The Creative Act: A Way of Being
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Started reading March 11, 2025
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Through the ordinary state of being, we’re already creators in the most profound way, creating our experience of reality and composing the world we perceive.
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practice of paying attention.
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“Clair de lune,”
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The universe functions like a clock:
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These rhythms are not set by us.
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We are being conducted. The artist is on a cosmic timetable, just like all of nature.
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As artists, it is our job to draw down this information, transmute it, and share it. We are all translators for messages the universe is broadcasting.
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Some transmissions come on strong, others are more faint. If your antenna isn’t sensitively tuned, you’re likely to lose the data in the noise. Particularly since the signals coming through are often more subtle than the content we collect through sensory awareness. They are energetic more than tactile, intuitively perceived more than consciously recorded.
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A space so free of the normal overpacked condition of our minds that
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it functions as a vacuum. Drawing down the ideas that the universe is making available.
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We all start with it.
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Even the most ordinary experiences in life are met with a sense of awe. Deep sadness and intense excitement can come within moments of each other. There’s no facade and no attachment to a story.
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unspoken and unthought
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Awareness moves differently. The program is happening around us. The world is the doer and we are the witness. We have little or no control over the content.
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The gift of awareness allows us to notice what’s going on around and inside ourselves in the present moment. And to do so without attachment or involvement. We may observe bodily sensations, passing thoughts and feelings, sounds or visual cues, smells and tastes.
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Awareness is not a state you force. There is little effort involved, though persistence is key.
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presence with, and acceptance of, what is happening in the eternal now.
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If something strikes me as interesting or beautiful, first I live that experience. Only afterward might I attempt to understand it.
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we can change our ability to notice.
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It is filtered in a unique way for each of us. Not everything makes it through this filter. And what does get through doesn’t always do so faithfully.
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And our minds don’t have the processing power to take in all the information surrounding us.
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These relationships produce beliefs and stories. They may be about who we are, the people around us, and the nature of the world we live in. Eventually, these stories coalesce into a worldview.
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It is helpful to know this default system can be bypassed. With training, we can improve our interface with Source and radically expand the vessel’s ability to receive. Changing the instrument is not always the easiest way to change the sound of the music, but it can be the most powerful.
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Without the spiritual component, the artist works with a crucial disadvantage. The spiritual world provides a sense of wonder and a degree of open-mindedness not always found within the confines of science.
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The things we believe carry a charge regardless of whether they can be proven or not.
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When you’re working on a project, you may notice apparent coincidences appearing more often than randomness allows—almost as if there is another hand guiding yours in a certain direction.
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Pay particular attention to the moments that take your breath away—a beautiful sunset, an unusual eye color, a moving piece of music, the elegant design of a complex machine. If a piece of work, a fragment of consciousness, or an element of nature is somehow allowing us to access something bigger, that is its spiritual component made manifest. It awards us a glimpse of the unseen.
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We receive these types of messages all the time, if we remain open to them.
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The first step is to notice the conveyor belt is there.
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Any relevance it bears might be by chance, but you might allow for the possibility that chance is not all that’s at play.
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A practice is the embodiment of an approach to a concept. This can support us in bringing about a desired state of mind. When we repeat the exercise of opening our senses to what is, we move closer to living in a continually open state. We build a habit. One where expanded awareness is our default way of being in the world.
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To support our practice, we might set up a daily schedule, where we engage in particular rituals at specific times every day or week. The gestures we perform don’t need to be grand. Small rituals can make a big difference.
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The purpose of such exercises is not necessarily in the doing, just as the goal of meditation isn’t in the meditating. The purpose is to evolve the way we see the world when we’re not engaged in these acts. We are building the musculature of our psyche to more acutely tune in. This is so much of what the work is about.