Play First, Work Later (& delight your inner child)

 

Like puppies or lion cubs or dolphins spinning silver lariats of bubbles, children play for the joy of playing. Young children are masters of imagination, since they know the magic of making things up. Our first and best teacher of conscious living is our inner child.
     But that inner child may have gone into hiding, under a glass dome or in a room in Grandma’s house, because of shame or abuse, ridicule or loneliness, because the world wasn’t safe or it wasn’t fun. If we have lost our dreams, if our imagination is stuck in a groove, it’s because we have lost our inner child. To live as active dreamers in everyday life, we have to bring that child home. This requires a quest, a negotiation, and fulfillment of a promise. 
     The quest will lead us down halls of memory to a place and time where our wonder child went missing. We can embark on the quest as a guided journey to a real place in the imaginal realm, or through the portal of a dream or memory from childhood.
     The negotiation requires us to convince our child selves that we are safe and we are fun to be around. Fulfilling the promises we make will require us to remember to play without scheduling it.
     Play first, work later, our child selves will insist. The cautious dutiful adult self will protest. But if we are to keep our inner children at home in our bodies and our lives, we’ll need to fulfill our promises to be fun as well as safe. If we play well enough, then before we quite know it, we’ll fall in love with our work because it will be our play. 

Text adapted from Active Dreaming: Journeying Beyond Self-Limitation to a Life of Wild Freedom by Robert Moss. Published by New World Library. 

 

When you feel you're a character in a novel someone else is writing

Do you ever have the feeling you are a character in a novel someone else is writing? The crazy-brilliant collector of anomalies, Charles Fort, offered the suggestion "that Momus is imagining us for the amusement of the gods, often with such success that some of us seem almost alive – like characters in something a novelist is writing; which often to considerable degree take their affairs away from the novelist." For those who have forgotten their Greek myths: Momus is the god of mockery and satire who was kicked out of Olympus because the other gods couldn't stand his savage humor. The quote is from Fort's The Book of the Damned. Its contents are less sinister, but possibly more weird, than the title suggests. By "damned", he was referring - with Momus-like mockery - to facts and ideas excluded from discussion by conventional thinking and mainstream science, like fish falling from the sky. The trick is, of course, to become authors - or at least co-authors - of our own life stories, and determine what genre we wish to inhabit. When I write fiction, I know that it is for real when a character comes alive and tries to run off with the story. In life, I sometimes feel like one of those runaway characters. Right now I am very curious to know who came up with the initial plot. In other words, I am a character in search of his author. There is a serious risk for a character who embarks on this quest. The author may have given up on you or forgotten your existence. Once contact is made, your author may decide you to write you out of his story and put Finis on your current life page. So my assignment grows. As a novelist, I create characters. As a character, I must play a larger game. I must seek to create, or at least re-create, my author.

Illustration: Momus as the tarot Fool in an eighteenth-century deck.

The Call to Create

I will bring something new into my world. 

This is the very definition of the creative act.It applies to any field of action, from art to auto repair, from philosophy to childcare. It involves a conscious encounter with our chosen field, which may be as large and loose as whatever is going on around us in everyday life, or as specific as a chosen calling, whether that is golf or metaphysics or cooking. As Rollo May reminds us, memorably, in The Courage to Create: "Creativity is the encounter of the intensely consciously human being with his or her world." 

It demands courage, because you are going to go beyond the limits you have accepted for yourself or taken on from others. It requires you to find your edge, and work from that edge. 

It is a call you do not want to refuse, at this point in your life, with a new year before you. Rollo May, with blazing clarity, tells us why:

If you do not express your own original ideas, if you do not listen to your own being, you will have betrayed yourself. Also you will have betrayed our community in failing to make your contribution to the whole. 

The universe may or may not be interested in whether you lose twenty pounds. But the animate world is very interested in you - and will support you in unexpected ways - when you dare to make it your game to bring something new to it and join in the ways of creation. 

What's that? You don't think you have anything new to contribute? Reach beyond the little mind that talks that way. Listen to your dreams, and the many voices of the speaking land around you. Open to the possibility that if you will only risk a little more, you will draw forces that will inspire and sustain you. First among those forces is your own creative spirit, who tends to go away when you are repeating yourself, bound to the cycle of samo-samo. 

What have you got to lose by making this your action imperative?. Say the words out loud 

I will bring something new into my world. 

and see what answers, and gives you the power to develop the form for what you will create. Then go to it - do something physical, immediately, to show the universe, and your creative spirit, that you mean it. Pick up the paintbrush, climb the mountain, write the damned book proposal and send it off, sign up for that weird class, make that dish no one would ever expect to see on the table.

 

Note: I dreamed last night that I rediscovered an article I had written, inspired by one of Rollo May's books on the creative act. I saw the cover design of the book very clearly. It was one of several books by May I have on my shelves. I went searching old folders and found this piece, written on New Year's Eve in 2012 in lieu of conventional turn-of-year resolutions. 

 

Journal Drawing: "Baby Basket at My Door" by Robert Moss. From a dream that inspired me to write my book Growing Big Dreams. 

In praise of bricolage

I've given up trying to translate the marvelous French word bricolage, sometimes rendered as "tinkering". It's about putting together bits and pieces on a whim, rather than approaching a project as a solid, stolid work of engineering. It's about following oneiric logic rather than plans and structures.

     Claude Lévi-Strauss,who made the word at home in French, found that this approach is central to the making of myths and the workings of "the savage mind". In his celebrated book La pensée sauvage he observed that the bricoleur employs "devious means". His game is "always to make do with whatever is at hand, that is to say with a set of tools and materials which is always finite and is also heterogeneous because what it contains bears no relation to the current project, or indeed to any particular project, but is the contingent result of all the occasions there have been to renew or enrich the stock or to maintain it with the remains of previous constructions or destructions."[1]

     Found objects, junk shops, storage basements, words overheard from strangers...these are materials for bricolage. So are your journals. I love to go through old journals plucking out curious and shiny things and arranging them on fresh pages. I was encouraged to learn that this was a regular practice for Thoreau, a dedicated journal keeper. He liked to forage through old journals plucking out promising bits and pieces - observations in nature, quotes from his reading, dreams and reflections. He copied excerpts and married them up as fresh drafts. It became his habit “to work back over his journals…to reengage old subjects in the light of new interests, to revise and recopy his own earlier journal work,measuring, weighing, culling and sorting his materials…taking up earlier threads, reweaving and combining them.”[1]

     For any writer, as for Thoreau, it opens treasuries of material and above all it supports the writing habit. Playing around with old notes removes the terror of the blank page. When you dip into an old journal, you are never at a loss for a theme. The simple processes of selection, arrangement and retitling will fire the imagination. Before you know it, you’ll be in the midst of writing something new. However, the practice of journaling from journals is not only for writers. It is a marvelous tool for self-observation, for life navigation, and for constructing a personal encyclopedia of symbols.  

     Ah, but what is best is the pure bricolage. I might start working through old journals with a specific agenda, using the search engine to pull up items from my digital files, arranging materials in orderly folders, setting production schedules. Then I am distracted or enchanted by a note I made after a concert:

Barber's Adagio for Strings: The sad and lovely waves of sound carried me effortlessly into vision: of an island in the mist, of the grace of swimming swans, and the loneliness of a solitary swan, of a bright winged being towering above the many-colored waters. Meeting me halfway in the crossing, the swan prince made me know what is required to be enfolded in his knowing. I remember how Aengus, dream god and love god, took the form of a swan.

or a quote that stuns me awake:

Plotinus on the personal guardian: "“Our guardian is the power immediately superior to the one we exercise, for it presides over our life without itself being active…Plato truly said that ‘we choose our guardian’, for, by the kind of life that we prefer, we choose the guardian that presides over our life.’

or a dream of any kind, calling me into fields of memory, mystery and delight:

The Thumbelina Exchange: A young woman has mastered the art of entering another universe by becoming incredibly small.This may have been intentional; she may have wished herself out of her life situation, at least for a fling. Not clear if she is able to return at will.

Soon the pleasure of simply playing with my finds as they come up and come back, takes over. I forget my agendas, and play with the pieces that catch my eye, arranging and fitting them together without expecting them to snap into prearranged place like a jigsaw puzzle. I don't count on it, I don't try to program it, but I am open to finding again that it is in these moments of dickering and tinkering and playing without thought of consequences that fresh and unexpected creation bursts through, as I once saw an apple tree rise from an abandoned core in a heap of compost.  

References

1. Claude Lévi-Strauss, La pensée sauvage (Paris: Plon, 1962)

2. Robert D. Richardson Jr., Henry Thoreau: A Life of the Mind (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986)

A 2-minute history of dream creation

Dreams and twilight states of consciousness have inspired great scientists, inventors, musicians, writers and liberators of human possibility throughout history. Here are some examples:

• Scientist Otto Loewi dreamed the experiment that enabled him to prove that nerve impulses are chemically transmitted, a discovery that won him the Nobel Prize.
• Beethoven composed a canon in his sleep, and transcribed it after waking.
• Giuseppe Tartini dreamed his famous Violin Sonata in G Minor, known as the Devil's Trill. By his own account, Tartini gave the Devil his violin in the dream and was awed by the brilliance of the fresh composition he received.
• Robert Louis Stevenson received his stories in a twilight state of “reverie” in which benign spirits he called “brownies” helped him to compose.
• William Butler Yeats wrote his celebrated one-act play Cathleen ni Houlihan from a dream, and much of his poetry flowed directly from dreams and visions.
• Elias Howe, the inventor of the modern sewing machine, dreamed the solution to the technical problem that had stumped him.
• Lucille Ball was inspired to launch her phenomenally successful TV show by a dream in which she was visited by a departed friend, the actress Carole Lombard (who had been killed in a plane crash in 1942). Later Lucy’s departed mother appeared in dreams to give her business guidance.
• Jack Nicklaus dreamed up a new golf grip.
• Polynesian master navigators were able to cross thousands of miles of ocean, without maps or instruments, because they followed courses shown to them in dreams. A priest (and royal tattooist) called Hau Maka dreamed the way to Easter Island, describing the location in great detail. His king and his people trusted the dreamer’s travel report. They all set sail with everything they had and after two months sailed into Anakena Bay, which was exactly as Hau Maka had described.
• In his speech on acceptance of his Nobel Prize, quantum physicist Niels Bohr attributed his discoveries to his dreams. 
•  Another Nobel laureate and quantum physicist, Wolfgang Pauli, said that dreams were his "secret laboratory."
• Harriet Tubman, the most famous conductor of the Underground Railroad, helped 300 slaves escape to freedom by leading them along the roads she discovered and scouted in her dreams.
• Larry Page, co-founder of Google, told a commencement audience at his alma mater that the idea that put him en route to creating the search engine that became a financial behemoth came to him in a dream, counseling, "If you have a big dream, grab it."
• The biggest gusher in the history of oil, at the time of its discovery in 1938, was the direct result of the dream of a retired British colonial official. It was the origin of Kuwait's oil wealth, the source of the fuel that got American shipping across the Atlantic in World War II - and of the later Gulf War.
• Johnny Cash, John Lennon and Paul McCartney are among scores of popular musicians whose songs have been directly inspired by dreams.

For much more on dreaming as a secret engine in the history of all things human, please read The Secret History of Dreaming.

Picture: "Tartini's Dream" by Louis-Léopold Boilly (1824)

Up All Night with the Daimon

 

My creative daimon is the most demanding of the spirits I seek to entertain. I use the word “daimon” as Yeats did, to describe a spirit that is forever driving me to do the most difficult things “among those not yet impossible.” Real angels (not the greeting cards kind) are forever saying, Get Up, Wake Up, Get On With It. My creative daimon operates the same way. He has never heard of a body clock. He has no interest in what time it is, or how much sleep I get, and knows that what I most need to do with this body is to create with passion, entertain the spirits, ignite creative and healing fire in others... and marry the worlds. 
    I felt the wind of his wings in the middle of the night in Paris in May, 2013. I was staying in a studio on the Street of the Moon Man and the Sun Woman, as I renamed this section of the Rue du Faubourg Saint-Denis because of the statues a couple of blocks away. After a long day leading an Active Dreaming workshop, followed by dinner at a pleasant brasserie opposite the Gare de l'Est, I rose at 1:00 a.m. and sat at a table to work on the  book that was published as The Boy Who Died and Came Back. 
      In France, it seemed natural to write about my "far memories" of other lives lived here, and to narrate how I have used the tools of dream archaeology - marrying shamanic dreaming to scholarly research - to investigate one life in particular: that of Charles d'Orléans, the medieval poet-prince in whose name Joan of Arc went to war. Three hours later, I was satisfied with a fresh 3,000 word draft and had written a couple of shorter pieces, so I thought I might put my body back to bed in order to be rested for the morning workshop session.
     Flat on my back around 4:00 a.m., I found my body was nowhere near flirting with sleep. I considered my situation from the perspective of a greater entity I felt was with me in the space. I sensed the wind of his wings. I rose from my body to join him and look down at the Robert body sprawled under the sheet. From this perspective, I had no concern, no worries, about how much sleep the body in the bed might get, or what might be done with it, as long as it served my creative purpose. I agreed with the daimon: let’s get that body up. Let’s get on with the new book. So I did, and turned out another 2,000 words. When the time came to shower and dress and get myself to the workshop, I was charging on all cylinders. Writing is a workout, and the creative act is energizing and healing. And the extraordinary becomes easy when we entertain our creative spirits and borrow their wings.
     I have learned this:
- When we are passionately engaged in a creative venture - love, art or something else that is really worthwhile - we draw support from other minds and other beings, seen and unseen.- - -
-  We draw greater support the greater the challenges involved in our venture. Great spirits love great challenges.
- Whether we are aware of it or not, all our life choices are witnessed by that creative spirit that that Yeats called the daimon. The daimon lends or withholds its immense energy from our lives according to whether we choose the big agenda or the little one. The daimon is bored by our everyday vacillations and compromises and is repelled by us when we choose against the grand passion and our life Work, the “talent that is the call”.
- The daimon loves us best when we choose to attempt what is all but impossible, and may be perceived as quite impossible by the daily trivial mind.

Text adapted from The Boy Who Died and Came Back: Adventures of a Dream Archaeologist in the Multiverse by Robert Moss. Published by New World Library.

Photo: On the Street of the Moon Man and the Sun Woman

 

 

 

Advice on writing

Go to the palace of the winds
where the curtains flutter like butterfly wings;
play the orchestra of your heartstrings.
Step out of your busy days
into a more spacious time.
Make friends again with your other self
who has been writing the novels you haven't read
and let him create through your fingers.

Go to the Gare du Nord in the shadow of war
and kiss her again: the lovely dark-haired woman
you have loved in more than one life.
As the sweetness of black and red berries
explodes on your tongue, filling your senses,
make sure you get her on the train
to safety in a country far from here
while you go underground to fight the crooked cross
and write the journal that will fill a novel
in the future you are living now.

Pick up the trail of the happy hooker
who parted company with you at the customs check -
vivid and succulent in her sables,
unburdened by all her Louis Vuitton luggage -
and was treated like royalty while you were grilled.
She blew you kisses and cried, "We'll meet again, darling!"
She is the part of you that is shameless but selective,
who'll put out only for the richest of prizes.
Make a date to play with her.
Let her wear the fox fur this time
before she disrobes in silken stages
and calls you to breathe her sweetness, to graze on her slopes
and transform her, through your attentions, into a lively Muse.
You lost her when you were full of rights and wrongs
and fell into spiritual correctness and forgot
that the spirits must always be entertained.

Follow your laughing, sexy Muse when she leads you down
to the boxes of good and bad and reminds you
that creators aren't moralists and must take from both.
Lean back, be loose, let her pleasure your palate
with wild strawberries and blackberries warm from the sun
and juice you to write the new story
of old gods and heroes: of the strong man of the green island
who was trained by a stronger woman
and ruined by the spite of an insatiable queen;
of the seer of the North whose eyes are two ravens
and was a shaman before he became a god
by hanging on the One Tree, offering himself to himself;
of the Sisters of the Stones, whose internet
is the humming of bees, and whose sanctuary is in amber.

Free the desk that is your door
of work and fossils, of old drafts;
plot with toy soldiers and colored pencils,
smoke cigars with Mark Twain and Winston,
play the music that stirs your blood.
Mornings, let the novelist who is now at home in you
leave the bed before you, to sit in your chair
and tap your characters awake with busy fingers
as the old priest of Ifa in his leopard skin
wakes the divination gods with his tapper
to cast the patterns that start the game of the world again.


Photo: Mirror for a Writer in Amsterdam (R.M.)

Breathe in, breathe out: be inspired and aspire

  

Inspiration is breathing in, as in inhalation. Drawing in the wind of creative spirit is like drawing breath down into the lungs. The Japanese speak of fu-in, "wind inspiration".

Aspiration is breathing upon, blowing, panting after something. To aspire is to send out the breath of soul.

Etymology, as in these examples, can be quite inspiring.

In his spiritual classic, The Quest of the Oversoul, Paul Brunton suggested that the optimal condition for inspiration is "self-forgetfulness through complete concentration." Inspiration is what we can breathe in when we clear the ordinary self and its preoccupations out of the passages, and open to something beyond all that clutter. This can lead to that blessed flow state we all aspire to, when we are awakened and conscious. It can be invited, but not programmed or controlled. As Brunton observed:

Man is capable of connected thought but not of connected inspiration. The genius who struggles to give birth to great things lives fitfully, warring sporadically with his own self, sometimes blocking and unconsciously interfering with the inspiration which woos him.

When we are truly inspired, we can become vehicles for fresh creation that comes to us whole and complete. Brunton maintained that "all inspired work is delivered to us whole and complete before even the first movement of hand or head has been made."

As a book writer, I must pause for a few deep breaths, because although I know exactly what this means in the inception of a new book, I also remember that bringing through what may be complete on some other level of reality may be a long and bumpy process, requiring perspiration as well as inspiration.

Aspiration, in contrast to inspiration, means sending out the breath of your wishes and yearnings. I think of how, when we still wrote letters the old-fashioned way, some of us might breathe on the envelope to send love to a loved one or in the hope that our missive would bring happy results.

I am cheered by Brunton's confidence that when we truly aspire, we mobilize a response from invisible helpers:

To send out repeatedly into the universe a silent or vocal call, desire or yearning for spiritual truth, peace or guidance is to set stirring into action certain intelligent forces that exist in the universe and that ultimately respond, in exact proportion to the degree of intensity of the aspiration. The universe is not a blindly working machine, but a garment worn by a hierarchy of conscious intelligent beings.

Action plan, for any day: breathe in, breathe out, and be conscious of what you are calling in and sending out.

Graphic: "Mountain Breath" by RM with AI assistance

Acts of Creation

 

To be creative is to bring something new, and valuable, into our lives and our world. You don’t have to be an Einstein or a Shakespeare to be creative. You need to play the best game you can, in whatever field is calling you, and come up with some new moves, and play so hard you don’t think of your game as just work (and may never want to retire from it).

What makes a world-class creative remains mysterious. But new research in neuroscience is telling us interesting things about how the association centers of the brain work when new ideas are coming through, confirming that one characteristic of creative people is that they make connections between things that other people don’t see as connected. Nancy Andreasen, a pioneer of brain imaging at the University of Iowa, found that in episodes of high creativity, multiple association cortices of the brain are communicating back and forth with each other - not to process sensory input, but in free conversation. Wild and novel connections are made, and from these – through the brain’s character as a self-organizing system – new creation emerges.

 Educational psychologists who try to rate creativity levels speak of a “fourth-grade slump”, when adult assumptions and formal training start to block kids’ natural ability to make things up. This suggests another key to creative living; we want to stay in touch or get in touch with the spontaneous creativity of our inner child, our master imagineer. 

Something important that creative people have in common is that they develop creative habits. For choreographer Twyla Tharp, these include “subtraction” – making a conscious effort to minimize distractions and make sufficient time and space available for a new project. For creativity researcher Keith Sawyer (a psychology professor at Washington University in St Louis) good creative habits include “working smart”, creating a daily rhythm that sets the right balance between hard work and “idle time” when the best ideas often jump out.

For Columbia business professor William Duggan, creativity in business hinges on “opportunistic innovation”, the readiness to watch for unexpected opportunities and change your plans in order to cash in on them when they turn up.

Other habits of creative people: 

- They find personal ways of getting “into the zone”.

- They are risk-takers. They are willing to make mistakes, and learn from them. They look at mistakes as experiments rather than failures.

 - Creative people are “prepared for good luck”; they view coincidences as homing beacons and turn accidents into inventions.

- They make room for creation – time and private space.

- They find a creative friend. This is a person who provides helpful feedback and supports their experiments.

- They persevere. 

Creativity is not just the preserve of a lucky – or tormented – few. It’s a power we can all claim. 

And here is what, for me, is the most important key to creativity. When we take on a creative project - and its element of risk - and step out of whatever box we have been in, we draw supporting powers, especially the power that the ancients called the genius or the daimon. Most people understand this intuitively, even though we may fumble for an agreed language to describe it.

Drawing by RM

 

Lost=Found Department

 

In order to find ourselves, we may first have to get lost. As I wrote in The Three “Only Things, “This is the cardinal navigational law of serendipity: You can only get to the magic kingdom by getting lost. You get there when you think you are going somewhere else and fall off the maps.”

Here’s a literary example.

David Mitchell relates that around Christmas in 1994, in Nagasaki, he got off at a wrong tram stop and stumbled upon “a greenish moat and cluster of warehouses from an earlier century.” This was his first encounter with Dejima, a trading factory of the Dutch East India Company built on a man-made island in Nagasaki harbor. For two and a half centuries, when Japan was closed to the outside world, this was the sole point of contact between Japan and the west.

Twelve years after alighting at the wrong tram stop, David Mitchell published his extraordinary historical novel The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, which richly deserves its tremendous critical and commercial success. Mitchell succeeds in transporting us into the mental and physical worlds of two cultures at the close of the eighteenth century. He is a master of what he amusingly calls “Bygonese”, conveying how people thought and talked in an earlier time in a way that never seems labored or antiquarian. Among his memorable characters, Dejima itself becomes indelible. And he found it by getting lost.

Image: An imagined aerial view of Dejima from a 1780 woodblock print by Toshimaya Bunjiemon, published in Isaac Titsingh's Bijzonderheden over Japan (1825).

How Mircea Eliade delivered his Snake

I love finding out how other writers do their thing. It's fascinating to learn how the great Romanian scholar and fiction writer Mircea Eliade – prolific in so many genres – sustained and generated his creative production under almost all circumstances. He wrote stories in a secret police prison. He hammered out books under the shadow of his wife’s terminal illness and of the Red Army occupation of his country. He went on writing in conditions of penury and exile and raw terror (the terror of History, he called it again and again). He started early, publishing in a popular science magazine at fourteen (when he aspired to become an ichthyologist) and basically kept it up till the end of his life.
    Some of his larger projects he had to put down and take up again over many years  This was the case with his huge autobiographical novel Noaptea de Sanziene (published in English as The Forbidden Forest) and with his pioneer study Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, an enduring inspiration to the neo-shamanic movement in the West since its first publication French in 1953.

     Then there are the books that Eliade wrote in a frenzy, abetted by both the demons of necessity and his greater creative daimon. I am thrilled by his account of how Șarpele (The Snake) streamed out of him over ten nights:.

I wrote the book in the course of ten nights, working between 11 and 3 or 4 a.m., in the spring of 1937.

He had to deliver the completed work on “Book Day”, otherwise the publisher would not pay him. But at the same time he was teaching at the university and proofreading a scholarly book that had to be ready by the same deadline.

I was overworked, exhausted, and in order to stay awake I drank coffee; then, so I could sleep in the mornings I took sleeping powders. Every morning Ciornei [his publisher] sent a boy to pick up the 15 or 20 pages I had written during the night and take them directly to the printer. I did not reread a single page of the two hundred which comprise the book; nevertheless, Șarpele is one of my most successful writings.

He had plenty of ethnographic and folklore material relevant to his theme. He did not consult it. “The writer in me refused any conscious collaboration with the scholar and interpreter of symbols.” He discovered in this way that “the free act of literary creation can…reveal certain theoretical meanings.”

Indeed, only after I read Șarpele in book form did I understand that in this book I had resolved, without knowing it, a problem which had preoccupied me for a long time.

Naturally, after reading this I was eager to read the novel that emerged from these nocturnal frenzies. There is no English translation, and my Romanian is hardly enough to order coffee, but I found an edition in French, titled. Andronic et le serpent and devoured it in one night. Strange, sexy, wild and feverish, a remarkable birth from those ten incandescent nights.
    The story of how Eliade produced this novel  deepens my conviction that for some of us the all-but-impossible deadline is a great prompt to commit the creative act. This has often worked for me.

Source: Mircea Eliade, “Autobiographical Fragment” in Norman J. Giradot and Mac Linscott Ricketts, Imagination & Meaning: The Scholarly and Literary Worlds of Mircea Eliade  (New York: The Seabury Press, 1982) 123

Inviting in your genius

The Romans never described a person as a genius. They might say, "Apollonius has a genius" - i.e., a special relationship with a tutelary spirit. The word genius is related to gignere, which means to engender or "beget". It implies reproductive energy, the power of inseminating new life. The Romans called the marriage bed genialis lectus. As observed by Jungian analyst and classicist Marie-Louise von Franz, "this referred not only to sexual potency but also to the qualities that today we would call psychic vitality, temperament, resourcefulness and a lively imagination."
    In a well-bred Roman household, a statuette representing the personal genius of the father of the family usually stood near the hearth in the kitchen. It might be the figure of a young man, holding a horn of plenty or a phallus or a snake. The woman of the house was believe to have her own guardian spirit, or "Juno", who embodied the power of giving birth. In the Roman conception, each of us is born with a personal relationship with a spiritual patron, or genius, who is the source of creative energy.
    James Russell Lowell was close to this perception when he wrote: "Talent is that which is in a man's power; genius is that in whose power a man is."
    To live and work creatively, we need to make room for this energy. The Romans were on to something. To bring something new into the world is to give birth. We see this in the pregnancy dreams that are not about physical childbirth, but about something new that is borning inside us. We can feel it in our bodies in a period of creative gestation.
    When one of my books is ready to be born, I feel pregnant. I mean that in a quite literal sense. My appetites change. I develop odd cravings at strange hours. I forget to eat or sleep for days at a time, then walk out of a dinner party to crash or feed my face with something I wouldn't normally touch. I develop morning sickness. When my new baby is ready to come out, I can't stop the contractions, even though sometimes, like a woman I once heard screaming in a maternity ward, I want to yell, "This has to stop!" There is no dope, no epidural, no C-section available to dull the experience or shortcut the labor; whatever is in me has to come out the old-fashioned way. There is an equivalent to birthing in water: the blessed gift of going into a state of flow, in which I relax into the rhythms of what is fighting its way into the world.
     As Erich Neumann remarked, "Every human being is by nature creative. Yet one of the gravest and most menacing problems in our Western civilization arises from the fact that this civilization cuts man off from his natural creativity."
    To choose and act creatively, we must be able to put our commonplace selves, with their reliance on structures and schedules,on one side, and make room for the source energy of the begetter. Creative inspiration, as all artists and discoverers know, comes through spontaneous combustion between the waking mind and other levels of consciousness. "I know now," wrote Yeats, "that revelation is from the self, but from that age-old memoried self, that shares the elaborate shell of the mollusc and the child in the womb, that teaches the birds to make their nest; and that genius is a crisis that joins the buried self for certain moments to our daily trivial mind."
     You cannot program a creative breakthrough, but you can clear a space where it may come about. Dreamwork is a wonderful aid to the creative process, because the source of dream images and the source of creative inspiration are not separate. When you resolve to catch your dreams, you are telling your creative source, "I am available. I'm listening."
     When you record your dreams, you are developing the art of storytelling. You will discover your gifts as a writer, and if you are already a writer,you will find you have done your "warm-up" exercises almost effortlessly and are ready to go he distance. Best of all, through dreamwork you are constantly learning to approach challenges from new angles, in a spirit of play. The Romans believed that a person's genius rejoices in good living, in laughter, in healthy sex, in having fun. Forget to play, and you are not working with your genius, for whom play is the only thing in mortal affairs worth taking seriously.

Adapted from Conscious Dreaming by Robert Moss. Published by Three Rivers Press

Image: Winged genius from mural in a Roman villa at Boscoreale, near Pompeii, late 1st century, now in the Louvre.

Punch a Hole in the World: Listening to Children's Dreams

Young children know how to go to Magic Kingdoms without paying for tickets, because they are at home in the imagination and live close to their dreams. When she was very young, my daughter Sophie had adventures in a special place called Teddy Bear Land, where she met a special friend. I loved hearing about these travels, and encouraged her to make drawings and spin further stories from them.

One day Sophie sat down beside me and asked with great earnestness, "Daddy, would you like to know how I get to Teddy Bear Land?"

 "I'd love to."

 "Sometimes I take the Sun Gate. Sometimes I take the Moon Gate. Sometimes I take the Tree Gate. Sometimes I take the Rainbow Bridge. And sometimes I just punch a hole in the world."

I've never heard anyone say it better. To live the larger life. we need to punch a hole in the world. This is what dreaming - sleeping or waking or hyper-awake - is really all about. On our roads to adulthood, we sometimes forget how to do it, just as older children in the Chronicles of Narnia cease to be able to see Aslan as they approach adolescence and become more and more burdened by the reality definitions of the grown-ups around them.

When we listen, truly listen, to very young children, we start to remember that the distance between us and the Magic Kingdoms is no wider than the edge of a sleep mask. True listening requires us to pay attention; to attend, in its root meaning in the Latin, is to stretch ourselves, which requires us to expand our vocabulary of understanding. We owe nothing less to the young children in our lives. When we do this, we discover that they can be our very best teachers on how to dream and what dreaming can be.

Here's what we need to know about listening to children's dreams and supporting their imaginations:

1. Listen up! When a child wants to tell a dream, make room for that. Make some daily space for dream sharing. Listen to the stories and cherish them for their own sake.

2. Invite good dreams Pick the right bedtime reading or better still, tell stories. Help your child to weave a web of good dream intentions for the night - for example, by asking "What would you most like to do tonight?" Encourage children to sleep with a favorite stuffed animal (whether teddy bear or T-Rex) and make this a dream guardian.

3. Provide immediate help with the scary stuff If your child was scared by something in the night, recognize you are the ally the child needs right now. Do something right away to move out that negative energy. Get a frightened child to spit it out (literally) or draw a picture of what scared her and tear it up as violently as possible.

4. Ask good questions. When the child has told her story, ask good questions. Ask about feelings, about the color of the sky, and about exactly what T-Rex was doing. See if there's something about the future. Say what you would think about this if this were your dream. Always come up with something fun or helpful to do with this story. Open up the crayon box, call grandma, etc.

5. Help the child to keep a dream journal. Get this started as early as possible. With a very young child, you can help with the words while they do the pictures. When your child reaches the point where she closes the journal and says, "This is my secret book and you can't read it any more" do not peek. Give her privacy, and let her choose when she'll let you look in that magic book.

6. Provide tools for creative expression. Encourage the child to bring dreams come alive through art, dance, theater and games, and to draw or paint dreams. Gather friends and family for dream-inspired games and performance. Puppets and stuffed animals can be great for acting out dreams. This can also be dress-up time. It's such a release for kids to portray mom or dad or other grown-ups in their lives - be ready to be shocked!

7. Help construct effective action plans Dreams can show us things that require further action - for example, to avoid an unhappy future event that was previewed in the dream, or to put something right in a family situation. A child will probably need adult help with such things, starting with your help. may require adult help, starting with yours. This will eventually require you to learn more about dreaming and dreamwork (hint: you can start with my books).

 8. Let your own inner child out to play As you listen to children's dreams, let the wonderful child dreamer inside you come out and join in the play.

9. Keep it fun! When you get the hang of this, you'll find it's about the best home entertainment you can enjoy.

Notice two things that are not on this list, but would be at the very top of a list of what NOT to do with your children's dreams:
1. NEVER say to a child "It's only a dream". Children know that dreams are for real and that scary stuff that comes out in dreams needs to be resolved, not dismissed.
2. DON'T INTERPRET a child's dreams.You are not the expert here; the child is.

Text adapted from Active Dreaming by Robert Moss. Published by New World Library.

Art: Book Tree by a 10-year-old Romanian boy

Acts of Creation

 

To be creative is to bring something new, and valuable, into our lives and our world. You don’t have to be an Einstein or a Shakespeare to be creative. You need to play the best game you can, in whatever field is calling you, and come up with some new moves, and play so hard you don’t think of your game as just work (and may never want to retire from it).

What makes a world-class creative remains mysterious. But new research in neuroscience is telling us interesting things about how the association centers of the brain work when new ideas are coming through, confirming that one characteristic of creative people is that they make connections between things that other people don’t see as connected. Nancy Andreasen, a pioneer of brain imaging at the University of Iowa, found that in episodes of high creativity, multiple association cortices of the brain are communicating back and forth with each other - not to process sensory input, but in free conversation. Wild and novel connections are made, and from these – through the brain’s character as a self-organizing system – new creation emerges.

 Educational psychologists who try to rate creativity levels speak of a “fourth-grade slump”, when adult assumptions and formal training start to block kids’ natural ability to make things up. This suggests another key to creative living; we want to stay in touch or get in touch with the spontaneous creativity of our inner child, our master imagineer. 

Something important that creative people have in common is that they develop creative habits. For choreographer Twyla Tharp, these include “subtraction” – making a conscious effort to minimize distractions and make sufficient time and space available for a new project. For creativity researcher Keith Sawyer (a psychology professor at Washington University in St Louis) good creative habits include “working smart”, creating a daily rhythm that sets the right balance between hard work and “idle time” when the best ideas often jump out.
    For Columbia business professor William Duggan, creativity in business hinges on “opportunistic innovation”, the readiness to watch for unexpected opportunities and change your plans in order to cash in on them when they turn up.

A high tolerance for ambiguity is a characteristic of highly creative people. This increases our ability to think outside the box, make connections others can't see, and escape from either/or choices..We grow our tolerance for ambiguity when we share dreams in the right way and receive feedback from multiple perspectives - and find that every viewpoint has something to offer. Active dreamers are capable of checking all the boxes when given multiple choices.

Great creators in all fields are dreamers, not only in sleep but in twilihght states of reverie where connections that escape the ordinary rational mind come easily and contact with higher intelligence is often made. Robert Louis Stevenson said he received his stories in a state of “reverie” in which benign visitors he called “brownies” helped him to compose.
      Wolfgang Pauli, one of the pioneers of quantum physics, said that dreams were his “secret laboratory.” Scientist Otto Loewi dreamed the experiment that enabled him to prove that nerve impulses are chemically transmitted, a discovery that won him the Nobel Prize. Einstein, Niels Bohr, Kekulé, – and Newton in his own day, and Hypatia in hers – were all dreamers. They drew inspiration from sleep dreams and developed the ability to slip into twilight states of consciousness

Other habits of creative people: 

- They find personal ways of getting “into the zone”.

- They are risk-takers. They are willing to make mistakes, and learn from them. They look at mistakes as experiments rather than failures.

 - Creative people are “prepared for good luck”; they view coincidences as homing beacons and turn accidents into inventions.

- They make room for creation – time and private space.

- They are visual thinkers.

- They find a creative friend. This is a person who provides helpful feedback and supports their experiments.

- They persevere. 

Creativity is not just the preserve of a lucky – or tormented – few. It’s a power we can all claim. 

And here is what, for me, is the most important key to creativity. When we take on a creative project - and its element of risk - and step out of whatever box we have been in, we draw supporting powers, especially the power that the ancients called the genius or the daimon. Most people understand this intuitively, even though we may fumble for an agreed language to describe it.

When we are passionately engaged in a creative venture, we draw support from other minds and other beings, seen and unseen. According to the direction of our will and desire, and the depth of our work, those minds may include masters from other times, and a greater Self. We draw greater support the greater the challenges involved in our venture. Great spirits love great challenges.

Yeats wrote about what it required to engage the daimon with quivering passion in his essay Per Amica Silentia Lunae. The title means “The Friendly Silence of the Moon”. He borrowed it from Virgil's description of the Greeks approaching Troy by stealth. Under the poet's moon, Yeats explains how we  can develop a co-creative relationships with minds operating in other times and on other planes of reality. 

Yeats believed, as I do, that whether we are aware of it or not, all our life choices are witnessed by a larger self he called the daimon. The daimon lends or withholds its immense energy from our lives according to whether we choose the big agenda or the little one. The daimon is bored by our everyday vacillations and compromises and detests us when we choose against the grand passion and the Life Work, the soul's purpose.

The daimon loves us best, Yeats said, when we choose to attempt “the hardest thing among those not impossible.”

Art: "The Red Tree" by Robert Moss