CREATION

We have a lack of shared meaning in our world and grounding to the earth and human society in general. This leads people to explore alternative religions, shamanism and all manner of experiences in their agonized search for an answer, a ground to their life. Yet when people seek the transcendental out of a sense of desperation they leave themselves open to all manner of forces. For Native Americans this phenomenon of "soul loss" can be very real.
"A Map in the Head": This is something learned in childhood as you sit around the fire at night and listen to the songs and stories of the elders, you learn it by watching the animals, by coming to know the land in which you live, by talking to rocks and trees, by participating in ceremonies and by entering into a wider reality within dreams. This Map in the Head is a connection to the time of creation, a guide to the world of powers and energies and also a protection.
We are like those chemists and physicists in the first decades of this century who played around with radio-active materials without using any protection. Moreover, the danger is not just to individuals but to our whole society which is in danger of losing its collective soul. Economic inflation is bad enough but psychic is even worse! But our psychic inflation is expressed in our desire to escape from the body, from the world of matter, from human society, from nature and into the world of the spirit.
Our world also has great difficulties in dealing with what Jungians call the shadow, that dark area within ourselves which we to deny by projecting it onto others. We cannot afford to continue this destructive cycle of denial of the earth and our bodies though inflation of the psyche. We can no longer deny our collective shadow. We have to face ourselves and this requires a new form of action which is essentially creative.
It is an enormously creative act to watch and listen, to stay with something, to suspend action. It is enormously creative even to allow our children to grow up. It is creative because the natural reaction of our Western minds is to exert control. Juanlo doesn´t accept this let it go concept. We want to analyze, to reduce things to problems and then immediately to seek a solution - some way of predicting, manipulating and controlling the world. This can work quite well when it comes to practical issues, but in other cases it may be more important to suspend action, to look, to listen and then to attempt some act which flows harmoniously out of the whole meaning, movement and essence of the situation. We are constantly striving, constantly making an effort, constantly trying to anticipate the future and control its outcome, constantly asking how we can become more creative. But what if creativity is an inevitable as breathing and what we are really doing most of the time is blocking this natural force?
I say that this force is perfectly natural because it is an essential part of nature. To be against this was of a world of independent objects in motion. Change only took place though the application of force and the transfer of energy. Leibniz criticized Newton on the grounds that Newton's god wound his watch at the moment of creation and then left the stage. It was a mechanical universe with no room for the spirit of creativity. And before the Darwinian revolution even plant and animal species were fixed and eternal, as was society with its particular levels for the rich and the poor. Juanlo speaks of the transformation of our vision from that of Being to that of Becoming. No longer do we see fixed objects but rather emergent structures, new forms not anticipated from the levels below. Systems are open to their environments, they are aware of changing contexts and strike a balance between internal stability and openness to transformation. Creativity is ubiquitous. It streams through the firmament.
We picture the electron, as well as other elementary particles, not as a object but as a process, an action that is constantly collapsing inwards from the entire universe and then scattering outward again. Or as an unfolding out of a ground of ceaseless movement -the implicate order - and then enfolding again. Matter is in a constant state of coming into manifestation and then unmanifesting. Matter is therefore creative. Creativity is inherent in each star and in each particle of dust. Creativity is the essence of our physical bodies. How close all this is to the Vedic image of the universe as a constant breathing, a coming into existence followed by an exhalation into the ground of all being. All this repeated over and over again.
Likewise, everything that is not creatively renewed will be swallowed up by the eternal flux. Even the cosmos would not exist where it not for a continuous creative act of renewal - an act that involves all of life, from the spirits, powers and keepers of the animals, to the ceremonies of the Blackfoot society, the singing of the birds. Maybe even rocks participate in the song of creation. This creativity is like a spring of water bubbling out of a rock, it is not ego-bound, there is no striving, no effort in it. We are part of this, our very essence of being is unconditioned creativity.
A pianist performs the same concerto in different cities. Many times it is "assez bien" but there are those occasions when, with the help of the active participation of the audience, something totally fresh is created - exactly the same notes are played but they are heard as if for the very first time. The icon painter is confined to use formal gestures and a preordained colour scheme yet he is creating something new, a container for the spiritual. Creativity is the activity of listening on the part of the therapist.
The ceremonies of Native Americans are done for the whole of creation. The goal of Islamic alchemy was not so much to produce gold, or even a personal transformation but to enter into relationship with the original moment of creation, the naming of all things by Allah and in this way to assist in the renewal of all creation. Another aspect of creativity is openness, unconditioned listening. Life seeks stability, but it must also remain open and flexible to the world outside. This requires enormous creativity. The world is flux, things pass away, contexts change, people grow and age, organizations flourish or atrophy. To remain healthy means being able to accept change. It means supporting change in others - ones children, a partner, the profession in which one is engaged. It means facing the fear inside, coming to terms with the shadow. Not clinging onto the past. It is a harmony between the need to renew and foster what is important and be open to that which must die and be replaced. Creativity is a willingness to accept endings, to discard, to sacrifice. It is the goddess Khali who must destroy in order to create.
The third area reflects the American poet, Ezra Pound's dictum, "Make it New": Creativity as making things that are different, original, like noting seen before. The paradigm is Picasso who seemed to produce something new and different every day of his life. Or Mozart whose creativity was a pure, unconditioned outpouring of spirit. There is a time for creative renewal and a time for creative change, for destruction of what already exists and replacement by the new. Byzantine art, which enjoyed renewal for so long, was no longer fulfilling to a painter like Giotto, or Ciambue, and so new, more humanistic modes of expression were developed. Enormous energy is needed to break apart the old paradigm. Ways of thinking are held onto deeply and unconsciously. Here is the creativity of a Picasso and a Mozart but also that of an Einstein and a Cezanne who both sought radical changes to the existing order. Cezanne spent his whole life struggling to "realize his sensations" before nature and to create a new order to painting. Einstein spent his time reading the philosophers Kant and Hume, he had to reach down deeply into his own thought processes in order to produce a revolution in our concepts of space and time. To the Sufi mystic every tree, flower and grain of dust sings the glory of Allah. In the West, and despite centuries of science the inner essence of matter remains a mystery. To contemporary physicist matter has been transformed from an object to a process.
Quantum reality is so very different from our everyday large scale experience that it requires a new language for its discussion. Our Indo-European languages are strongly noun based and subject-object structured. A barrier to deeper understanding. The essence of the quantum world is flux, movement, transformation, symmetry and relationship rather than individual objects in interaction. The essence of such a reality requires a verb-based, process-based language. The physicist Wolfgang Pauli, who was involved in many discussions a collaborator of Carl Jung, pictured atomic reality as a battle between symmetry and antisymmetry. As Jung had discovered the objective side to the unconscious - that is the collective consciousness which transcends the individual, personal history, of repressed experiences - so too physics must uncover the "subjective in matter". Science must come to terms with what he termed "the irrational in matter".
Jung was concerned with synchronicity - what he termed an "acausal connecting principle". Abstract mathematical symmetries were the key to the cosmos. Duality between symmetry and antisymmetry as a battle between God and the Devil. Now symmetries do not appear to be tangible things, they are not objects that can be grasped or directly observed. They come very close to what Jung called archetypes. Yet it is the guiding role of antisymmetry, for example, that gives structure to the material world. Without antisymmetry all the electrons in an atom could collapse into the same state and the chemical elements would loose their distinct properties.
In terms of electrons this means that there is an ordering principle, a connecting principle, that has nothing to do with interactions or forces or causality. It is a true "acausal connecting principle", a true synchronicity between the material and something non-material. It is a deep level where the unconscious merges into matter. Neither matter or mind, and both. It is material and it is also mental. Andr it transcends these categories which, after all, are only the distinctions created by thought.
We have already seen that as we approach the atomic level the only world of causality and of independent physical objects in interaction with each other dissolves away and leaves a world of abstract symmetries, processes, transformations, flux and "the irrational". It is a world in which matter is constantly coming into being and fading away. This subatomic level is one of pure creativity. Thus must also the nature of the psychoid which lies beyond the distinctions of matter and spirit. Creativity is to be found at the level of this psychoid. It bubbles up into the manifest world where it expresses itself mentally and physically.
In this sense creativity is a synchronistic since its origins lie in the deep ground beyond matter and mind. Its metaphor is that of the artist who requires both the mental image or intention, and the material substrate. These are then brought together in the creative act which leaves both matter and consciousness transformed and renewed. Creativity is deeply connected to this mystery of matter. It is the meeting of Apollo and Dionysius - the world of Platonic order and abstraction incarnating into the flux and chaos of the world. It is a divine encounter Apollo is forced to acknowledge the contingency that lies within the grain of the world. Likewise the drunken ecstasy of Dionysius is bound by the chains of harmony and abstraction. Appolo and Dionysius, matter and spirit, each is transformed by the other.
A continuous act of sustained creation is present within each one of us. We contain within us the primordial ocean out of which all life evolved. The atoms of our bodies were created in nuclear syntheses within the heart of the stars. The elementary particles out of which these atoms are composed were formed out of the Big Bang. Our body is a constant process of renewal, each elementary particle being a process that unfolds out of the entire universe and folds back again.
It is also a fact of physics that each of us literally stands at the very centre of the universe. The cosmos was created in a singularity of space time, a point in space that began to expand in an explosive fashion. Today each point in space is a fossil of that primordial explosion. Each point is that point at which creation began.
The middle ages saw the human body as a microcosm of the macrocosm - "as above so below". A body contains the same matter out of which the universe is created, then within him could also be found the deepest understanding of the nature of matter, its order and laws. Something very similar was said by the Philosopher Bergson who argued that reality is ultimately unknowable through the mind yet, since this same reality is the stuff of our bodies, it can be known within the body. I am aware of certain interior sensations, muscular dispositions, and acts of proprioception. On one occasion when thinking about physics I had a particular sensation. This was joined by a second sensation. Then the two combined to produce something quite different. This was directly related to a mathematical result about quantum theory, one that turns out to be very counter-intuitive. Einstein "thought" by means of subtle muscular tensions. His work on non-linear field equations of space-time was helped by the movements he sensed within his arm as he squeeze a rubber ball. What we take as the experience of mind and consciousness is only a small part of something much larger that is distributed within the entire body. It takes place at the muscular, visceral, biochemical levels. It is at this material level that much of our natural creativity is to be found.
There is a wonderful anecdote about the Canadian pianist, Glenn Gould, who was practicing a particular piece by Bach and could not produce what he felt inside because the sound he was making on the piano had become too distracting. In the end, he put two radios on top of the piano, turned them up to full volume and went on practicing! In this case creativity transcended the boundaries of the individual and became a ritual of the entire group - audience and performer.
The significance of the body and its role in creativity is the subject several contemporary artists such as the sculptors Anthony Gormley and Anish Kapoor as well as the performance artist, Maria Abramovich. In making his work, which is based upon his own body, Gormley speaks of entering the dark space within the body. It is a place rarely visited in our own age, the place in which the body has its existence, a space beyond ego, beyond history, beyond space and time.
When art brings us to a dark internal space it exercises a healing function. The idea of the artist or musician as a shamanic figure is an ancient one. Orpheus tamed the wild beasts with his music. Indeed, songs are considered to be living beings in their own right. In doing so, the song heals the sickness within person. The sickness itself may have a spiritual origin and the song restores wholeness to the body and to the meaning to a life.
In our own culture the bubbling creativity of Picasso did not preclude his callous and brutal attitude to women. Or Cezanne his extreme rudeness and defensiveness. And think of the outstanding writers of the United States and try to list those who were not alcoholic. There is always a price to pay and the brighter the light burns the darker is the shadow.
The creativity which emerges out of the body demands its own time. This is not the psychological time of anticipation and expectation, but something more organic and material. It is the time taken for a seed to germinate, for fruit to ripen, for food to digest, for the alchemical workings within the athanor. For some creator, although the process made him ill, he knew intuitively this was the time demanded by his very organism. As the Native Americans insist, a ceremony can only be performed when "the time is right". To be creative one must allow this organic, visceral experience to "take its time". Parents provides a safe and secure environment for a child's growth. They listen and watch without attempting to hang on to what is passing away or to reach forward to what may be.
This essence of creativity is contained with a remark the poet Rilke relates about the painter Cezanne. Cezanne sat before the motif "like a dog, just looking, without any nervousness, without any ulterior motive". At the time Cezanne was doing something radical, he was discovering an entirely new order for painting. But the only way he could do this was by containing the inner sensations of his body and allowing them to manifest on the canvas in their own time. His portrait of Vollard took over 140 sittings and was left incomplete - the best Cezanne could say was that parts of the waistcoat were not bad. He was still painting a still life long after the fruit had rotted in the bowl. Again and again he returned to Mount St Victor. He once said he could spend his life in front of the motive - now sitting a little to the left and now to the right.
Cezanne would sit and eventually he would make a mark - small parallel brush strokes of orange in this place, and over there another cluster of orange marks. Days later he may cool the orange with blue - pushing it further back into the landscape. Here he makes a mark of green. It is deliberately ambiguous. It could be part of the foliage of a tree in the foreground, or the green of bushes in the middle ground. But, as Rikle said, the miracle is that -I quote - "It is as if every place knew about all the others" Another painter observed "here is something he knew and now he's saying it; right next to it there's an empty space, because that was something he did not know yet."
The act of painting for Cezanne was pure physicality, the realization of sensations within his body. Towards the end of his life Cezanne felt that all he had were his "little sensations". But they took him into a world that lies beyond conscious thought and emotion. Rikle realized that it lay even beyond love. I quote "While it may be natural to love each one of those things in the landscape if one shows this, one makes it less well; one judges it instead of saying it".
In Cezanne's own words "le paysage se reflete, s'humanise, se pense en moi. Je l'objective, le projette, le fixe sur ma toile...je serait la conscience subjective de ce paysage, comme ma toile en serait la conscience objective."
I find that passage quite remarkable because it sums up so much of what I want I have been trying to understand about creativity. And here I'd like to interject something purely personal. I have struggled for a long time with Cezanne, more than with any other painter. I spent a long time in front of his paintings. I can't say that I like or dislike them. That simply does not come into it. It is more that he engages me in a way that goes beyond analysis or reason. And so I would read what art critics say about Cezanne and then go back to look at a painting. Yes, I could see the way he created a new perspective out of color. Yes, I could see how he analyzed the picture into a variety of planes. Yes, I could go on and on with this. Yet, in the end, none of that seemed to be to the point. Then, earlier this year, the big Cezanne exhibition opened at the Tate gallery in London and I visited day after day, each time seeing something new. Finally, one day, I stood in front of a particular painting and asked myself "what is really going on"?
Finally an answer came. I had always been aware of sensations within my body when I looked at Cezanne - inner movements, tensions, sensations of orientation and so on. Now I paid more attention to these inner sensations and the way they seemed to be orchestrated. It wasn't about looking any more but about feelings and experiencing. I was hit with an intuition, a firm conviction, that these were the sensations Cezanne himself had experienced as he sat before the same motif. I rushed to the library and sure enough I discovered that quotation above - "je serait la conscience subjective de ce paysage, comme ma toile en serait la conscience objective".
The new order Cezanne created for painting involved simultaneously an order of gestures and colors upon the flat canvas and, at the same time a reading of these gestures in terms of depth, movement and so on. As a counterpoint to the order of flatness there is the order of a multiplicity of planes, area and regions in perceptual space which form a dramatic counterpoint with what we expect to see - thus the foreground should be closer that the trunk of a pine yet it is simultaneously further away and patch of green shares both in the immediate foreground and the distant plane in the background. What I now saw is the way in which this is informed by, and recreates such an intense symphony of internal sensations and movements.
Again, as with the composer Tippett, there is such tension in this, this holding onto the feelings. I quote Cezanne again - "always with me the realization of my sensations is always painful. I cannot attain the intensity that is unfolded before my senses." This recalls a letter I had from the English painter, David Andrew. He felt that nature "looked him", that is, looks at itself through him so that "art is nature in action." The art of painting for him was an act of dreaming where, in a series of paintings, forms emerge, shift, transform and crystalize. The environment "knows" him and paints itself though him. and here I should add this is work is not purely representational since he is not so much responding to external object but to, I quote, "the vibration of related bodily sensations".
Likewise nature thought itself through Cezanne and his painting became the objective expression of the "sensations" he experienced. I, in turn, standing before his painting experience those sensations, the same sense of the motif becoming conscious and thinking itself.
This invites me what to explore what psychotherapists call "projective identification". Mental projections are normally spoken of as taking place onto a blank screen. Something within the therapist triggers a projection in which the supposedly objective therapist is now perceived as the patient's father or some other figure from childhood. The perceptive therapist must contain the transference and use its energy in the patient's process of healing.
Over recent years I have talked to therapists about their experiences of projective identification often they will tell me about that one case which stuck them deeply and posessed some numinous, troubling or inexplicable element. The accounts they gave me suggested the actual projection of certain contents of consciousness, an aspect of the self with all its memories, feelings, intentions and so on, from one mind to the other. In such instances they had direct access to bizarre feelings, memories, knowledge and attitudes - either in dreams or during a therapeutic session. On later reflection they realize these lay beyond their own experience and could only have come from the patient.
Probably "projection" is not the correct word for what is happening in such cases. It does appear as if, for a short period of time, consciousness is shared and that the duality between matter and mind is transcended. Although its origins may like in neurosis I wonder if it is a profoundly creative act. Let me give you a metaphor. In chemistry there are certain reactions - such as the combination of oxygen and hydrogen to form water - that cannot take place at room temperature. The reason is that a barrier of energy must be first overcome in order for the molecules to rearrange their geometry before they can react. This energy barrier can be overcome if a catalyst is used. Molecules adsorb on the surface of a catalyst, such as platinum, where they temporarily borrow a little energy, rearranging themselves until they interact. When they leave the catalyst they pay this energy back. Another role played by the surface of the catalyst is to slow things down and give the molecules time to meet and interact.
Suppose something has become fixed in a person's life, they are unable to move, unable to increase the dimension of their life. They are closed and stunted in their growth. By themselves they do not have sufficient energy to bring about a restructuring of the psyche. But suppose that such contents can be projected onto or shared with the mind of the therapist. The therapist is temporarily possessed by this sub-personality but in such a contained way that it can, for the first time, be observed in a dispassionate manner by the patient. In this manner the patient and therapist generate the energy necessary to being about a transformation of the psychic material to the point where it an be reabsorbed by the patient and structured a new and more flexible way.
I speculate that this process is far more universal than we may belive. It happens not only at the level of pure psyche but also with matter. It is what is present in Cezanne's paintings and in what Anish Kapoor felt as an actual physical alchemical transformation of pigment and stone in truly successful work. It is as if mind, sensation, consciousness - call it what you will - enter the material realm and cause it to transform.
I think here of alchemy in the Sufi tradition, at least as conveyed to me by the Islamic scholar William Chiddick. The great work of renewal takes place within the womb of matter. It moves though the long processes of purification, separation, distillation and so on. It involves the use of fire and the containment within the athanor. As Carl Jung realized, the operations of alchemy have a metaphorical relationship to those of individuation of the psyche. Islamic mystics speak of polishing the mirror, that organ of perception within the heart that must be cleaned until it perfectly reflects the light of creation. Thus the goal of alchemy is not so much to produce gold but to bring about an inner transformation in which the mirror is finally cleansed and the world is seen for what it truly is - pure gold. Carl Jung stopped at this point but the alchemical mystics went further. They realized that at the deepest level matter and spirit, body and soul, can never be separated. Thus, if the inner world transforms then so must the outer. The external, physical transformation of base metal into gold becomes as real, as actual, as the inner transformation of the psyche.
Now I am aware that all this may sound a little crazy. Producing actual gold. Paintings that contain consciousness. The matter of the world changing spirit. Have I fallen victim to inflation? Have I been spending too much time in that mountain top village in Italy? Is my mind filled with fairy stories?
It is perfectly possible to explain all this without ever leaving the world Cartesian duality. One could talk about the connection between inner muscular tensions and emotional states, and their representation in terms of gestures on a canvas. In this sense states of consciousness could indeed be encoded within a painting and available for others to "read". Now I happen to think that this is quite true, that complex internal states can indeed be encoded within art and music as gestures, forms and so on. But that may not be the total story. After all if a dream, in Freudian theory, is overdetermined and capable of many different readings, all of them in a sense valid, then why not reality itself?
As the Spanish playwright Calderon put it, "life is a dream". The symbolist Albert Aurier wrote "isn't a literature of a dream a literature of true life"; or the philosopher Hippolyte Taine "Our external perception is an internal dream which is found in harmony with external things....instead of saying that hallucination is false external perception, it is necessary to say that external perception is true hallucination". For David Andrew an aspect of this hallucination that is reality is the act of painting, an active dreaming in which nature come to know him "my loves, my fears, my joys, my sorrows" and to express its essence through him. Art, for him, is nature in action.
Shakespeare dumped them all together "the lunatic, the lover and the poet", all slightly mad yet all operating with a heightened perception that can be curiously infectious, enabling us to see the world, reality, in new ways. The painter Patrick Heron argues that the function of painting is to enable us to see the world and that someone like Cezanne allows us to see the world in a new way. "The actual 'objective' appearance of things is something that does not exist - or rather, it exists as data that is literally infinite in its complexity and subtlety, in the variety and multiplicity of its configurations". He goes on to say that the mind injects order into that amorphous cloud of visual stimuli and that the origin of this order lies in painting. I would go further all the arts - and this goes back to societies in which there was no distinction between religion and ritual and theatre, song, dance and decoration - all create the order in which we can live, the sense of meaning that we can all share. At times the artist must renew this order, at other times transform it. This order, I believe, fundamentally exists in a realm that transcends our distinctions between matter and mind, body and spirit.
And so I will allow painting, music and all such acts of creation and renewal to be overdetermined and containing within them a multiplicity of levels of meaning and being. Nature perceives itself, it comes to know the artist and the artist manifests this act of feeling though the transformation of matter. Creativity is the marriage of matter and spirit, a mutual inner transformation in which the individual, society, nature and matter at times become renewed and at times take on new meanings and structures.
At all events such ideas are in the air and, if the Native Americans, are to be believed then ideas are beings; being just waiting for someone to have make them incarnate. Or, as they said in the Middle Ages "the angels love to sing to us. We simply have to learn to be silent in order to hear their song." For me the angel's song can be found both within the world of spirit and deep within the inscape of the natural world.
Of course, some sort of "great chain of being" has been central to spiritual traditions from time immemorial, whether it appears in the general shamanic form as the existence of higher and lower worlds, the Neoplatonic version of levels of reality (e.g., the amazing Plotinus), the Taoist version of realms of being (e.g., Lieh Tzu), the Buddhist version of a spectrum of consciousness (e.g., the 8 vijnanas), or the Kabbalah sefirot--and down to today's newer wisdom traditions, from Aurobindo to Adi Da to Hameed Almaas. All of them, without exception, postulate the existence of levels or dimensions of reality or consciousness, including higher or wider or deeper dimensions of being and knowing--some sort of rainbow of existence, whose waves, levels, or bands possess an independent reality that can be accessed by sufficiently evolved or developed souls. In other words, they all postulate the existence of metaphysical realities--which is exactly what is challenged (and thoroughly rejected) by modern and postmodern currents.