Is Creativity Divinely Inspired?

Fresh from TED2009, Elizabeth Gilbert muses on the impossible things we expect from writers and other creatives - and shares the radical idea that, instead of the rare person "being" a genius, all of us "have" a genius. It's a funny, personal and surprisingly moving talk.
(Recorded February 2009 in Long Beach, California. Duration: 19:29.)



To enjoy an analysis and discussion by Mark McGuinness of LateralAction, click here.

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most vagabonds I knowed don't ever want to find the culprit
that remains the object of their long relentless quest
the obsession's in the chasing and not the apprehending
the pursuit, you see, but never the arrest
- Tom Waits
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10 Reasons the US Military Should Use Pot

An eloquent and compassionate argument for the use of marijuana to relieve post-combat pain and stress issues - by Penny Coleman in AlterNet.

"It is just possible that Tim Leary was right when he said that psychedelic drugs cause paranoia, confusion and total loss of reality in politicians who have never taken them."

On top of a 100 percent disability rating with PTSD, "Charlie" - who asked that his real name not be used - came home from Afghanistan with a traumatic brain injury, a back injury and gastrointestinal problems. The VA pulled every magic trick out of its bag to treat him. But nothing worked.

What did work was marijuana.
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This article is at once hopeful and disturbing. As evidence mounts and more and more scientists, health providers and even the AMA allow that marijuana is an effective and safe treatment for pain and PTSD, marijuana continues to be classed as a Schedule I drug, deemed to be more dangerous than cocaine, oxycodone and methamphetamines, all of which are Schedule II.

Most unsettling is the section on Suicide Prevention, where Coleman cites The Journal of Clinical Psychiatry report that 89 percent of veterans with PTSD are prescribed antidepressants and 34 percent antipsychotics by the VA. Of the specific medications identified as potentially useful, all but two come with warnings of suicide or increased risk of death. Add to that a comment by VA Secretary Eric Shinseki that more vets have committed suicide since 2001 than were killed on the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan and one cannot help but wonder how this situation is allowed to continue...

Can we say Big Pharma? In my opinion Coleman skips over this one a little lightly, pointing out that it is easy enough to grow your own - maybe she's never known anyone who's run afoul of the law for engaging in this most natural of pastimes, this most victimless of crimes - oh, get me going. Even here in Canada where the law is supposedly somewhat relaxed, getting busted for growing pot is not a joke and will interfere with your personal freedom in ways you cannot imagine and over which you have no control.

All in all, a very well written and provocative piece.
Click here for full article.

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Penny Coleman is the widow of a Vietnam veteran who took his own life after coming home. Her latest book, Flashback: Posttraumatic Stress Disorder, Suicide and the Lessons of War, was released on Memorial Day 2006. Her Web site is Flashback.

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don't Bogart that joint, my friend
pass it over to me...
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Awakened Doing

We are in the midst of a momentous event in the evolution of human consciousness, but they won't be talking about it in the news tonight.

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from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
by Eckhart Tolle
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Awakened Doing is the alignment of your outer purpose - action - with your inner purpose - awakening and staying awake. Joining these two, we align our lives with the creative power of the universe. Our state of consciousness thus becomes the primary factor - the situation and what we do become secondary. Actions no longer arise from the reactive force of ego but from the alert attention of the awakened consciousness.

Three Modalities of Awakened Doing:

Acceptance

“For now, this is what this situation, this moment, requires me to do, and I do so willingly.”

Performing an action in the state of acceptance means you are at peace while you do it, and that you have chosen to take responsibility for your state of consciousness.

Enjoyment

“The peace that comes with surrendered action turns to aliveness when you actually enjoy what you are doing.”

Joy is the dynamic aspect of Being - it blossoms when we decide to make the present moment, not the past or future, the focal point of our life. As we awaken to our life’s purpose, enjoyment replaces ego-driven wanting as the motivation behind our actions.

Enthusiasm

“Enthusiasm means there is deep enjoyment in what you do plus an added element of a goal or vision that you work toward.”

When a sense of goal is added to enjoyment, a creative tension is generated which adds enormous intensity and energy to what you do. Enthusiasm knows where it is going while remaining deeply at one with the present moment, the source of its aliveness, joy and power.

Enthusiasm is the power through which our creative energy expresses itself in the physical dimension. That is the creative use of mind, and it involves no wanting or grasping. You cannot manifest what you want - you can only manifest what you already have.

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Whatever you ask in prayer, believe that you have received it,
and it will be yours - Jesus Christ

We are both the Cosmic Force and the Vehicle - Genpo Roshi
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Leave The Door Open...

...for that which is new.

Genpo Roshi tells of how his dog knows that in order to be able to pick up a new treat, she has to drop the bone that is already in her mouth. Why is it, then, that humans don't seem to understand this simple logic - that in order to be open to new realms of possibility, we have to let go of what we think we already know.

Andrew Cohen has some thoughts on that:

Without being aware of it, many of us tend to base our sense of what's possible now, in the present moment, upon what has or has not happened in the past. But if we want to be spiritually liberated, indeed if we want to be an expression of evolution-in-action, we have to dare to look beyond everything we already know. We have to leave the door open for the unimaginable. We have to stop weighing and measuring what's possible now by what has already happened. We have to let go of all the conscious and unconscious cynicism that has become habitual in our way of thinking.

That miraculous creative potential is the very essence of the evolutionary process when it's flourishing. Fourteen billion years ago with the Big Bang, the entire Universe emerged from nothing. Every step in the evolutionary process begins with an event that is defined by the emergence of something that has not existed before. In evolution there always exists the unmanifest potential of that which is new. That's what's so extraordinary about it. So in order to align yourself with that dynamic and creative process, you must let go of the inherent limitation of the past. You must strive to cultivate a relationship to your own experience in the present moment that makes the unimaginable emergence of that which is new possible right now.

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The creation of something new is not accomplished by the intellect but by the play instinct acting from inner necessity. The creative mind plays with the object it loves.
- Carl Jung
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Greenwashing So Absurd...

it's almost funny.....

When companies like Exxon-Mobil and McDonald's think "green", they're thinking of cash, not the earth. And after all, what matters to unscrupulous marketeers isn't so much the reality of their brand or product, but how the public perceives it - which often results in greenwashing so absurd, it's almost funny. These 15 examples of extreme greenwashing range from woefully ignorant to downright malicious.
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Why Men Shouldn't Write Advice Columns

Dear John:
I hope you can help me. The other day I set off for work, leaving my husband at home watching TV. My car stalled, and then it broke down about a mile down the road, and I had to walk back to get my husband's help. When I got home, I couldn't believe my eyes. He was in our bed with the neighbour's daughter!
I am 32, my husband is 34 and the neighbour's daughter is 19. We have been married for 10 years. When I confronted him, he broke down and admitted that they had been having an affair for the past six months. I want to save our marriage but he won't go to couples counselling. I'm a wreck and I need advice urgently. Can you help?
Sincerely,
Sheila.
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Dear Sheila:
A car stalling after being driven a short distance can be caused by a variety of faults with the engine. Start by checking that there is no debris in the fuel line. If it is clear, check the vacuum pipes and hoses on the intake manifold and also check all grounding wires. If none of these approaches solves the problem, it could be that the fuel pump itself is faulty, causing low delivery pressure to the injectors.
I hope this helps.
John
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God's Playing A New Game

Ken Wilber and Andrew Cohen on
The Myth Of The Given

In this remarkable dialogue, Wilber and Cohen challenge the tendency towards fundamentalism inherent in all major religions - Eastern, Western and everything in between.

About God, they argue that when seen in an evolutionary context, who and what God is can no longer be taken as fixed - that from a developmental perspective, God is also evolving, just as we are.

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Wilber: Albert Einstein is said to have performed the following thought experiment when he was contemplating relativity. He asked himself a question: if you were literally riding on the edge of a light beam and you held a mirror in front of you, could you see yourself? The answer is no. If nothing travels faster than light, light can't get to the mirror to reflect your reflection, so you would see nothing.

That's another good image for the edge of evolution. There's nothing in the future to see. We're creating it as we go out there. And it's pretty scary to look in the mirror and not see anything.

Cohen: The Authentic Self is the expression of the evolutionary imperative itself, within the human heart and mind. It is a perpetual, unending and always ecstatic impulse in consciousness that strives only to create the future. But in order for the authentic self to function uninhibitedly, the individual has to be willing to continually let go and embrace ever more of the world of form in every moment. For the individual, emotionally, psychologically and philosophically, this is what is so ultimately challenging about a truly evolutionary context at the level of consciousness - the relentless demand to continue to let go at these very deep and subtle levels.

I think it's only a rare individual who actually is going to have the courage, the authenticity of interest, the fearlessness, the liberated awareness to be able and willing to continually let go in that way and at the same time have his or her own deepest sense of confidence in the nature of being and in life remain absolutely unthreatened.

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Towards the end of the interview they discuss The Shadow - what they call the disowned self. They explain how, starting at a very early age, aspects of ourselves which are seen as unacceptable are denied, repressed and projected, creating myriad forms of dis-ease as the repressed aspects fail to develop past the stage at which they were split off.
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Wilber: Now if we could get rid of these impulses just like that and they stayed out there, there would be no problem. But the trouble is that they are actually parts of our own self, and every time we push something to the other side of the self-boundary, we diminish our own consciousness; we make ourselves smaller. And that keeps us out of the present moment.

Cohen: In order to free up our consciousness, we have to own these repressed parts of ourselves - we have to embrace all of them, we have to bring light into all the dark and hidden corners of our self, we have to claim ownership of the entirety of our I - before we can authentically transcend our ego in the spiritual sense.

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They go on to explore the shortcomings of either meditation or psychotherapy alone to unblock and liberate these repressed aspects. As Ken Wilber puts it, "The meditative context is all about letting go, but we can only do that if we deal with our dissociated impulses first ... What we want to do is basically heal the vehicles through which we will manifest our enlightened awareness."

Andrew Cohen sums up: "...it is only those who awaken to a larger purpose, a purpose bigger than their own wholeness, salvation or even enlightenment, who will actually find the energy and the resources to begin to own these darker and more unconscious parts of themselves and really change in ways that make all the difference in the world."

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To enjoy the full EnlightenNext article, Click Here or on title
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Thinking is Overrated

Imagine you have no head.

I'm serious.

Imagine you have no head.

Right this instant.


Has Mark McGuinness finally lost his head? Best read on...

You can feel your arms, legs, hands, feet, stomach, chest and back. But your bodily sensations stop at the neck. There’s nothing there.

At this moment, you can feel, touch, see and hear – but you can’t think.

(Don’t worry about how you can see or hear without eyes and ears – worrying requires a head, and right now you haven’t got one.)

Allow your centre of consciousness to sink from where your head used to be, down into your chest or stomach. Notice what it’s like to have your awareness located at your centre of gravity.

Stay in this state for at least a minute, before reading the rest of this article from LateralAction.

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Homo Sapiens Sapiens

The Self-Guiding Evolution of Civilizations
by Duane Elgin

In the history of the collective, as in the history of the individual, everything depends on the development of consciousness - Carl Jung

The universe is creating self-organizing and self-referencing systems at every scale. In accord with this dynamic, the human family is working to become consciously self-organizing at progressively larger scales. We have evolved from awakening hunter-gatherers to a species that has created a wired world whose actions are changing the face of the planet. Because the impact of humanity is now global, that is the scale at which we are challenged to become reflective if we are to be choiceful about our common future. We are challenged to no longer "run on automatic" but to pay attention to how we pay attention as entire civilizations.

The vehicle of collective attention at a civilizational scale is the mass media - particularly broadcast television. If civilizations are to realize their potential for full reflective consciousness and become self-guiding in their evolution, then it is vital for the public to mobilize the public airwaves on behalf of the public interest.

How we use our tools of mass communication is not just another issue; it is the basis for understanding and responding to all issues. With mass communication we can achieve the level of mass social reflection and cooperation needed to adapt our manner of living to the new global realities.

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Our scientific name as a species is homo sapiens sapiens, or doubly wise humans. Where animals have the capacity to know, we humans have the capacity to know that we know and the ability to bring a reflective consciousness into our lives. If we use our scientific name as a guide, then our core purpose as a species is to realize - both individually and collectively - our potential for double wisdom.

Developing our capacity for reflective consciousness, both personally and socially, is a paramount evolutionary challenge. How, then, are we to begin thinking about the qualities of consciousness of entire civilizations?

For some ideas on that, click here or on title

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Duane Elgin is an internationally recognized speaker, author and social visionary who looks beneath the surface turbulence of our times to explore the deeper trends that are transforming our world.
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Buddy System

The Infectious Power of Social Networks

A fascinating article from Jonah Lehrer in Wired Magazine.
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A revolution in the science of social networks began with a stash of old papers found in a storeroom in Framingham, Massachusetts. They were the personal records of 5,124 male and female subjects from the Framingham Heart Study. Started in 1948, the ongoing project has revealed many of the risk factors associated with cardiovascular disease, including smoking and hypertension.

In 2003, Nicholas Christakis, a social scientist and internist at Harvard, and James Fowler, a political scientist at UC San Diego, began searching through the Framingham data. But they didn't care about LDL cholesterol or enlarged left ventricles. Rather, they were drawn to a clerical quirk: the original Framingham researchers had decided to note each participant's close friends, colleagues and family members.

But what, you might wonder, does this have to do with modern social networking vehicles like Facebook? Actually quite a lot, as the authors discovered to their amazement. And although these two scientists are fascinated by the online world, their central research tool remains those handwritten papers salvaged from the Framingham Heart Study.

By studying Framingham as an interconnected network rather than a mass of individuals, Christakis and Fowler made some remarkable discoveries about the power of social networks to influence individual behavior.

More recently Christakis and Fowler have begun to study the variables, such as genetics, that determine a person's place within a social network - whether in the centre or on the fringe - but they emphasize that there's no ideal social location. During a flu epidemic, the periphery is the safest place since people with fewer connections are less exposed to the virus. But being on the fringe also reduces access to resources, which radiate from the centre. Networks transmit the stuff of life - from happiness to HIV - so evolution has generated a diversity of personality traits, which take advantage of different positions within the group. According to Christakis and Fowler, there is no single solution to the problem of other people. Individual variation is a crucial element of every stable community, from the Aboriginal people of Australia to the avatars of Second Life.

And because we're social primates, such communities are essential. When we're cut off from our network, we slip into a spiral of loneliness and despair, which severely affects our health. "Your friends might make you sick and cause you to gain weight," Christakis says, "but they're also a source of tremendous happiness. When it comes to social networks, the positives outweigh the negatives. That's why networks are everywhere."

People, in other words, need people: we are the glue holding ourselves together.

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Jonah Lehrer is a contributing editor to US Wired.
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I'm Not A Zen Monk...

...I'm doing my expenses.

A compelling argument FOR Distraction, by Russell M. Davies, for Wired.co.uk Magazine

"The Internet has it in for multitasking. Every ... oooh, hang on a minute, just replying to Twitter. Every blog seems to be focused on concentration or concentrated on focus. The goal is Getting Things Done; the enemy is Distraction. But I'd like to suggest that multitasking and distraction aren't the enemy - they're what make us human and creative - and that we should be building software tools that distract us more, not help us to concentrate.

"Hang on a second. I'm getting an email from Facebook telling me that someone I don't really know has updated their location via Twitter.

"Anyway, my first bit of evidence is...."

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The Confidence Guy

aka Steve Errey - Wired into Truly Confident Living

This is why I don't get anything "done" when I'm home. Okay, it's exactly why I like to be home.

Steve Errey writes with humor and heart on topics like Fear & Doubt, Leadership and Confidence Building. The titles of his blogposts are sheer genius, and the content more than lives up to the promise. How about these:

** I Want To Be A Kid When I Grow Up
** Forgive My Fluffiness, Please
** Broke As A Piano In A Burning Barn
** Does Believing in God Mean You Don't Believe in Yourself?
** Scared to Change? Embrace Your Inner Wimp

My favorite so far is this one called The Power Of The Unexpected

Steve Errey on Change: Change is scary. I get it. I feel it too. But sometimes you gotta suck it up, walk right into it. Confidence is what makes it okay to admit that you're scared, and for the whole being scared thing to be okay. The alternative is living in a world where you're always safe and always right, but never happy.

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The Power Of Less

or, How To Do Less And Get More
by Brian Clark, for Copyblogger

Brian passes on this advice from Leo Babauta's book, The Power Of Less:

~~ Do less to achieve more
~~ Enjoy the stillness
~~ Don't do things that don't matter

Right decisions require the right mindset, and a clear path to achieving the goal.

How clear is your mind right now?

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About the Author: Brian Clark is founder of Copyblogger and co-founder of DIY Themes, creator of the innovative Thesis Theme for WordPress.
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A Theologian of Renewal

In an age torn apart by the culture wars between science and religion, Catholic theologian John Haught has a better way. Here, EnlightenNext offers a glimpse inside the prodigious mind and heart of a man who has looked into the future and seen a new face of God.

Carter Phipps and John Haught on Evolutionary Theology.

John Haught's most recent book, God and The New Atheism: A Critical Response to Dawkins, Harris and Hitchens, prompted Carter Phipps to approach him last spring for an interview. To Phipps' surprise, Haught's responses "...hinted at a much deeper and broader theological agenda - to define and articulate a new vision for the religious impulse in the twenty-first century." Haught refers to this new vision as "evolutionary theology" - joining other thinkers, teachers and philosophers attempting to "articulate, understand and ultimately define a truly post-traditional spiritual worldview that could survive and thrive in a scientific age."

On the influence of Teilhard de Chardin: "Teilhard was one of the first scientists in the twentieth century to become aware that the universe is a story. It's not just a place of imperfection, what Galileo called 'the sink of all dull refuse', caricaturing the Platonic view. No, the universe is a place of creativity and becoming, a place of becoming more. Teilhard knew astronomy and he knew some physics and he knew the history of science and he knew what the Galilean revolution implied. It meant that we could no longer look spatially to somewhere else to find the perfection that we're looking for. We have to look toward the future. The future became for Teilhard the place where we lift up our eyes and our hearts to have something to aspire to."

On a new conception of God for our time: "The consciousness of our age calls out for a God principle that lives not just in the wondrous beauty of nature, or the eternal stillness of the present moment, but in the unknown creative potential that exists in the mysterious space of the future."

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A God-Shaped Hole At The Heart Of Our Being

Something is working itself out in this universe. What is it?

An interview with evolutionary theologian John F. Haught

Amy Edelstein of EnlightenNext recalls their first encounter:

"Haught's precise mind and inquisitive heart are doing much to encourage a higher level of discussion in the world of evolutionary theology, invigorating the debate between science and religion. After speaking with him for just twenty minutes, my own grasp of where the march of evolution is taking us deepened in ways I never would have imagined."

Profoundly influenced by the ideas of Pierre Teilhard deChardin, Haught urges "... communion with God through the Earth, meaning that we want to keep alive our sense of the infinite, our sense of the eternal, our sense of the divine, even as we remember that the way we come in contact with that divine reality is only by way of natural reality or by way of things immediate to our experience."

"We can't describe or predict the evolutionary developments in the world's future with any great accuracy, but maybe they would take the form of even deeper consciousness and deeper freedom, deeper capacity to love and feel, and so forth. At the very least, we should leave ourselves open to those possibilities."

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Confucius Say...

5 essential blogging tips from the father of Chinese Philosophy

Michael Aagaard has just launched the very first Danish blog dedicated to the fine art of online copywriting. In this article for Copyblogger, he offers five classic Confucian quotes (and one of his own) that are vital to remember if you want a successful blog ... and a successful life.


1. The essence of knowledge is having it, to apply it.

2. Everything has beauty, but not everyone sees it.

3. When anger arises, think of the consequences.

4. Respect yourself and others will respect you.

5. What you do not want done to yourself, do not to others.

Aagaard adds:

6. I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand.

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For Evolutionaries...

INTEGRAL LIVING
Personal & Social Transformation Workshop

Integral Theory and Spiral Dynamics are effective tools that are being used around the world to understand the complexity of human behavior and to develop integrated solutions to social change and conflict. We will be exploring how they can be used practically in our everyday lives and fields of engagement (work, relationships, etc.).

March 2010
Halifax, Nova Scotia
Call 902-529-2102 or
email: info@newearthinstitute.ca

New Earth Institute is a non-profit institute operating out of Nova Scotia, Canada, which offers courses, retreats and workshops based on the vision that, "Put simply, only when we make peace with ourselves can we hope to make peace with and in the world."

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you tell me it's the institution
well, you know, you'd better free your mind instead
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There Is A Crack In Everything...

... that's how the light gets in

Beautiful images, profound message from Leonard Cohen:



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every heart, every heart to love will come
but like a refugee
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Seekers and Changemakers...

Are self-sabotage and resistance getting the best of you?

Have you ever said to yourself, "This can't be IT. There's got to be more to life, and more to me, than this!"?

That was the very question that called Susan Johnstone to learn to "..dig ... dig deep into my own inner world, to discover the roots of whatever was running my life at that moment."

I had the pleasure of meeting Susan at the Awakening the Dreamer, Changing the Dream workshop in Halifax in the spring of 2009. Susan has an inquisitive mind and a passion for life that is at once totally engaging and totally engaged. She created a program and website called The Heart's Voice through which she works with people to help them acknowledge and step through their deeply ingrained patterns of resistance and self-sabotage, patterns which hold us back from expressing our full potential. In her words,

"I work with seekers and changemakers who have great intentions and don't understand why they're having difficulty following through on them. They've often retreated from what they really want because they've lost faith in themselves or they're just tired of being disappointed."

Through The Heart's Voice Susan presents new understandings and simple skills that anyone can learn and practice that will "...allow you to gently transform your resistance into powerful fuel for your life." The site offers a free printable e-book entitled 6 Keys to Ending Your Battle With Resistance.

Susan's program offers genuine insights into how our resistance develops over our lifetime, in both its inner and outer aspects, how to be kind to ourselves when we realize we are repeating old patterns, and how to face the challenge of making new and better choices.

"When you come into compassionate relationship with your resistance, you'll discover that it's actually part of the raw material that your soul has chosen to work with. In learning to transform it, you'll be accessing more and more of your Authentic Self - the most essential YOU."

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The Story of Cap & Trade

This is a story about a world obsessed with stuff. This is a story about a system in crisis. We're trashing the planet; we're trashing each other; and we're not even having fun...

A fast-paced, fact-filled look at the leading climate solution being discussed at Copenhagen and on Capitol Hill. Host Annie Leonard (Story of Stuff) introduces the energy traders and Wall Street financiers at the heart of the scheme and reveals the "devils in the details" in current cap and trade proposals - free permits to big polluters, fake offsets and distraction from what's really required to tackle the climate crisis.



If you've heard about Cap & Trade but aren't sure how it works (or who benefits), this is the film for you.

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