A great many people are on the sidelines when it comes to the ultimate value of Yoga and meditation. Sure, because of the recent positive press, even the mainstream variety, most now agree that Yoga and meditation are beneficial for combating stress, for relaxation, for longevity. I’d like to underline their importance as a catalyst for creativity.
While creativity is a great cure for apathy, the question remains: How do you spark it, how do you take that first step when you’ve never done anything creative before?
Suppose you close your eyes and see a light forming above the bridge of your nose. Soon this warm light seems to take possession of your being. Wordlessly, you feel its power, its stimulating, cleansing nature. You sense a new energy, one pushing you to get up and do something — something with your hands. Play an instrument, type out a novel, paint a masterpiece. Or perhaps something with your voice. Sing a song, step outside and yell at the trees.
House in Bayside, CA
New research from King's College London found that, “Helping chronic fatigue syndrome patients to push their limits to overcome the condition produces a better rate of recovery than getting them to accept the illness and adapt to a limited life.
“By contrast, patients whose therapists encouraged them to accept the limits of their illness and adapt their lifestyles to live with it showed significantly less improvement when they were followed up after 24 and 52 weeks.”
Doesn't this just make sense, that we shouldn't accept our so-called limits? That we only reach our full potential by struggling against self- or socially-imposed limitations.
"The greatest book in the world, the Mahabharata, tells us we all have to live and die by our karmic cycle. Thus works the perfect reward-and-punishment, cause-and-effect, code of the universe. We live out in our present life what we wrote out in our last. But the great moral thriller also orders us to rage against karma and its despotic dictates. It teaches us to subvert it. To change it. It tells us we also write out our next lives as we live out our present."~ The Alchemy of Desire—Tarun J. Tejpal
In other words, half the battle is just getting going. I don’t think there’s a person in the world, except for driven geniuses such as Pasteur, Napoleon, Shakespeare, Cervantes, Montaigne, Milton or Tolstoy who doesn’t want to give up once in a while. And that’s the difference between genius and ordinary persons.
According to Matthew Arnold: ‘Genius is mainly an affair of energy.’
To Charles Pierre Baudelaire: ‘Genius is nothing more or less than childhood recovered by will, a childhood now equipped for self-expression with an adult’s capacities.’
To Napoleon Bonaparte: ‘Men of genius are meteors destined to burn themselves out in lighting up their age.’
And finally, Napoleon Hill, who saw it this way: ‘Sex energy is the creative energy of all geniuses. There never has been, and never will be a great leader, builder or artist lacking in the driving force of sex.’
That doesn’t mean we should all resign ourselves to a mediocre life just because we’re not geniuses. Stimuli differ. Not all of us are geniuses, driven to creative heights by sexually sublimated energy. There are many types of energy: sexual, nervous, or misdirected, and plain ol’ lack of. Each of these has its own source and characteristics. Sexual energy — in its sublimated form — probably does drive genius. But genius is not the topic here, so let’s leave it with the understanding that each one of us consecrates a variable amount of sexual energy — from zero to a hundred percent — to our various pursuits. Whether they be creative or not depends on our beings.
Modern life, with its stress and anxiety, creates the perfect conditions for generating nervous energy, or energy that leads nowhere, surplus energy that turns us round and round, misdirected, unfocused — its very plentitude more of a curse than a blessing. Why? Because it creates a wind-up toy mental state with one missing element — the one element the might give it purpose. And that is the ability to self-direct. We all know this state, whether we have experienced it ourselves or observed it in others. And that’s the thing about Golden Flower Meditation (GFM); it not only generates energy, it induces a state of mind capable of directing said energy. But you don’t have to undertake GFM, just to get yourself going.
If you lack, or believe you lack, the innate energy to create, there’s something you can do about it and it’s called mental discipline. You can COMMAND yourself to get up and go. Not only will it work, it will have a feedback effect; in other words, do it once and you’ll develop a kind of muscle-memory that uses the positive feedback of getting something done to push you to do something else the next time.
Thanks to the digital age, one of the easiest and most agreeable creative pursuits is photography. Why? Because you can do it all yourself in a very short cycle from taking pictures to loading and developing them on a computer. You get to see the fruits of your work immediately. And each time you go out you’ll get better at the whole process.
Arcata Plaza's controversial McKinley statue with proverbial seagull on head
What’s that? You say you wouldn’t know what to photograph? Baloney — picking a subject is easy. Start by photographing themes. Ladders, socks, firehouses, signs, out the window of a car, red objects, and so on. You see, the point of photography is that it has no point for most people; they don’t do it for money; they do it for fun, for family keepsakes.
Do they get better at it as time goes by? Do they even think about getting better, or is it only a kind of reflex: Grab the camera to take the Thanksgiving picture, for example.
I started photography at the age of 13. I had a Kodak Brownie. It used 620 roll film that produced a giant 2” by 2” image. It had an optional flash that used bulbs. The pictures I took were bad. I had no idea of framing, composition, light or exposure. I just grabbed the camera to capture the moment; I never thought about the technical or artistic side of it.
So every shot was pretty much the same. Before my Kundalini awakening, I had no sense of design, no artistic ability, no idea about color, no idea that I had to position the camera in relation to the subject and not the other way around. What’s more, I never considered them.
At 25, I was still shooting. I’d used a variety of cameras, none too elaborate or expensive. I’d taken no classes, but I had become aware that there were governing principles, that there was more to photography than snapping souvenir images. Yes, my technical understanding did improve, but overall I was dissatisfied. I didn’t know how to take good photos, but I had become able to recognize a great photograph when I saw one.
About 40-years-old, I was looking at a coffee table book of photographs, when I asked myself, “What make a great picture?” I skimmed the book again, looking for a common thread. When I had finished a few minutes later, I knew the answer. Mentally, I had compared my photographs with the ones in the book and was able to pin down what it was they had that I didn’t.
Light & Shadow
Simplicity. There were very few elements in these photographs and every element had a purpose. Leaving out composition and lighting for a moment, it seemed that good pictures excluded all but the necessary. Why, I asked myself, can’t I at least begin to try to take pictures that way? To look into the viewer with the intention of including only the necessary elements and of composing those elements harmonically in relation to the whole.
Since then, my images have gotten better. Yes, I’ve looked into composition, lighting, exposure, framing, color. I’m not great, but I am better, just enough so that it keeps me energized — keeps me moving forward.
Nothing beats going out in the early morning or late afternoon, walking around looking for problems to solve with a camera. What do I mean by that? I mean that every physical entity, be it object or person, is a potential problem that can be solved with a camera. That is, the camera, used correctly, can produce something of intrinsic originality and even beauty from the most mundane settings.
Sometimes the best solution is to pass by, to let the challenge go, whether for compositional or technical reasons. But a 32MB SD card holds over 2000 raw images. With the old Brownie, you got about 8 exposures if I remember correctly; with a digicam or a modern DSLR, you can shoot until you’re exhausted.
The point is the more I persisted, the more questions I asked myself, the more I understood, the better my photos became. Was it sexual energy that drove me to want to capture images? Or was it curiosity? Where does curiosity come from? These are the questions I asked myself over the years, once I decided to get going.
These are the questions you might start with, whether you decide on photography, dance, writing, studying archeology, video, music, painting, or whatever. The goal is to do. Start now, organize later on. Ask yourself questions: Why am I not doing something? What would it take to start? What should I do first? What do I need to do to learn it?
None of these questions need be answered. All you need to do is rise and get with it! Yes, the more important questions came to my mind after I had activated Kundalini, but I got going long before that. Kundalini kick starts creativity. In my case, made everything, well, almost everything, fall into place.