Wily Walnut’s Blog 2.0

Fear is the enemy of the creative life.

Fear is being pumped into your psyche by the news and media.

It can paralyse you. Or initiate the most creative period in your life.

Your choice.

As always.

Yes, focus is important.

(I need to focus more than anything.)

But a lot of people get arthritis of the focal lens.

They get ’stuck’ on their special interest.

They get stiff and find it hard to look for, look at, and take in other data.

But to live freshly and creatively, you need to be able to open that focal lens as wide as possible, so you can take in and benefit from all the data channels coming at you.

Win Wenger says you have up to 23 “sidebands of thought”.

That’s separate, simultaneous channels of your thinking processes.

How many are you aware of?

Focus is important, if you want to get things done, and get ahead.

But if you want to innovate, you need to widen the channel and spray your attention instead of lasering it down the same old tiny pin prick.

Biggest most arthritic focal point?

Yourself — the whiny, judgemental, fearful self — the yack-yack inner voice or squawker… not the grandness of your being.

Open up a little.

Ever get into a slump? Feel like you have got a malaise of the soul? Feel like the fire has gone out on the last ember of your creativity, inspiration, and hope for life?

Is it just getting old? I don’t know. All I know is that it…sucks.

I’ve been feeling like that lately. It just comes upon me at certain times of the day. Pockets of deathliness floating through my consciousness.

Forgive me for over-dramatizing. 

You know how it is when you get gloomy. It’s not just the blues…it’s the end of the world!

Maybe it’s the grinding fear-mongering, the endless broadcasting of bad news, disaster, depression, hatred, and warfare?

Or more selfishly an inexcusable waste of creative energy and an unfocused sense of purpose? The ’soul’ hates to feel useless… 

The temptation is to want to run from these gloom-and-doom ‘floaters’ when they obscure your vision. But I am reminding myself that there is creative power in these deathly phantoms.

How so?

Well, they can be rock bottom, only way is up moments.

Or they can provide contrast, a kicking board to launch new creative endeavour.

Consider that they are also teachers. Here to instruct in the darkness and shadow of the self. That much neglected but essential soil in and from which we grow and bloom.

Intuitively, I say they are ‘black hole energy’. Gateways and portals to dimensions unfamiliar to our habitual ways of being. So much to explore. So much being offered.

Getting intrigued by the ‘black dog’ when it comes, rather than overwhelmed or repulsed, is a much more useful mindset. Who knows what we’ve been missing by struggling to get free of the ‘dementors’ grip? There’s nothing to fear but fear itself — all else is a journey into discovery and learning.

What is death but a void, empty of energy? A void waiting to be refilled.

Perhaps these pockets of death are room to grow, new opportunities for life, for creation.

New territories to explore and populate.

Life is an exploration.

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Photo credit: Boskizzi

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Check out Alexander Green’s 21 day challenge to quit complaining over at: www.SpiritualWealth.com

Seems like a really worth while challenge to take up.

And look out for the funny monk story at the end of his article – it really made me laugh out loud!

Swiss amateur skydiver, Olivier Vietti-Teppa, made a successful jump over the weekend using a parachute based on Leonardo da Vinci’s design from 523 years ago!

He jumped from a hovering helicopter at 650 metres (2,130 feet) on Saturday and the Leonardo da Vinci parachute opened as planned at 600 metres above a Geneva airport.

Da Vinci’s parachute design consisted of four equilateral triangles forming a pyramid and was featured in a notebook dating from 1485.

For full story: Leonardo da Vinci parachute jump

Just added my reply to Robert Alan Black, one of the top creativity trainers in the world. He’s got a mammoth creativity resource that all of you subscribed to my own Brain Squeezers will want to rush on over to check out.

See my reply here:

From Brain Squeezers to Alan’s Cre8ing Challenges

“A Zen master once asked an audience of Westerners what they thought was the most important word in the English language. After giving his listeners the chance to think about such favourite words as love, truth, failure and so on, he said, ‘No, it’s a three letter word; it’s the word ‘let’. Let it be. Let it happen.’”from ‘The Inner Game of Tennis’  by W Timothy Gallwey

I don’t know about YOU but in a lot of my creative work and manifestation work, I’m in the mode of trying to GET. I want to get new ideas. I want to get more money. I want to get the life that I think will make me happier. I’m grasping for things from a place of lack.

When you change your mental frame and starting think in terms of LET, you release a lot of energy. Let ideas come to you. Let new wealth flow into your life. Let the life you want take shape before you.

Try it out. Play with both. Letting feels more powerful. You shift to a psycho-spiritual state of the already accomplished, the already perfected, where things can happen and have happened without force.

I feel like I’m at the back of the line when it comes to the uptake on web 2.0. But a quick survey of most of the people I know tells me they haven’t got a clue what Twitter is. To be honest, I haven’t either! But, as of yesterday, I’m on there now and seeing what possible value it has. Some people say it’s good for search engine rankings. I’m just playing with it, see what happens… if anything.

It must have had an effect. Went to sleep last night with a thunderstorm relaxation music track playing. Mrs Walnut was having difficulty getting to sleep and suddenly became aware of owl sounds on the thunderstorm relaxation music track. She hadn’t noticed those before. It took a while before she realised it was me snoring. The twit’s ta-woo!

http://www.twitter.com/wilywalnut

I’m intrigued by the relationship of the concious mind, the so-called unconscious mind, and the hyperthetical superconscious or universal (and supposedly all-powerful) mind.

Recent brain research showed how our conscious thoughts emerge from the unconscious mind. Brain activity shows up before we are conscious of thinking the thought. This makes sense, but not to that part of us that likes to think it is consciously making decisions.

It’s a shock to the ego to realize that, actually, no, I’m not in charge!

The conscious mind that we know is little more than a pimple on the skin of the deep vast mind. It’s been called the tip of the iceberg. But I suspect that even that idea makes too much of it, as though the conscious mind is the pinnacle of mental achievement.

It’s worth questioning that assumption.

Unconscious mind. Unconscious means we are ‘not consciously aware of’… it’s happening outside of our conscious knowingness.

How are you beating your heart? Growing hair on your body? Repairing and replacing body cells?

You don’t know. What else don’t you know that is going on and being directed by the deep vast mind, the unconscious?

I like to explore by retracing thought trails back to their source. We’ve already established that thought originates at the unconscious level. So tracing thought backwards offers some hope of getting some kind of insight into the unconscious mind.

At least, that is what I am exploring.

I think it is problematic to have these ideas of conscious, unconsious, subconscious as it helps to create the sense of separation and isolation. You need to move into a state of mind in which you accept it all as the big YOU — even if you are not conscious of all it’s goings-on.

It’s like the body… when you start obsessing about one part of it, you create a sense of separation and disconnectedness from the body. But that disappears when you get absorbed in some physical activity like playing soccer or frisbee or something, and you are just in the body making use of it.

Tracing thought home does give you an opportunity to connect and merge with the deep vast mind. It’s like a meditation in that you have to go beyond conscious verbal thought and plunge into the vastness that is the core of your being.

Then, without thought, you can really only operate on intuition (perception and aperception), experience through being, and pure awareness.

I think the verbal conscious thought stream is a very thin and limited bandwidth data-stream from the unconscious. We need to create or become aware of other channels of data emerging from the unconscious mind. So far one of the best ways we’ve identified to do this is through something like Win Wenger’s image streaming process which taps into the same sort of data stream as we experience in regular night time dreaming.

Photojournalist Bonnie Schupp wrote to me to share her 10-Step Program to Creative Thinking, which formed part of a wonderfully lucid and thought-provoking essay she wrote on The Birth of Ideas.

She kindly allowed me to reproduce it here. So here’s Bonnie’s CLANG DELTA formula:

CLANG DELTA
Bonnie’s 10-Step Program to Creative Thinking
 

Create solely for the joy of it.

Let curiosity drive you.

Abandon your need to fit in.

Nourish the child in you and let this child come out to play.

Give yourself permission to be eccentric, even outrageous.
 

Dismiss the judge in you that sets rules and boundaries.

Experience something new each day.

Look at the world as if you were an ant, egret or alien.

Take time to vegetate without being afraid you are wasting time.

Ask what if.

Here are some links to Bonnie Schupp’s work as a creative photojournalist, with her comments:

“Many of my portfolio images are typical “stock” photos without a creative edge. They sell. But some (my favorites) lean more toward the creative side of concepts:
 
http://www.istockphoto.com/file_closeup.php?id=5804006
 
http://www.istockphoto.com/file_closeup.php?id=2924887
 
http://www.istockphoto.com/file_closeup.php?id=3484871
 
http://www.istockphoto.com/file_closeup.php?id=4830859
 
http://www.istockphoto.com/file_closeup.php?id=5267743
 
http://www.istockphoto.com/file_closeup.php?id=5166395
 
http://www.istockphoto.com/file_closeup.php?id=4033577
 
http://www.istockphoto.com/file_closeup.php?id=5148291
 
http://www.istockphoto.com/file_closeup.php?id=4482494
 
http://www.istockphoto.com/file_closeup.php?id=4578997
 
http://www.istockphoto.com/file_closeup.php?id=4281933
 
http://www.istockphoto.com/file_closeup.php?id=2329243
 
http://www.istockphoto.com/file_closeup.php?id=4343206
 
http://www.istockphoto.com/file_closeup.php?id=3724183
“This one shows ‘SCHUMAN’ name cut off to read ‘HUMAN’ just by moving a little to one side while composing the photo.”

Click the image above to go to Bonnie’s main business site