Tuesday, November 09, 2004

Philosophy?

I am getting more and more sure that there's this place people have that can be reached through meditation, what some call prayer, that I tend to call "creativity" or some such. It is the quick, the vital core, from which insights and ideas spring up, full-fledged, with feathers and the ability to fly. It is the finest thing I know, to work at my writing or sometimes to leave my writing and go sit in the back yard or to take a run– and it happens: a vision, an idea, a solution, a whole scene springs up.
My belief is that this is the human doing its thing, integrating whatever is floating around in me, my experiences, voices I've heard, the movement of my muscles. But if someone could prove to me beyond the shadow of a doubt that this came from some god, or from Oneness with the Universe, or from a Jungian archetype of past human experience– I wouldn't be particularly surprised.
In other words, I think my creative insights are probably made of the same stuff as my mother's prayers and someone else's meditation and someone else's mystical experience. It is the most wonderful sensation, and I think it must be fairly common, more common to some that to others– it is totally wonderful, but has no more ethical content than sex or biting into a big sweet ripe peach. Albert Speer no doubt felt it, the rush, as he envisioned some imperial monstrosity to express the ambitions of the Third Reich.
What is needed along with this thing is reason and experience and ethics. Omigod, I'm getting a philosophy: this place where creative stuff arises is totally amoral and non-ethical. Ethics, it seems to me rises from reason and experience, although probably the greatest leaders (speaking broadly here– poets and the first people who figured out you could sow the seed you'd been gathering--as well as political leaders) probably had both things, the ethical outlook and that great upsurge from the place I don't have a name for. It's the brain/heart, feeling/thinking thing.

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