Tag: Creativity

Ecstasies and spontaneities of the street show: on the road in France

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Mint tea and chocolate

The caravan started with a conversation over mint tea and chocolate in the salon-library-bazaar-book-store-tea-space of an old French farmhouse turned into an ashram.

For four days, a dozen of us in our twenties had been coming face-to-face with the depths and chaos of our humanness, our creativity, our shadows, and our souls, through workshops on writing, drawing, chanting and moving, with meals together, meditation in the morning, and music and poetry throughout. Intense, difficult, uncomfortable — life-affirming.

It was after midnight on the last night, and handful of us remained awake, building dreams.

The central idea: a traveling caravan, where we could live what we love while offering it to the world — playing music, reading poetry, performing theatre, dancing, selling books, cooking, sharing skills and knowledge, drinking tea and eating chocolate.

Create, create, commit

One of the speakers for the seminar, M., had shared with us the instruction her spiritual teacher gave her:

“Create, create, create! Show, show, show!”

Which is what she was doing: painting, writing, traveling, and continuously finding new ways to share what she was creating.

We were all engaging various degrees of creative work, but (at least for me) it was easier to “just create,” without the demand and friction of needing to show my work. Easier to stay hidden and stay comfortable.

As we talked, M. was working in the office next to us, listening. Then she stepped into the room with a question: what were we actually going to do? What concrete steps were we willing to take? Tonight, before we all left and the energy dissipated?

In our ecstatic dream building, visions walked before reality, and our own feet were barely on the ground. If someone had suggested we learn to fly, we would have believed it possible (and maybe it would have been). The energy and excitement had been building through hours of talking and chocolate. We could have left that space high on ideas, laid in our beds too excited to sleep.

Then we’d wake up the next morning and go back to our lives. The dream might still dwell in our minds, but the energy we’d collected would dissipate. It would go elsewhere, feed other projects. The dream would remain a dream, like most do.

So: what were we willing to do, that night, to bring our magnificent ideas down from the sky, to the earth, where we could get a foothold? (A woman sitting with us, an experienced and successful painter, sculptor and artist, joked, “After this, you can go outside and stare at the stars, just to come down a little bit.”)

On scraps of paper, we each wrote a sentence describing our dream project together. The vision was there, defined. The passion was there. But to become a project, not just an idea, it needed clear, physical, committed sustenance — that is, action.

So we decided to get together for a weekend and start creating. Play music, read poetry, perform theatre; cook, eat, talk, meditate, drink tea and break chocolate together. Enshrine time and space — three days, one house — fill it with six individuals with shared intention — and see what would happen. The vision of the caravan, in a house. I would be in France for another month and a half before returning to the United States. We narrowed it down to one weekend and agreed: “I’ll be there.”
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J.G. Bennett: The life of Creativity

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J.G. Bennett, on what has been called the Gurdjieff work, and Bennett describes as being concerned with the transformation of substances in various forms:

“The notion of the Fourth Way is wholly bound up with these two principles; the first is that of complete involvement in life externally, and secondly, in the acceptance internally of responsibility for certain work that is required for a great Cosmic Purpose.

According to Gurdjieff, this purpose is concerned with the transformation of substances whereby the destiny of mankind as a whole can be kept moving in the right way. This takes many forms. It can take the form of activities of artistic creation; it can take the form of certain kinds of social organizations; it can take the forms of the transmission of specialized forms of knowledge, or research into the conditions of mankind, and preparation for the future, and certain other tasks, more specifically connected with what I said; that is, the transformation of substances.

I am personally confident, from long years of study of this matter and having been in contact with a rather unusually large number of people who have been concerned in this particular field, that there really is such Work and that there are people who understand it in a way that is not obviously visible on the surface. This means that there is in effect a Twofold Life on the earth. One is the visible, external life in which we all have to participate, and the other is an invisible life in which we can participate if we choose. In a sense one can say the first life is a causal life; that is to say, in that life causes that exist in the past produce results that are being experienced in the present and which will be carried forward in the future. It can also be called the stream of happenings. It is of course called by such names of Samsara and the Wheel of Life, and so on, but in a very simple way it is the ordinary life that we all live. The second, the other life, is non-causual, which means that it exists only in so far as it is created. It is the life of Creativity. Every creative act rightly performed is a means of participation in that life. And the search for creation is the search for that life.

Creation is infinitely varied in its content and its forms. Everything that is going on everywhere is also a field of possible creativity, and therefore there is no limit to what can be found in the field of creation. But the great majority of mankind are content to live in the first life. A few are searching for the other, because there is a feeling of a need to participate in creative activity and a realization that one is only half alive, and perhaps not even that, if one is not participating.

That is what is meant by the word Work, and when we talk about ‘the work’ or the Great Work — Magnum Opus — it refers to the invisible world which has to be perpetually created in order that it should be. And it is that that we are called to if we are destined for accelerated completion. In order to enter that world, we have to earn the right to be in it, and for that we have to bring to it something made by ourselves. The first and simplest thing we can bring is our own capacity for work; our own capacity for transforming energy, and therefore for participating in the Creation. This can afterwords be converted into specific forms of creativity, according to objective needs and our own subjective powers.

There is no doubt that the Fourth Way is the direct application of the principle of creativity in life. That is why I called it non-causal. It always has to start without an antecedent cause. It is a spontaneous call from beyond that makes this possible.”

(From a lecture at Denison House in the summer of 1963, published in 1973 in “Gurdjieff: A Very Great Enigma”)