Solid gold creativity

For the last few months I’ve been struggling with an issue, and one of the things that distresses me most, apart from the struggle itself, is that it’s the same old issue I’ve had for decades.

I know this issue.

I know every stone on the path to where it lives, all the byways and cul-de-sacs on the trip, the scenery, the wallpaper when I get there.  Most of all, I know I don’t want to go to there again.  Nevertheless, it’s where I keep finding myself.  And I’ll hazard a guess here that you know exactly what I’m talking about because you too have “an issue” which dogs you over and over again.

Addicted to insights

The other day I had an insight about the issue while talking to a friend on the phone.  I had the kind of experience I described in a previous post on sharing.  I was talking about the issue and a tiny suggestion of an insight I’d had about it, and in the sharing I got it fully.  It became, as it were, a full-blown insight.

Now anyone who’s done lots of training and development in the nature of human being (I had mine courtesy of Landmark Education) will know that insights are great seductive jewels.  I think of them as the lollies of the human experience: a pretty, tantalising sugar-hit, inviting us to eat more and more, and eventually, sick-making.  As they say in later courses at Landmark Education – the earlier courses necessarily being given over to the first thrilling insight binges – we’re all, in fact,

addicted to insights.

We love insights.  Can’t get enough of them.  As soon as we’ve had one, we’re looking for the next.  They’re so damn … interesting.  And yet, here’s the thing: insights do not make a blind bit of difference.  If you look back over your life, you’ll see that, like me, you’ve probably had — and enjoyed — thousands and thousands of insights.  About others, about the world, about yourself.  Not one of these insights, however, will have changed anything.

Why?  Because insights lie in the realm of knowing, and real change or transformation lies in another realm, a realm which subsumes knowing and knowledge: the realm of being.

It’s the reason why the same issue can show up again and again for me, and why your issue keeps showing up for you over and over again.  And why, no matter what you know about it (realm of knowing), and what you do about it (realm of doing), nothing changes.  Because the issue lies in the realm of being.

Being and breaking rocks

Without some exposure to the concept of being or ontology (the study of being) which has almost vanished from our collective conversation, it can be tricky to grasp what I mean by phrases such as “the realm of being”, or the idea of being subsuming knowing.

The latter is particularly challenging because we’re so far gone in our fetishisation of science and “rationalism” we assume there is nothing outside of, or not available to knowledge.

But there are a few analogues that can help you glimpse the realm of being, and what’s involved in moving from one realm to another.  My friend, a scientist herself, came up with one of them.  She thinks of the difference between the realm of being and other realms as a state change.  For example, the kind of change or move that occurs when a gas becomes a liquid, or a liquid becomes a solid.  It’s the idea of transmutation.

Another is an analogy often used in Landmark Education about the difference between content and context.  There were three men breaking rocks beside a road.  The first man when asked what he was doing said, “I’m breaking rocks!”  The second man when asked what he was doing said, “I’m earning money to feed my family.”  The third man when asked what he was doing said, “I’m building a cathedral.”

For mine, the key difference between the realm of being and the realm of knowing is that the former is the realm of the completely new, while the realm of knowing is always the realm of recognition, ie, literally re-cognising something already glimpsed or known that one may have forgotten or covered up.

Nietzsche saw it all

Friedrich Nietzsche, the German philosopher born in 1844, spent the last 10 of his 56 years here on earth locked in madness under the dubious care of his sister, Elisabeth, the woman who would single-handedly trounce his reputation to this day by consorting with the National Socialists and allowing her poor brother’s writings to be used in service of the Nazi movement.  But before the final breakdown which occurred famously on his seeing a carthorse being flogged by its driver in a Turin square, Nietszche’s peculiar alloy of genius and madness vouchsafed him intuitions that have never been bettered.

One of them is the idea of the eternal return, or eternal recurrence.

What, if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: ‘This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you … The question in each and every thing, ‘Do you desire this once more and innumerable times more?’ (1)

What blows me away about this is how he got it all in one:

• that our definition of torment or hell is the same thing happening over and over again
• that this is what happens, this is our life; ie, there’s no “what if” to the demon stealing after us and whispering; rather, it’s when the demon does so (and the demon of course is ourselves, our own internal monologue)
• how we respond to that fact is what makes all the difference; in other words, it’s the response which belongs to the realm of being.

The response, Nietzsche speculates, can be despair and resistance:

Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus?

Or it can be acceptance, non-resistance, the great “yes” of which Nietzsche often spoke, the same “yes” offered curiously enough by the faithful Muslim servant, Farah from Out of Africa that I spoke about in an earlier post:

Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: ‘You are a god and never have I heard anything more divine.’

My curriculum

As for myself and my own situation, the insight I got the other day involved learning and what was to be learnt and how each of us has a curriculum or curricula to master throughout our lives.  Indeed, the funny thing is the three main Landmark courses are together called The Curriculum for Living which I hadn’t remembered until that moment.  More re-cognition!

I recognised that part of my curriculum is to learn to fight for what I want.  I’ll keep you posted on how this works out, and whether I can translate it into the realm of being. What’s your curriculum?

*****

Notes

1. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, section 341