with the Creator by doing art, sharing responsibility for destiny by legislating the Being of beings. We are situated with a consciousness of things ’seen’; and then, occasionally, we are aware of deeper and more profound aspects of things ‘not seen’.
Most people are simply not willing to ‘turn inward’, warning others not to go off the deep-end, convinced that the ‘real world’ is outside. These neurotic people are unable to be aware of who-they-are, living external, ego-adaptive-lives with only a persona (sham personality). They encourage conforming, being well-adjusted, fitting-in, adapting by insisting that it is not healthy to take oneself so seriously.
On the contrary, a few are self-aware, self-creative, and self-transcending people, still having chaos within, are able to have a cosmic sense of themselves. Having been asked to be more than they know how to be, they despise themselves in order to overcome themselves, looking forward to a time when they live according to their own individual wills, seeking a community based on individual differences, while enjoying the uncertainties of human life, including the spirit of gravity.
Art becomes the stimulus of life that excites and enhances, “that eternally compels us to life, to eternal life.” What have you done to overcome yourself?
Friend
If you want a friendlier world, make friends. (that’s as smart as I get!)
What could be more obvious; and yet, more difficult.
Social law external to the individual is an advantage; and yet, can be a considerable disadvantage. It is an advantage when self-control and self-finding are weak, when demands of ‘personal egoism’ need to be moderated; and also, when violent ‘collective egoism’ is rampant and menacing.
It is a disadvantage, however, when mature people are ready to transcend ‘egoism’, becoming one-within-the-One. Internal relating is direct, immediate rather than mediated through ‘constructive thought’.
AUROBINDO QUOTE:
An external unity with others must always be an outward joining and association of external lives with a minor inner result; the mind and heart attach their movements to this common life and the beings whom we meet there; but the common external life remains the foundation, - the inward constructed unity, or so much of it as can persist in spite of mutual ignorance and discordant egoisms, conflict of minds, conflict of hearts, conflict of vital temperaments, conflict of interests, is a partial and insecure superstructure.
Beyond ‘constructive thought’ is to commit to the Divine within oneself and within others in radical oneness (your neighbor ‘as’ yourself).
AUROBINDO QUOTE (continued)
The spiritual consciousness, the spiritual life reverses this principle of building; it bases its action in the collective life upon an inner experience and inclusion of others in our own being, an inner sense and reality of oneness. The spiritual individual acts out of that sense of oneness which gives him immediate and direct perception of the demand of self on other self, the need of the life, the good, the work of love and sympathy that can truly be done. A realization of spiritual unity, a dynamization of the intimate consciousness of one-being, of one self in all beings, can alone found and govern by its truth the action of the divine life.
SPIRIT ASPIRES
‘Pushing through’ mind, life, and body, the Creator Spirit aspires to realize divine humanity that is ’striving for birth’.
The Creator Spirit cannot be contained, nor can human personality. Constant finding and missing in the joy and pain of self-discovery, and world-discovery, must inevitably lead to self-finding and self-unfolding of Spirit. Realizing this self-exceeding, humanity evolves its truth of being through spiritual completeness (perfection).
Fuss, Worry, Clutch, and Grab
When personality does not have enough ‘power-to-be’, sickness occurs, causing people to become fiercely competitive. Manipulating oneself, and others, for ‘power-to-be’ results in collective egoism, which invariably diminishes personality, as Sri Aurobindo says,
“. . . clashing mental ideas, urges of individual and collective physical want and need, vital claims and desires, impulses of an ignorant life-push, hungers and calls for life satisfaction of individuals, classes, nations, a rich fungus of political and social and economic nostrums and notions, a hustling medley of slogans and panaceas for which men are ready to oppress and be oppressed, to kill and be killed, to impose them somehow or other by the immense and too formidable means placed at his disposal, in the belief that this is his way out to something ideal.”
Conversely, when personality finds inner power, beyond the ego mental-constructs, personality ‘comes alive’ with the flow of creative power. Power is based upon ‘intuitive grasp’, without agency, as Consciousness-Force, as Sri Aurobindo says,
“But because the burden which is being laid on mankind is too great for the present littleness of the human personality and its petty mind and small life-instincts, because it cannot operate the needed change, because it is using this new apparatus and organization to serve the old infraspiritual and infrarational life-self of humanity, the destiny of the race seems to be heading dangerously, as if impatiently and in spite of itself, under the drive of the vital ego seized by colossal forces which are on the same scale as the huge mechanical organization of life and scientific knowledge which it has evolved, a scale too large for its reason and will to handle, into a prolonged confusion and perilous crisis and darkness of violent shifting incertitude.”
Experiencing power ‘immediately’ is essential for humanity to realize perfection, since perfection demands freedom and responsibility. Power that is ‘mediated’ results in ‘perfectionism’ that is externally coerced.
VIABLE
Every aspect of existence is being coerced into a system of mechanistic mentality; unless significant change occurs, the ‘human environment’ will be destroyed by disease and dysfunction.
Humanity is learning that the planet is fragile (i.e. limited resources, interdependent, living rather than mechanistic, etc.). An integral community must be created that realizes that diversity of the One is essential for health.
Synergy, which is all-important for integral community to even exist, depends on facilitating “an enabling, unified understanding.” Self-transcending and self-creative people, scattered throughout the planetary community, are using advanced communication technology to initiate and sustain this ethical dialogue.
Disintegration and exploitation have become immediate concerns: why do they exist and why do they persist? All life systems are threatened by fragmentation and alienation, with every aspect of human existence challenged, even though human capacity has been tremendously increased by technology. Since these changes are occurring so rapidly, it is extremely difficult to see if they offer ‘peril’ or ‘promise’ (i.e. Is the Earth dying, or is a new Earth being born?).
Without an increase in our evaluative ability, reflective and inventive abilities will continue to menace the quality of life. The efforts to contain humanity within a ‘constructed mental system’ are failing to factor in relevant elements, allowing: ethnic, religious, racial and national conflicts; depletion of resources through fierce competition, resulting in extreme disparities and severe destruction of the biosphere; all fueled by a tremendous increase in population.
The necessary changes, needless to say, will be to “another kind and form of life.” Mental answers are partial, seemingly making the situation worse; a more dynamic and comprehensive understanding of human community is imperative. In order to put the ‘surprising’ into life, so the rich diversity will flourish, rather than be restricted by rigid and coercive structures, Margaret Wheatley said, “We need to be able to trust that something as simple as a clear core of values and vision, kept in motion through continuing dialogue, can lead to order.”
The greatest crime by teachers and leaders, in most cultures, has been to force joyful experience into joyless, uncreative channels. When people are denied freedom and responsibility, they ‘get an attitude’, since apathy and violence are the result of powerlessness and hopelessness. Instead of subordination within a ‘dominator culture’, self-organizing cultures are emerging, awakening the joy of friendship and meaningful work.
If humanity is to become viable “for the evolution of another kind and form of life,” !he affinity steam of life must be allowed to flow, as well as, the structural steam!
No Answer
Truth is known ‘through’ perspectives, rather than ‘once-and-for-all’ and ‘for-sure’. [There must certainly be those who want to ask, “Since when?” and “Who says so?”] They believe Truth is contained within their tradition (cultus), ‘as if’ God were an Idea, and ‘as if’ we were predetermined ideas.
As a form engendering force, God is dialogue (I AM THAT I AM), eternally creating ideas with infinite qualitative and quantitative possibilities. With each perspective in creative tension with all perspectives, we can be thought of as ’spontaneous ideas’ within the Infinite Mind. We are doing art on the level of Being, creating consciousness in order to give meaning to existence.
Responsibility does not have any ‘rules’ (concepts, formulas, blueprints, methods); there is no idea to tell us who-we-are or how-to-be; freedom (no-thing-ness) is deeper and prior to that-which-Is. Essence originates spontaneously from Being, creating that-which-Is.
BERDYAEV QUOTE
“Creativity is the supreme mystery of life, the mystery of the appearance of something new, hitherto unknown, derived from nothing, proceeding from nothing, born of nothing other….”
Truth is not about reality; it is reality. The creative effort of life-itself is originating ‘what-is’ out-of-nothing, as Spirit spontaneously continues the creation in and through humanity.
Violence of Transformation
God and man ‘work with’ each other, aspiring to transform human consciousness into the perfection (compassion) of the One.
Simply, they are involved within a progression from matter, to life, to mind, and then to Spirit; or another way, our consciousness progresses from infrahuman, to human, to suprahuman. Humanity, finally, is to be surpassed, living totally ‘within’ the life of humanity while being ‘above’ humanity, in order to guide Nature to the perfection of the One.
The numinous levels of the psyche can be understood progressively in terms of the violence of sacrifice:
God sacrifices man for God
God sacrifices God for man
Man sacrifices God for man
Man sacrifices man for God and man
God and man, giving themselves ‘entirely to create’ the meaning of existence, are ‘working out’ the evolutionary process. The operative word is ‘work’, which means, destroying in order to create. We are asked to be more than we know how to be, continually brought into question, overcoming simplicity with greater complexity and increased intricacy (compassion).
God is not in a distant heaven but within ourselves and our society. Our work is to go within, awakening the power of the deep unconscious, in order to bring the Self to form . . . ‘overcoming’ ourselves to be our Self.
AUROBINDO QUOTE
The idea or experience of an inner darkness when looking inwards is the first reaction of a mentality which has lived always on the surface and has no realized inner existence; it has only a constructed internal experience which depends on the outside world for the materials of its being. But to those into whose composition there has entered the power of a more inner living, the movement of going within and living within brings not a darkness or dull emptiness but an enlargement, a rush of new experience, a greater vision, a larger capacity, an extended life infinitely more real and various than the first pettiness of the life constructed for itself by our normal physical humanity, a joy of being which is larger and richer than any delight in existence that the outer vital man or the surface mental man can gain by their dynamic vital force and activity or subtlety and expansion of the mental existence.
Immediate Power
Integral spirituality is being known ‘by God’, in order to know ‘with God’. Instead of knowing ‘about God’ through concepts and structures, knowing is ‘intimacy with’. Capacity for the Living God dies, when power is mediated through law, tradition, creed, doctrine, institution . . . and the world becomes ‘flat’, having lost the power of deep relating.
Immediate Power has the quality of an event, an occasion, within which ordinary consciousness is disturbed or disrupted, encouraging original formulation of thought as a revelatory process. There is a feeling of being outside of oneself, or of being suspended in wonder, awe, or Mystery.
The genius has these experiences frequently, refusing to know without an original appreciation within an immediate encounter. There is a ’sense-in-which’ that the very integrity of the person is brought into question, bringing the ordinary into question, wanting to let novelty occur.
Freedom and responsibility take on great significance, often ‘throwing’ one into moments of intense anxiety and dread before novelty occurs. Accountability is ’safe’, while creativity is ‘dangerous’. . . live dangerously by knowing ‘with God’.
Perfection
“What alone can regenerate us? Envisionment of what is perfect.” Friedrich Nietzsche
The world is in trouble. The difficulty when saying this is no one is able to adequately say what the trouble is. Duane Elgin in his book, Promise Ahead, offers extremely disturbing symptoms, he calls ‘adversity trends’. Will we ‘crash’ or will we ‘bounce’?
The answer will be determined by our assessment: Is the Earth dying, or is a radical shift in consciousness occurring? Every indication is that we have more power than we have maturity. Technology has developed way beyond our capacity for evaluation (viz. our values are inadequate)! We are dangerous!
Nietzsche was one who saw this coming; he said that we are more than ‘rule keepers’; we are the creators of value. We are called upon to envision the perfect and give style to life. “The grand style consists in contempt for trivial and brief beauty; it is a sense for that which is rare and lasts long.”
The Grand Style asked of us is made possible by the Grand Politic. Our problem today is that we lack the political will to give style to life. We settle too quickly for the trivial and brief . . . who among us will commit to envisioning the perfect?
Ecstatic reason is required, as well as, technical reason; thinking only on the surface of things is not adequate. We need to ‘ground’ our consciousness in Being; ‘Intentions’ need to be based on ‘intentionality’, which requires integral thinking.
Technology is neither our problem, nor our answer; we must be grounded within an integral community. Grounding our consciousness awakens and liberates forces that propel us into a new realm, forces that undertake bold deeds. An integral community is the opposite of alienation and fragmentation; it is the dynamic in which all people can live to capacity and creativity.
What alone can regenerate us? Envisionment of what is perfect (whole). When we realize that we are all one-within-the-One, we will have created “an enabling, unified understanding” by which the ruinous forces will be overcome. Mastery of Nature and her transformation will have been realized for a greater perfection in the earthly existence itself.
Revere Life
What has become obvious, I have had only one idea, and I still do not know what it is. Just when I think I have come upon a new awareness, or experience, I find that it is the same idea with new words, only increased urgency. I have read theology with an urgency similar to the way a mother reads a First-Aid Manual when her child is spurting blood.
A few years ago, having realized this, I said to myself, “I do not know,” and I still liked myself. The neurotic compulsion let go; I did not ‘have to know’. There was still an intensity; I still wanted to know, but I was freed up. The word ‘Mystery’ took on new importance; no idea would ever content me; my soul was able to soar and plunge more playfully, while still experiencing awe and wonder.
Then, I decided on a ‘project of passion’ that held my ideas together (coherent basis). “Reverence for life” was chosen to formulate the ‘intentionality’ of my thinking, as I sought to join the evolutionary project of creating consciousness. Friends, who were long gone, Meister Eckhart, F. W. Nietzsche, Søren Kierkegaard, etc., continued their dialogue in my head.
Albert Schweitzer provided one sentence that satisfied me: “Reverence for life means to be in the grasp of the Infinite, inexplicable, forward urging Will, in which all being is grounded.” Not only did this satisfy my ‘hunger and thirst” for essential righteousness; my concern about society was given a basis for ‘activism’.
Reverence overcomes the alienation and fragmentation that proves to be so ruinous to the economy of the planetary community. Connecting with such a deep purpose as reverence for life brings people together with passion, even with those we thought were our enemies. The urgency is that the world is spurting blood.
Community is an Ethic
Albert Einstein defined ethic as “an enabling, unified understanding.” Without an ethic there is no community, so ethics become whatever is needed to have a community.
But wait, are there inadequate, or dysfunctional communities? Or again, communities that enable diversity and spontaneity of expression? Some have ‘low synergy’, others have ‘high synergy’. Where does synergy and the intimacy of community come from? (Do we even have a global ethic?)
An ethic happens among people, created by engaging each other in dialogue. Instead of an ethic being imposed, an ethic is composed out of each person’s destiny with others. Our shared destiny is to liberate wisdom and beauty (as a way to a higher humanity). Amor sui, amor dei, amor fati is the cry for community — love yourself, love God, love destiny!
ETHIC FOR AN INTEGRAL LEARNING COMMUNITY
Creating an Integral Learning Community depends on ego-transcending altruism, transcending competitive individualism, through shared vision of meaning, involving these concerns:
INTEGRAL
When we experience personal wholeness, we begin concerning ourselves with the whole-beyond-the-parts; and then, we begin creating community in which all are one-within-the-One
TRANSCULTURAL
Transcultural goes beyond ego-centric, ethno-centric, racial-centric, and nationalism, beyond the tolerance of multi-culturalism to the thrill of diverse people living to capacity and creativity within dynamic unity.
PARTICIPATION
As participatory democracy matures, sovereignty begins and ends with each and every person. Community has evolutionary responsibility to move beyond totalism and individualism to synergism and dialogue.
ENABLING
When we shift from coercive power to enabling power, life becomes open (i.e. Instead of making each other do what we would not do, we enable each other to do what we could not do).
SYSTEMIC
In ‘composing community’, constructive means are made available through a systemic process: art, communication, community, education, environment, health, justice, resources, science and spirituality.
SPIRITUAL
With freedom and responsibility, each goes beyond self-interest to passionate, self-transcending concern. (i.e. work is education in which a living culture brings people together in stimulating, meaningful, and challenging ways.
SUMMARY
An Integral Learning Community is created when solitary individuals dialogue with other solitary individuals about meaning. Committed to transforming consciousness beyond the mental to the spiritual, they produce a synergy to overcome subordination to mechanistic and dominating structures.
SACRED CHILD
The child is both the evolutionary goal of the past and the beginning still to come. Within the child, we see our smallness and our vastness, containing the possibilities within our personality, as well as, the essence of the living universe.
Perfectibility is the principle which underlies life activity, drawing human beings into connection with the primary, most pervasive processes of the universe. The Self, often symbolized by the child, represents the underlying processes of life and death and rebirth, of the struggle and resolution of opposites into the Way.
“Make a Killing”
In an earlier post, I talked about “fuss, worry, clutch, and grab”, saying that when personality does not have enough ‘power-to-be’, sickness occurs, causing people to become fiercely competitive. Another way to consider the consequences of ‘powerlessness‘ is the business exclamation, “I just made a killing!”
When the vast majority of people rely on ‘external support’, a ‘fierce’ Collective Ego forms that is deadly! More than one hundred years ago, Sri Aurobindo warned,
If humanity is to survive, a radical transformation of human nature is indispensable.
The warning was not listened to, and the situation has only gotten more urgent.
WARNING! WARNING!
“But because the burden which is being laid on mankind is too great for the present littleness of the human personality and its petty mind and small life-instincts, because it cannot operate the needed change, because it is using this new apparatus and organization to serve the old infraspiritual and infrarational life-self of humanity, the destiny of the race seems to be heading dangerously, as if impatiently and in spite of itself, under the drive of the vital ego seized by colossal forces which are on the same scale as the huge mechanical organization of life and scientific knowledge which it has evolved, a scale too large for its reason and will to handle, into a prolonged confusion and perilous crisis and darkness of violent shifting incertitude.”
We now use a ’smash and grab’ operation . . . taking advantage of people experiencing “a prolonged confusion and perilous crisis and darkness of violent shifting incertitude.”
WARNING! WARNING! WARNING!
SOLITARY
‘Lonely’ is painful; ’solitary’ is joy.
Solitary is not the same as ‘isolated’; a solitary person is able to relate with others in an independent and creative way.
* Individualism tends toward separation from others;
* Totalism tends toward identity with others;
* Solitude tends toward engagement with others.
We are with others, even crowded together, and we are painfully alone. Other times, we are with others, deeply engaged, and we are joyfully alone.
Only confronting the Alone, do we have creative power; ‘thrown back’ on ourselves, we are asked to be more than we know how to be. We can be united with the creative effort of life; or, we can be lonely even for ourselves, isolated from our inner self!
When we live as an individual, we are subordinated rather than solitary, and have not become a person. Only as we know ourselves as radically alone, beyond any external idea to tell us who we are, do we become whole as a solitary person, which involves the anguish of freedom and responsibility. We do not imitate, adapt, adjust to what others expect us to be; we ‘meet’ them within an I-Thou relation as a unique person.
BERDYAEV QUOTE
When confronted with an object my Ego remains solitary; there is no need to emerge and go towards the Thou, but … in the presence of another Ego, which is also a Thou, it emerges from its solitude in an endeavour to achieve communion. The intuition of another Ego’s spiritual life is equivalent to communion with it.
“I lived in solitude in the country and noticed how the monotony of a quiet life stimulates the creative mind.” Albert Einstein
SPONTANEOUS SYMPATHY
Obedience to the Living God is to be creative, doing a perfect work of art, uniting your will with the almighty Will for action!”
AUROBINDO QUOTE
“ . . . he would live and act in an entire transcendent freedom, a complete joy of the spirit, an entire identity with the cosmic self and a spontaneous sympathy with all in the universe. All beings would be to him his own selves, all ways and powers of consciousness would be felt as the ways and powers of his own universality. But in that inclusive universality there would be no bondage to inferior forces, no deflection from his own highest truth: for this truth would envelop all truth of things and keep each in its own place, in a relation of diversified harmony, - it would not admit any confusion, clash, infringing of boundaries, any distortion of the different harmonies that constitute the total harmony. His own life and the world life would be to him like a perfect work of art; it would be as if the creation of a cosmic and spontaneous genius infallible in its working out of a multitudinous order.”
Mediocrity is Sin
Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds. Albert Einstein
AUROBINDO QUOTE
“ . . . he would live and act in an entire transcendent freedom, a complete joy of the spirit, an entire identity with the cosmic self and a spontaneous sympathy with all in the universe. All beings would be to him his own selves, all ways and powers of consciousness would be felt as the ways and powers of his own universality. But in that inclusive universality there would be no bondage to inferior forces, no deflection from his own highest truth: for this truth would envelop all truth of things and keep each in its own place, in a relation of diversified harmony, - it would not admit any confusion, clash, infringing of boundaries, any distortion of the different harmonies that constitute the total harmony. His own life and the world life would be to him like a perfect work of art; it would be as if the creation of a cosmic and spontaneous genius infallible in its working out of a multitudinous order.”
Angelus Silesius, also a spontaneous genius working out of a ‘multitudinous order’, said, “It is a sign of mediocrity to want other people to resemble oneself.” He saw that humanity, unable to unite with the Spirit of the Living God, was ’stuck’ in the mental, trusting ego consciousness that adapts, adjusts, fits-in, conforms to the world of the Collective Ego.
Mediocrity must be replaced by humility and profundity!
Transformation is the only ‘way’ (Tao teh ching), when understood as the incarnation of the eternal Tao/Logos. The ego, of itself, is clearly not able to realize the presence of the Living God . . . too often, creating religion, instead.
METANOIA
Metanoia means to ‘turn around’. And that means letting go of ‘what is’ for what is now possible.
Spirit invites humanity into the generating Power of origination, enabling us to go beyond fear and rigidity to spontaneity. Instead of being dominated by external systems, we can turn toward an internal dialogue of freedom and responsibility to overcome and overreach ‘the ordinary’ through creativity.
Much of what concerns me is so intense, and extremely complex, that only a “complete change” will be adequate. I have often said, “The whole thing is wrong,” and the problems are so insidious that reason is not adequate. Lately, I have been saying that we need a new humanity.
The change is from an ‘ego adaptive’ person to a Self-transcending person who has awakened to the originating power of the Spirit. It is only a free and entire intuitive consciousness which would be able to see and to grasp things by direct contact and penetrating vision.
AUROBINDO QUOTE
This would be a real participation by the individual in the working of the universal Consciousness-Force; the individual Purusha would become the master of his own executive energy and at the same time a conscious partner, agent, instrument of the Cosmic Spirit in the working of the universal Energy: the universal Energy would work through him, but he also would work through her and the harmony of the intuitive truth would make this double working a single action. A growing conscious participation of this higher and more intimate kind must be one accompaniment of the transition from our present state of being to a state of supernature.
BEYOND RELIGION
‘The living presence of God’ is a radical reversal of consciousness: being known by God immediately rather than knowing about a ‘dead idea of god’ mediated by religion.
Closely related to living with God ‘immediately’ is a personal metanoia, turning from external and adaptive existence to inward and self-transcending existence. This going beyond oneself to be oneself is to be ‘beyond human’, united with the Almighty Will for fresh action, leading Nature to perfection.
Theandric (a.) Relating to, or existing by, the union of divine and human operation within the Word, or the joint agency of the divine and human nature.
As Nicolas Berdyaev said, “Who believes in the force of the spirit? Do Christians? . . . Truth must out: the overwhelming majority of men, and among them the Christians, are materialists. Not, mark you, materialists in their doctrine, but in their life.”
AUROBINDO QUOTE
“For no greater seeing mind, no intuitive soul of knowledge has yet come to his surface of consciousness which could make this basic fullness of life a condition for the free growth of something that exceeded it. This new fullness of the means of life might be, by its power for a release from the incessant unsatisfied stress of his economic and physical needs, an opportunity for the full pursuit of other and greater aims surpassing the material existence, for the discovery of a greater and diviner spirit which would intervene and use life for a higher perfection of the being: but it is being used instead for the multiplication of new wants and an aggressive expansion of the collective ego.”
Freedom is radical, primary within the depths of the Origin, demanding imaginative and innovative responsibility. There is no idea, or sytem of ideas, by which the creative process operates. Obedience to the Creator Spirit is to be creative — unique, historic, and unrepeatable — bringing form and value through art.
|
|