Creativity and Trust

    The times when I wasn't creative are likely times when I didn't think I had anything within me that was special and distinct from others.  I have often found myself in situations where I thought that I need to look up to authorities and spiritual teachers, to the point where I no longer know what my "voice" is, and unfortunately these are times when I wasn't so generative or creative. Think about the difference between a plant that is fixed in one place so that it can only grow in one direction, and the happy majority of plants that do not suffer from this impediment. Whereas the plant that is fixed indeed grows to be quite tall and dignified, it lacks the kind of shape that makes it distinct in the world. I think that sometimes I have had to trust that there is something within me worth being a source of creative flow, even when I would sometimes rather just be told what to do and the right way of doing things.

    Creativity, like meditation itself, requires the space to observe. Too much emphasis on method will end up suppressing what is really within us--the raw material that we have to work with, like the soil itself. And a failure to trust that the soil is going to grow good things can lead to a stilting of creativity. This also comes from stereotyping the creative person as someone who is artistic, a "genius", gifted, exceptional, an outlier, and so on. These terms only serve to exotify something that is actually very natural and everyday, and can take the form of even having a conversation.

    It takes trust to allow a flower within to open up, and to know that the flower won't overrun the garden, or won't go out of control completely. We love our creations without falling in love with them--that is, knowing that creativity always yields beautiful yet impermanent things. And in these cases, sometimes the joy of creativity lies not so much in the finished product itself, but that ability to leave a window of trust through which we know that some things of worth will arise when they are freely expressed.

Cynicism

  Perhaps the essence of cynicism is "been there and done that", without realizing that there are no two steps that have been in the same place. It's important to be mindful of when the mind becomes weary and falls into the habit of expecting negative things--repetitions of the past--to happen again. In those moments, we must have the courage to face things freshly knowing that they really are new experiences. This is the essence of beginner's mind, in fact, but I realize in myself the strong resistance, the thought that if I open myself up to beginner's mind, I might take on too many of the same things as before. Cynicism can only be countered with a kind of disciplined decision to be surprised by the moment--in fact, to see inspiration as a choice and not as something that just happens out of a whim or as a result of novelty. We have to always be on guard against this habit of falling back into a habitual malaise--a kind of feeling that nothing new is to be discovered, or an attitude which protects us from being alive.

Being Inspired in the Moment

 During the study group today, someone had asked the delightful question, "What's your favourite skandha?" I paused to reflect on it, as I am often inclined to do so, and then came up with the word: sensation. I enjoy sensation the most because we can contemplate changes more easily and directly as opposed to say, the body or perceptions, or even thoughts. But perhaps more importantly, sensations can be direct portals into a world of being that is not mediated by words, concepts or comparisons. I remember hearing a song lyric that goes "feelings never lie", and I believe that sensations (which are somewhat more basic in nature than feelings) are much the same in that they simply register qualities in the brain rather than saying something about them, as we would normally when we interpret a song or a text.

One can easily be inspired in the moment if they are able to stay with sensations as they are naturally occurring, without judgment, so far as they point to the impermanence of the mind. And this is quite real because these sensations are not mediated by interpretations or comparisons with the past. Sensations simply are--and their facticity points to something that simply cannot be compared to anything else. As soon as I overlay a memory (perhaps of something subtly beautiful, expansive, or nice) onto the current sensation, I am adding something more to it, and this takes me away from its presence. This happens all the time without my truly being aware of it. Suffering happens when these two thoughts (the current and the past) get mixed together into one essence, and I think even boredom happens because the sensation is no longer alive: it's being confused with a thought that is ossified. Labels tend to be like this, in the sense that they over-define the moment while denying its subtle qualities of being. And yet, just as I am writing this piece,  I am recognizing that we need a language to envelop this process of being with our experiences without trying to romantically embellish or diagnose them. 

There is almost a kind of "taxonomy of the heart" that can be explored here: the ways in which the bodily sense gets washed over with abstractions (trying to label the sensations according to cultural ideas, wishful thinking (wanting the sensation to be different) and even reifying the sensation into a static thing which it is not--not to mention trying to solidify the sensation by linking it to a body part. But these mechanisms only falsify the fleeting nature of sensations by providing a false sense of knowing through these overused concepts, such as the body anatomy we learned in school, or psychoanalytic theories etc.

What is real harmony?

 Some people might argue that we don't really live in a harmonious world. Even the animal world demonstrates to us how creatures compete for survival and thus spread their progeny into the future generations. Poetic images also convey the natural world as one of competition, such as when animals are referred to as fighting "tooth and claw" for survival, or even the "fearful symmetry" of Blake's "Tyger Tyger" . This reflects an underlying belief that identity and selfhood is deeply connected to having a healthy body that can thrive and outlive other bodies. Given the fact that our bodies are subject to frequent bouts of illness and decay, is it safe to say that our world is in complete disharmony?

  Two perspectives can help to even out this view. One is that even when we say that things "lack harmony", in reality, most situations operate with some degree of causal predictability. Planting certain kinds of seeds will yield only certain fruits, for example, so it would be absurd to think that a melon seed is going to suddenly sprout into a carrot. From this perspective, there is always something that we can predict (with little or no variation). Some philosophers such as Spinoza have also suggested that all beings have a conatus, or a kind of inner principle that allows them to maintain structural integrity and remain as one thing and not another. With this view of the causal predictability and interdependence of things, could we not argue that all things are inherently harmonious?

    There is yet another argument embedded in this, and that is the idea that harmony is really an attitude of equalization. Rather than identifying my "self" as a very narrow element of the world, I may be said to naturally harmonize when I drop all identifications of "self' and "other". In this way, I am able to equalize all the elements and my mind doesn't move to one phenomena or the other. Then, when my mind does not discriminate between like and dislike, preferring "this" over "that", a natural harmony will settle over me. This is a different kind of harmony than one which involves trying to rearrange the furniture of my life according to how I think it should be. Rather, this harmony involves more deeply understanding my life as a complex interaction of many elements, both good and bad.

A Harmonious Self

   Can the self harmonize with all phenomena, no matter how disharmonious life can sometimes seem? My reflection is that if there is no solid sense of "self" to defend, and if a person takes all the phenomena around them to be the same as themselves (with no conflict), then harmony can result. This might be analogous to a garden full of flowers, where each flower does not cancel out the rest, as long as the flowers can be seen as equally worthy of love. I wonder if perhaps Christianity is very good at articulating this by suggesting that all creations under heaven are worthy of respect and love insofar as God created them. Leibniz was yet another philosopher who suggested that because each being has its own unique mechanism and reason for existing (referred to as a "monad"), this makes them eternally valuable. If we look at all beings in this way with a spirit of respect and knowing things to be inherently worthy, then our attachment to self will diminish over time. Metta meditation is also a way of fostering this kind of respect for all creation, and wishing that things are well and peaceful because they are unique creations.

   There is another way of putting it, and that is to suggest that because everything is interconnected, everything should be equally loved, lest we suffer the consequences of not tending to these interconnections. This is also a viable way of looking at things, but it sounds too much like "I'll scratch your back if you scratch mine". Yes, we're interconnected, but there needs to be an intrinsic sense of generic respect for all being as a whole. There needs to be a basis for respecting all people for their uniqueness without the utilitarian attitude of what we can get from others. And that is why I feel that respect needs to come from a sense of seeing the uniqueness of all beings. In some ways, harmony can only arise when each appearance and unfolding moment can be seen as inherently perfect and not in need of improvement or change.

Facing Time Well, Coming Full Circle

 I sometimes want to return to things that seemed difficult in the past, to see if we can face it better now. This is a kind of trick that the mind plays, and it's often based on an idea that I am making progress in some way, and want to prove to ourselves that we have. But what is progress after all? We may have changed our circumstances over the years but we may not understand how we arrived in the places that we have.

   One of the difficulties that comes with going back to my old school (York) was/is in realizing that the function of the university is to create and foster original thinking. But the difficulty and struggle with that is knowing that originality is extremely hard to come by, and takes a lot of inspiration. I do remember "plugging away" at the essays, yet somehow everything just seemed like an assignment of sorts; I don't recall being able to gauge whether I truly had progressed in my knowledge or understanding of things. There is always a question there, like: did I create what I was "meant to" create? Or is there something missing that I need to go back and finish? And the more I reflect on that, the more the mind goes around in circles. Had I majored in Computer Science, for instance, perhaps this would not have even occurred to me, but I happened to major in an area that is so vast in scope and range that I can no longer even place or define myself within it.

   I think it's important to think of the experience as one of tension. I want to enjoy, but I am needing to create; I want to learn but I need to extend my learning, not just passively reproduce what has been learned already. I should respect the rules of my discipline, but later be open to creating new rules. And finally, all this book learning does need to go out somewhere into a community. But I think that this struggle plays out in everyday life as well, and as long as we are becoming comfortable with that tension and see myself as "someone who (actively) thinks", then I will not worry about being pacified by the professors or books around me. And I will always remember that knowledge is not something that is pre-given but has to be fought over and wrested with.

York Days

  Going back to York University to attend a conference, I felt a sense of nostalgia, but also the sense that no matter what kind of a student I was, I was always curious. I had a love and delight in all kinds of books (literature and philosophy especially) and I still remember the times when I mounted the escalator, excitedly going forth to explore the plethora of books that were waiting for me. 

    The arts--what can I make of it? Going to York was about exploring the arts. Literature, linguistics humanities, philosophy, history, even psychotherapy--there were so many things that I enjoyed about my life at York, but most of all was the love of exploring new theories and worlds, trying to get a handle on what life "means" but realizing that there are so many refracted mirrors and lenses that tell completely different stories about the whole experience.

   I don't know if I am a "scholar" per se, and I am not sure if I was able to fully actualize my ambitions. But the important thing is that I was enjoying myself in a more basic way than what I could have put into words: the experience itself of being on campus and wrestling with different ideas, actually was underpinned by a sense of stillness, which I can only describe as a contemplative enjoyment. However, in my effort to try to grasp things at the time or become something amidst all these ideas, I had lost sight of the joy I experienced in those years. This reminds me of Adyashanti's teaching that we must try to find the stillness that is already inherent to every moment: the stillness that is even embedded in struggle, anxiety and conflict. It seems that I had to learn these things long after I graduated from York University, only to revisit it with fresh eyes that was able to contemplate me as truly belonging in that campus, even when I wasn't necessarily being recognized academically or in a scholarly way.