N had mixed experiences with this CHALLENGE, which was about trying to be present in a time of creativity, and whether or not that would interfere with the creativity, or contribute to it. This month he had been doing quite a bit of song writing, and he was not sure if concentration on everything coming together like that was helpful for staying in the zone, if he were trying to concentrate. For example he had a song he had got involved with about two years ago, and he could never get the rest of the verses but one day he said Right, I am going to write this song, because he knew he was going to perform it for the following day at a songwriters meet-up. So he sat down, and for about two hours solid he just worked on it, and had found that was a more of an intellectual and partly emotional thing. It wasn't so much a physical body thing, other than just sitting there. Somehow, in doing what he was doing, he had got into the right kind of mental framework, and at the end of that two hours had something he was quite happy with, and which he could perform. He did not know whether that was what we called being in the zone or outside of the zone, or what was contributing. It was just a question of concentrating, giving that slot of time to it, and not letting yourself get distracted.
J said that if you were trying to be conscious of your powers of creativity, you were actually impeding those very powers, adulterating the clear screen. Normally in those situations we are quite protean, we can think of what we are saying and be aware of outside stimuli coming in and there were several different levels going on, for all of us, all the time. The particular problem of creativity was that when you have this inspiration, some idea that comes from where one knows not, it is like a river that branches out into tributaries after the processes of creativity in everyday consciousness, but the initial impetus, the creativity, which is the guiding light, is actually something which is not susceptible so much to having this degree of differentiation into other thought processes. It needs itself and nothing else.
RG believed we were all born with some kind of creativity, but that the creativity may somehow have been stopped. A child might draw something, and a parent say don't do that. Once we discovered we were in some way creative, was the time we could get the centres working at the same time, and the more creativity we built, the more chance we had of doing that.
L had tried this challenge, but did find that having to focus on these three centres while composing did seem to get in the way of some of the finer aspects of the creative spirit, butt did remind him very much of the techniques he was using in meditation, which revolved around three kinds of perception - looking at something, being attentive to what he was feeling physically, and listening to whatever was around - and maybe those related to the centres; it did split the consciousness three ways. However it hadn't helped very much with composing. For example he had awoken at night with music in his mind, which he had made a note of. That wasn't because he was concentrating on the three centres, it was because he had let consciousness go completely and gone to sleep. He had been reading Prokofiev's diaries, and an entry from 4 November 1913, in connection with learning piano music by heart, seemed relevant: ... all three sorts of memory are combined: musical, visual and digital, each of them having first been exercised separately and only later integrated.
The closest T had got to experiencing what she thought was the challenge was during her weekly life drawing. Thinking of the challenge had helped her to understand a little bit more about how, when she was drawing, it was a complete takeover of everything of her, in order to be in the living present with what she was observing, and trying to interpret through this weird point and line to plane. It was like a glimpse of something, connecting with this meeting and the challenge. It was a few seconds probably, of not even observing but just an awareness of something behind, or different from, this very vital experience, and it made her realise that that was what art meant to her - the live experience of observing and interpreting through this weird mechanism that we called drawing.
Responding to N, RM said that when working on something like music, it was the intellectual or creative centre that was operating. If we tried to use the moving centre, in normal mindfulness, you were looking at touch and taste and the physicality of things, and if you tried to be in touch with that, during the creative process, you would actually lose the creativity, you would be in the wrong space. You needed to be that space where the creation was happening, and letting nothing else interfere. N said we also needed to distinguish between those bits which are like initial inspiration, and what comes after, which is often the hard work. He thought a lot of creativity was sometimes only one percent of inspiration, and about 99 percent of perspiration. That was the difficult thing - to keep going after you had the initial idea. For T the conscious and the unconscious came to mind. The theory that there is a conscious and and an unconscious. It seemed very, very simplistic, actually. When you put yourself into the position of starting to write your story, or draw what you see, it is a conscious effort, but is it unconscious stuff that's coming through? People talked about the stream of consciousness type of writing, but was it a stream of unconsciousness?
Going back to something N had said, about what happens when you work on ideas, and whether it is any good, L cited another extract from Prokofiev's Diaries. It was one of the best bits L had found in this book, and he thought it was relevant.
If a nugget is detected in the sand he quarries away hoping to find an ingot, but all too often the result is that the nugget crumbles away leaving nothing but more sand. The scrap of idea that started it all off turns out to be worthless. But if, on the other hand, it can be crystallized into an original idea meriting some attention, whether it be a theme or a harmonic idea or simply an interesting musical turn of phrase, then the objective has been achieved and the gold bar has been found. It may consist of just a few notes, a sequence of two chords, or even a long idea lasting several bars. Now it can be written down, perhaps to be put aside for a day, or even a month. The precious ingot has been found and carefully salted away; now it is time to look for others, and when several have been unearthed the task of linking them together to make a chain can be undertaken.
The reading continued from Chapter 23 of Beelzebub's Tales.
Well then, my boy, at the period of this fourth sojourn of mine in person on the surface of your planet, I first arrived in the country now called Egypt, and after having stayed there a few days ... with the help of the local three-brained beings, caught the necessary number of ape-beings.
Having accomplished this, I telepathically signalled our ship Occasion which descended to us, it must be said on the first, very dark night; and when we had loaded these ape-beings into that special section of the ship Occasion which had been constructed for Gornahoor Harharkh under his directions, we at once reascended to the planet Mars; and three Martian days later, on the same ship and together with these apes, I ascended to the planet Saturn.
Though we had previously decided to carry out the experiments with these apes only on the following year, when they would have become thoroughly acclimatized and orientated to existence under the new conditions, I ascended then to the planet Saturn so soon because at my last personal meeting with Gornahoor Harharkh, I had promised him to be present at his family solemnity which had soon to take place.
T thought the subplot about the poor apes going out to Mars was on a theme of distraction. He had to become a godfather to the raven, and so instead of acclimatising these apes to the atmosphere, they took them after three days. It was about these multiple pulls as to where you were supposed to be, and what you were supposed to do, and things getting in the way.
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Do something creative with mind, body and soul (intellectual, moving and emotional centres), and observe if it helps or gets in the way.
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RG believed we were all born with some kind of creativity, but that the creativity may somehow have been stopped. A child might draw something, and a parent say don't do that. Once we discovered we were in some way creative, was the time we could get the centres working at the same time, and the more creativity we built, the more chance we had of doing that.
L had tried this challenge, but did find that having to focus on these three centres while composing did seem to get in the way of some of the finer aspects of the creative spirit, butt did remind him very much of the techniques he was using in meditation, which revolved around three kinds of perception - looking at something, being attentive to what he was feeling physically, and listening to whatever was around - and maybe those related to the centres; it did split the consciousness three ways. However it hadn't helped very much with composing. For example he had awoken at night with music in his mind, which he had made a note of. That wasn't because he was concentrating on the three centres, it was because he had let consciousness go completely and gone to sleep. He had been reading Prokofiev's diaries, and an entry from 4 November 1913, in connection with learning piano music by heart, seemed relevant: ... all three sorts of memory are combined: musical, visual and digital, each of them having first been exercised separately and only later integrated.
Sergey Prokofiev 1891-1953 |
The closest T had got to experiencing what she thought was the challenge was during her weekly life drawing. Thinking of the challenge had helped her to understand a little bit more about how, when she was drawing, it was a complete takeover of everything of her, in order to be in the living present with what she was observing, and trying to interpret through this weird point and line to plane. It was like a glimpse of something, connecting with this meeting and the challenge. It was a few seconds probably, of not even observing but just an awareness of something behind, or different from, this very vital experience, and it made her realise that that was what art meant to her - the live experience of observing and interpreting through this weird mechanism that we called drawing.
Responding to N, RM said that when working on something like music, it was the intellectual or creative centre that was operating. If we tried to use the moving centre, in normal mindfulness, you were looking at touch and taste and the physicality of things, and if you tried to be in touch with that, during the creative process, you would actually lose the creativity, you would be in the wrong space. You needed to be that space where the creation was happening, and letting nothing else interfere. N said we also needed to distinguish between those bits which are like initial inspiration, and what comes after, which is often the hard work. He thought a lot of creativity was sometimes only one percent of inspiration, and about 99 percent of perspiration. That was the difficult thing - to keep going after you had the initial idea. For T the conscious and the unconscious came to mind. The theory that there is a conscious and and an unconscious. It seemed very, very simplistic, actually. When you put yourself into the position of starting to write your story, or draw what you see, it is a conscious effort, but is it unconscious stuff that's coming through? People talked about the stream of consciousness type of writing, but was it a stream of unconsciousness?
Going back to something N had said, about what happens when you work on ideas, and whether it is any good, L cited another extract from Prokofiev's Diaries. It was one of the best bits L had found in this book, and he thought it was relevant.
If a nugget is detected in the sand he quarries away hoping to find an ingot, but all too often the result is that the nugget crumbles away leaving nothing but more sand. The scrap of idea that started it all off turns out to be worthless. But if, on the other hand, it can be crystallized into an original idea meriting some attention, whether it be a theme or a harmonic idea or simply an interesting musical turn of phrase, then the objective has been achieved and the gold bar has been found. It may consist of just a few notes, a sequence of two chords, or even a long idea lasting several bars. Now it can be written down, perhaps to be put aside for a day, or even a month. The precious ingot has been found and carefully salted away; now it is time to look for others, and when several have been unearthed the task of linking them together to make a chain can be undertaken.
The reading continued from Chapter 23 of Beelzebub's Tales.
Well then, my boy, at the period of this fourth sojourn of mine in person on the surface of your planet, I first arrived in the country now called Egypt, and after having stayed there a few days ... with the help of the local three-brained beings, caught the necessary number of ape-beings.
Having accomplished this, I telepathically signalled our ship Occasion which descended to us, it must be said on the first, very dark night; and when we had loaded these ape-beings into that special section of the ship Occasion which had been constructed for Gornahoor Harharkh under his directions, we at once reascended to the planet Mars; and three Martian days later, on the same ship and together with these apes, I ascended to the planet Saturn.
Though we had previously decided to carry out the experiments with these apes only on the following year, when they would have become thoroughly acclimatized and orientated to existence under the new conditions, I ascended then to the planet Saturn so soon because at my last personal meeting with Gornahoor Harharkh, I had promised him to be present at his family solemnity which had soon to take place.
T thought the subplot about the poor apes going out to Mars was on a theme of distraction. He had to become a godfather to the raven, and so instead of acclimatising these apes to the atmosphere, they took them after three days. It was about these multiple pulls as to where you were supposed to be, and what you were supposed to do, and things getting in the way.
