The writer's block?

In the mandala of our consciousness we are all in a sense artists. This is something that Alex Grey has recognized in his famous "The Vast Expanse" psalm:

Create perfection wherever you go with your awareness. That is why this teaching is admired by artists—they sense the correctness of the response to life as creative. Life is infinite creative play. Enjoyment and participation in this creative play is the artists profound joy. We co-author every moment with universal creativity. . . .

Artistic response (rather than conditioned reaction) to life is at least one-third of what we are as human beings. Integral philosopher Ken Wilber points out that virtually every greatest thinker in the history of humankind (from Plato to Kant to Habermas) acknowledged the Big Three, the triumvirate of perspectives—the Good, the True, and the Beautiful in the philosophy of Plato, for instance—to be the essential dimensions of our being-in-the-world.

Yes, it is important to subject ourselves to the oughts and shoulds of what must be done by us so as to fulfill our destinies (moral). Yes, it is important to subject ourselves to the truths and facts of coming to terms with the cruel reality—and not escaping from it into the vertigo of fantasies and illusions and false hopes (knowledge). But, as Kant argues in his concluding Critique of Judgment, without a cornerstone dimension of aesthetic response to life these other dimensions remain detached from each other. To embody our life as a play of creativity (as a form of art), as I see it, is a foundational component of a healthy and integrated existence.

Playfully writing one's own narrative of life and transcending a writer's block, the blockage that leads to copy&pasting of an old habitual storyline that we learned at some point and that makes us non-existent to ourselves, always looking for new ways of self-expression in the seemingly limited context of our life's framework, constantly searching for new tools for transcending that frame and finding new perspectives to it seems to be a way to balance the Big Three in one's own life. If I deny myself of this courageous creative response to life, I deny myself of life itself.

It is important to embody the Spirit's creativity in a canvas of the individual levels of our being, including the Soul, the ego, the adaptive personae, and the body. It is important to trust one's own artistic feeling that arises in the depths of the Heart. It is important to learn in action how to be a better artist of life than the moment before, to keep searching for new curves and touches in life, to keep looking for novel ways of self-expressing perfection while always already being a manifestation of the ultimate Stillness.

Otherwise life becomes a dull and in/efficient affair of a robot-like human mechanism that keeps self-replicating old constellations of patterns and occasionally passes the Turing test strictly by an accident.

And, as Elizabeth Gilbert wonderfully points out, when undertaking any form of art it is crucial to recognize that one's own creativity is not a private property or a selfish achievement, it manifests rather like a gift of Spirit. Even if your art is your life story (and it always is) the same writer's block rule still works; and you can get stuck, as we all do. Your life as a work of art doesn't belong strictly to your individual being, most certainly not to your personae or ego or even Soul, even though the latter comes closer to the essential Source. You can't force it, you have to let it grow.

P.S. And if you are forgetting both the dignity of being an artist and the humility of being a work of art by falling, e.g., into the dominance of either shoulds or facts I ought to wake you up by asking a simple question, the question that highlights the importance of your qualia or subjective joy of being:

"Why so serious?"

(A still from a highly recommended movie on the topic, The Dark Knight.)

The ground for conscious being

It is both fascinating and frightening how lost we can be in the world of apparitions due to subtle contractions and attachments of our psyche—the phenomena of which we tend to be unaware. We get used to a limited perspective on ourselves and on others; we develop some basic agreements with the world during the process of growth and interaction with the other, we co-create the worldspace where we live that includes our thoughts, things that we say, things how we say, our memories, visions, sensations, body movements, chronic energy fixations, and the totality of it all is our self which we present to the loved ones and the hated ones and the world at large.

It is dramatic that our self, as it constantly grows towards more maturity and embrace and experience and becoming more aware of itself by including more and more entities into its space of being-in-the-world, at earlier stages can learn and adapt to the world, construct the basic sets of its elements in a way that in the future would become self-evident as self-contractions and subtle attachments that hinder liberation and hide essential qualities of one's own human being, of one's own profound truth under limited adaptive masks or personae of which we are not aware for initially and genealogically these masks were developed in order to comply with the requirements and agreements that the other and the environment told us, showed us in the days when we were just starting to make first steps towards self-consciousness and conscious liberation. And these masks of which we are not yet aware, the shadow patterns of our co-existence contaminate our whole life and communion with the ones we love and prevent us from being fully and self-recognizably who we are, radiant blissful fluctuations of the Spirit's meaningful, passionate, unlimited unfolding, the unfolding that is personally embodied in the Soul, the ego, and the bodymind.

The Spirit is always present in our life as the very fact that we are aware. In fact it is the space of awareness, of consciousness that is aware of us and all our life right now. In this space the wisdom and compassion grow and stabilize as structures, as fractals, as flowers. Giving space to yourself the way you fully and deeply are in your true embodied nature means grounding yourself in awareness and putting everything that exists in life into this ground, washing with its liberating rain the basics presets of your tetra-constructed¹ being and knowledge of the world and how to engage with it. In the space of awareness the spontaneity occurs that breaks ice of the old and allows novelty to emerge, and the novelty brings new excitements and flow of life and the conscious awareness always liberates them from attachment, for the attachment per se is something of which we can become conscious in the space of awareness.

The names of attachments, fixations and repressions are Legion. They hide everywhere in your private and public worldspace and they cause you to develop a false concept of the self, a false self. You get used to move in a certain way and not the other; and you unconsciously consider these movements to be the boundaries that divide the territory of your self from the foreign land of not-self, the unknowing land that brings anxiety by its very existence. Thus, you get a limited perspective of your self embodied in movements. You get used to have certain sensations and feelings in the body; and you may not even be aware of the fact that these are only sensations and feelings that emerged in the process of growth; and you just take them for granted. Thus, you get a limited perspective of your self embodied in how you feel your body. You get used to have certain thoughts and preconceived ideas in your mind; and these ideas are always more limited than the mystery of the world and your self. Thus, you get a limited perspective of your self embodied in how you think about yourself and existence.

You get used to hearing a limited spectrum of sounds, seeing limited things, enjoying limited moves, experiencing limited emotions, playing limited roles, having a limited diapason of dreams, and living a limited range of possibilities of life. And all of it in the totality of who you are you present as a total message of your existence to others. And others respond, both consciously and unconsciously, to this message as a whole with their being. Of course, you are responding to their message as well.

If I am so attached to these things that I don't even let them into my awareness so as to let go of them, how not to get lost in this vortex of apparitions and how to finally arise above the process of recreating the suffering, the suffering that is constantly shared with others? If there is nothing in my self that I can ground myself in, for it all is essentially a fleeting and constructed experience, what is the way to freedom? How can I free myself to being fully embodied and yet unattached? The ultimate way is to ground yourself in something that has no content and yet is always already present, in a presence that constitutes the basic undeniable dimension of the being-in-the-world that is closer to you than your self.

That which is always already present and yet has no content is the silent awareness, the very framework of attention, the very space of consciousness in which everything you are reading right now as you are sitting in a certain posture, feeling certain sensations and thinking ideas and making various micro- and macro-movements is arising moment to moment. This awareness is your best fucking friend forever. Ground yourself in awareness and allow yourself making new moves, approaching people in new ways, playing new roles, having a fresh taste of feelings in the body, no matter how silly you think those are, for these very thoughts of silliness are just temporary clouds in the sky of your awareness that come and go, come and go like flowing waves in the ocean cradled by the wind which is the Spirit whispering.

Ground yourself and help your beloved to ground themselves in awareness and then look into their eyes and make funny faces, scream and cry and move and liberate and dance together and give the full space to feelings in the body and suffering in the life for this is the path to healing and redemption and underneath suffering you can find profound happiness if you actually follow this advice, this practical injunction. Constantly remind yourself and others of this translucent awareness and the power of the present moment and the glory of all-pervading silence by being a living example.

The quietude is the Spirit smiling to you.

¹ Tetra-construction is the term that points to biological, psychological, cultural, and social factors of development and evolution. See, e.g., Wilber, Integral Spirituality, 2006.

Ars longa, vita brevis, occasio praeceps, experientia fallax, judicium difficile

It is striking how ignorant you can be about the nature of your relationships with others. Especially with those who are close to you in some way. You can be in a very friendly relationship with somebody, a relationship that seems okay both to you and seemingly this other person, and yet, as, for instance, Freud noted, there is much more hidden beneath the surface of water; and the visible tip of the iceberg is just a partial and misleading appearance. Once you go deeper, once you dig up archeological remains of your past that resides in your life here and now and then, once you understand and appreciate yours and others' early traumas, you become both fascinated and terrified by what you have blindly denied, projected, swept under a carpet of your defenses.

In the early years life seems simple. There is Good, there is Evil, however you name it. The system you are identified with seems good to you, anything else is bad. People around can be good to you or bad to you. You define people through their relationship with you and your relationship to them. Psychoanalysis says it starts with the Mother: a caring Mother is the image of a Good Mother; a non-caring Mother is the image of a Bad Mother. The same mother manifests to you as two different persons: the one that is Good and satisfies all your needs, and the one that is Bad and doesn't. Sometimes this dichotomy seems to be able to follow you through life, perhaps dividing it into black & white stripes similar to a piano's keyboard.

Later in life the understanding emerges that not everything is about you, and your judgments are just judgments that can be right or wrong to some extent—or both, or neither. Some people are definitely more kind to you than others; some have a more negative attitude toward you; and most just don't give a shit about you. You look around yourself and can find no good, no evil in its absolute form. You still try to make judgment calls, but they don't seem solid to you. Everything looks relative, and you know you can be wrong, and you may even choose to look at things positively, to expect good from other people, and to blind yourself toward evil. This naivete can be very strong, until there is a crisis in your paradigm, the crisis of accumulated awareness regarding anomalies that don't match your expectations of being with others.

Everything looks relative, and yet there is human drama. There are no bad people, and yet the deeds of some of them are terrifying. In many ways, Hollywood has simplified it all extensively. Life is not a Hollywood movie, it is more like a Greek tragedy, it is more like the greatest play that could have ever been written by Shakespeare. In real life, in true everyday drama it is never obvious who your enemy is, for there are no villains with the letters E-V-I-L carved on their foreheads. (Well, some can have swastikas there… but this is just a sign; and the rest relies upon the one who interprets. Most are simply not fluent in psychopaths' language.) You can hardly make a definite judgment about the essence of a person, for human personality is so complex, paradoxical, and multifaceted. And yet once in a while your life depends upon your making a judgment call. It is not easy to know who are false prophets in your living, however "by their fruit you will recognize them." And, as I recently discovered, there is more to that advice than I thought before.

There would be no human drama, if everything were evident. If there were only the good, the bad, and the ugly, you would always know whom to shoot. But there aren't; and you don't. It is impossible for your enemy to betray you, you would expect that; and it would make no sense to call thy enemy's deeds "betrayal." In fact with an enemy you speak in terms of war, not betrayal. It's all quite sincere and straightforward. The very definition of betrayal is that it is done by those from whom you would never expect that. All human drama that directly involves you is created by thy neighbors. Look at the people who surround you. You would never see that coming, that is the point. Look in the mirror. Oedipus killed his own father and fucked his own mother, unknowingly. Stop fucking people close to you—or if you think you can't stop, at least do it consciously, sincerely, without deceiving yourself.

The very art of deception is in making you deceived. People are naturally two-faced, they tend to have many faces. Id, ego, and superego are just three of the most known subpersonalities. There have always been large amounts of data in clinical psychology on so-called manipulative and exploiting types of personality. All their life, from the early childhood (when this could have been important so as to adapt to a pathological social environment) these people have been trained to deceive others, to show them false appearances, to appear before you in sheep's clothing, to be your greatest friend, and to exploit you. In the field of human drama these are professionals. Such people consciously and unconsciously find your weak spots and use them, and one of the basic mechanisms for this is exploitation of transferential/countertransferential dynamics.

If one, for example, has an especially pathological narcissistic personality, that person will easily find ways how to make others serve him or her. Sometimes they do it unconsciously for their egos; in many cases, they learn how to manipulate their unconscious so as to create extensive networks of lies. They can build cults and/or businesses around it by being a "charismatic" leader and making other people do hard work for them through finding weak spots in their personalities. The transference-based deception may last forever, especially if you yourself have serious unsolved issues (such as victim patterns); but when you become aware of the transferential phenomena and break up the pattern, this person will instantaneously recognize the danger you bring to his or her system's stability; and you will be immediately discarded from it by the narcissism's immune system, without any mercy and self-doubt whatsoever. Furthermore, if that person, in addition to being narcissistic, is also highly dissociative, he or she may as well simply dissociate the entire narcissistic schemata, rationalize a sudden loss of a close one, and eventually maintain a good self-image (or at least persona).

How to recognize such a person? Look at the deeds of the overall self, not just the words of his or her persona or social mask. Look both closely and from distance. Look into yourself as well. See the relationship dynamics between you and the other, especially it relates to those who are most important to you. Feel into the body sensations and gestures that you engage in. Hear the words and the inner dialogue spoken. And finally awake to the pattern.