Art is a mystical process. Writing or any creative act is a spiritual or mystical process.
Every capacity or ability I can bring to bear on the authoring I do comes from and originates beyond me. I may participate in the creative process, but I did not author the capacity and potential I employ to identify or develop ideas, to set the intention to explore and articulate them, or to have the simple desire to produce something useful from those ideas.
The existence, the fact of all those creative impulses I cannot author. They came to me without my asking and have lived in me for years.
The ability to focus and persevere through some completion or some outcome like publishing or sharing or speaking or teaching from those ideas is also a capacity I can choose to engage, but in no way do I initiate or originate the impetus behind and before and beneath them.
You may not consider yourself a spiritual person, and you may or may not consider or give credence to the possibility that you’re guided by mystical sources or causes.
But contemplate the fact of these stirrings in you – not what you do with them, or how well you respond to them, or what they may say to you or help you create – but the simple truth of their existence in you.
I could not make these inclinations cease or subside in me if I wanted to, and I cannot want to. Impossible. I’ve surrendered to the truth that my art is a mystical process.
Is this true for you? If you’re an artist or creative, can you turn away from the muse? Can you silence the impulse for your art, can you stop thinking about your craft, can you turn off the attraction?
If you haven’t already, try to answer that, through whatever contemplative means you possess – meditation, journaling, prayer, intellectual analysis, discussion, research, dreams, running, free climbing, drinking, drugs, or any other form of inquiry you employ but may or may not be able to name.
Can you identify the source of the inclinations that define your highest hopes and deepest fears and where or how they arise?
I’ve spent a lifetime searching, finding nothing, and choosing instead to embrace, celebrate, and expand fully into those inclinations. What else can I do?
What else can you do?
Can you claim to have invented creativity? Would you agree that you’re just borrowing it, that it was in play long before it tapped you on the shoulder? Do you agree that creative inspiration has been guiding and informing artists throughout human history, and many may employ it for their own purposes, and that spark will carry on long after they and you and I have passed on?
Look again – and again – at your desire to be useful, to be recognized, to do well, and to treat others with dignity through whatever beauty and goodness you can produce. Wherever and however that volitional fortitude arises, beyond the specific learned skills you’ve developed and brought to your craft, beyond your current tools and projects, beyond the productivity you choose to muster today and tomorrow, beyond all that to whatever came with you when you entered here. Look to That.
What direction does that ‘whatever came with you’ lead you? In me, most days (but not every day) it points to the Light, to the promise of greater order, compassion, meaning, and insight.
We don’t wake up every day and choose that direction and the irresistible attraction to it. The Light is installed permanently, it’s built-in. We wake up and choose to respond.
That, I propose, is the source of your creativity, that is why you are a Creator, and that is why you started on this journey and why you keep going. That is the mystical center of your being, the spark that lights the fire.
Why do I make all these claims and point out these mysteries? What’s the point?
We all have our own reasons. I have three:
- To recognize and honor that this is the spiritual center of me, of us all. Maybe, just possibly, that attraction is seeking connection with the light in others. In my audience, my collaborators, anyone who I’m able to reach or who reaches back to me, and with all the people I’ll never know or know of, the muse wants that completion.
- To cultivate this source. In all my endeavors, especially my writing, I’ve realized the magic of spontaneous flow. This is the creativity that ‘just happens’ without effort or thinking. I simply show up and take notes. Flow didn’t find me until I let go, and won’t find me now unless I let go.
- To accept that because of the two ‘reasons’ above, my art and my identity as a creator is a means to an end. What I produce and how I place that in the world enables and serves the experience, for me and for all. The point of flow is not only what occurs and what is created – it’s the experience itself.
That’s it. All is experience. Life and reality are about optimizing experience in ways useful to the greater good. I suggest that nothing surpasses the experience, the flow, and the creative acts possible when we recognize, embrace, cultivate, and surrender to the Mystery.
If you’re a creator, you’ve already admitted this and to whatever degree, you’ve submitted yourself to the enchantment. You can’t create it, only you can only cultivate and consent.
All our outcomes as creators happen only through the experiences we create.
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I’m Bob Berry — researcher, speaker, writer, and innovator on the art of compelling experience.bob@itstheusers.com / LinkedIn / http://ItsTheUsers.com
