Truth And Creativity
We must use our lives to make the world a better place to live, not just acquire things. That is what we are put on earth for.
— Dolores Huerta
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People are being absolutely starved for authenticity, and in the meantime they’re offered an endless selection of German automobiles and hair-care products and ice cream flavors and witless entertainment, and none of it satisfies because what people really feel deprived of is an authentic sense of their own being and their own importance in the natural scheme of things. Culture cannot respond to that unless it makes a place for the transcendence of itself.
– Terence McKenna
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All true artists, whether they know it or not, create from a place of no-mind, from inner stillness.
— Eckhart Tolle
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All human beings are descendants of tribal people who were spiritually alive, intimately in love with the natural world, children of Mother Earth. When we were tribal people, we knew who we were, we knew where we were, and we knew our purpose. This sacred perception of reality remains alive and well in our genetic memory. We carry it inside of us, usually in a dusty box in the mind’s attic, but it is accessible.
— John Trudell
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Boredom is a symptom of life being dammed up, that one does not know how to get what one has within oneself into reality.
— Marie-Louise von Franz
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Cultivating a state of ‘no-mind’ makes it impossible to get bored. We’ve created a bored populace by supplying a continual flow of distractions. The mind that sees without distortion is a meditative mind, not one crammed with cultural artifacts. Chasing the million-and-one things is how we lose touch with our authentic self.
The inauthentic life is fundamentally boring because our real being is blocked from expression. Good therapy would be getting as much truth and creativity into your life as you possibly can. We’re dying from all the falseness in our way of life. We’re also dying from a culture-wide creative deficit. It’s quite a feat to grow up in our society and remain creative. The material rewards are skimpy at best.
Something about our way of living gives us the impression that we’re too small to make a difference. Our authentic self knows we’re connected to and responsible for the living world and everything in it, but the inauthentic self just wants to look good and be well entertained. That is the self our educational system fosters.
And it has to be said, happiness and peace don’t come that way.
The meditative mind, as any artist knows, is healing. Seeing reality is therapeutic, creating something beautiful or meaningful is balm for the soul. Anyone whose authenticity is damned up is restless and continually wanting to fill an emptiness that never goes away. Facing and experiencing that emptiness and the fears behind it would forge a path out of it, but running from it just feeds it.
Our society is not interested in confronting our strange sense of missing or losing something. Do we ever have enough? Have our possessions ever given us the meaning we seek, or do they just make us worry about losing them?
I think losing your authentic self under a load of anxieties is how we lose touch with ourselves and with any creativity we might have. Any practice that leads us to no-mind, even just momentarily, clears away the clouds of cultural confusion that fall over us by living in our peculiar way.
Our society cultivates a noisy mind, but we can resist those energies by simply watching the energy flows without interfering. We can’t be untouched but we can defuse those influences by paying simple attention instead of covering them with diversions.
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Volume four of my series Meditations on Living is now published on Amazon. If you read it, please leave a review.
Here’s one:
Insightful and eloquent musings on the human condition
A regular contributor on Medium, David Price’s articles caught my attention a couple of years ago. Combined with stunning artwork — some of which is his own — and often wonderful quotes from celebrated sources, his daily submissions became a fixture with my morning coffee. He combines an almost poetic prose with razor-sharp insights into the state of humanity and the world we’ve created. Time and again I’ve been thoroughly impressed by his views of the state of things, both the good and the bad, views that will often follow me around all day. This book is a collection of a number of his articles, and I highly recommend it.
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It will look like this:
