The Blackwinged Night

I was attracted by the cover of a book. The background is all black. Its upper two thirds are occupied by a gray circle described by a band of about half an inch and whose left side slides down the left margin and continues on to the binding side of the book. Inside the gray circle and at its bottom there is a sanded concrete pedestal. Above the hexgonal pedestal, there are two figures in burnished bronze. One of them rests on the pedestal in the form of a W but in such a way that it looks like the stylized form of a woman lying on her back with her head straining towards its opposite, a figure on top in the form of a C with the top of the C curve also straining towards the upturned "head" of the female form below and with its short left stylized truncated "arm" also reaching towards the female. But the lower parts of the two truncated torsos, both at an incline of about 60 degrees from the verticle are not joined. They are each cut or "sealed" off by a "slab" at their waist level. They strive to be but are not joined. Across the lower part of the circle and cutting right across it are three white lines against two gray bands but with two vertical lines at the one-third and one sixth positions thus producing the impression that the rectangles may be "bricks" piled one on top of another. Within the top left rectangle the name of the book appears "The Blackwinged Night" in orange against the gray and in the bottom right, its subtitle in navy blue "Creativity in Nature and Mind". Below the two gray bands of the title of the book is the name of its author F David Peat enclosed within a smaller circle which interects with the lower part of the big cirlce enclosing "the man and woman in love making" figures above. A very good complex design which nicely projects a contemporary feel, a blending of science and art, the yang and the yin, approaching but not fusing with each other. The book was published in 2000 by Helix Books of Perseus Publishing.

I looked at the back cover giving hints of what the book is all about: "What does the creation of matter in the universe have to do with humanity's creative spirit? What is the connection between..art, literature, and music, and ..mathematical formulae and scientific theories?...explores the profound similarities and connections between the universe's "creativity", which reveals itself in the laws of nature, and the creativity of human consciousness...the way it animates the physical world, giving us the power to experience beauty--whether gazing into the night sky, listening to Bach's B-minor Mass or creating ourselves something extraordinary and new".  I opened the book. It has seven chapters: Introduction, The Living Universe, The Big Bang, Silence and the Void, Language, All About Time, Creativity and the Body, Conclusions, 232 pages including Index at the end of the book. The book is recommended by Athony Storr, author of the Dynamics of Creation, Churchchill's Black Dog and Music of the Mind and Suzi Gablik, author of The Reenchantment of Art and Conversations before the End of Time. David  Peat himself is a popular science writer having authored Infinite Potential: the Life and Times of David Bohm; Superstrings: the Search for the Theory of Everything and with John Briggs, Turbulent Mirror: an Illustrated Guide to Chaos Theory and the Science of Wholeness.

I turned to the chapter on Conclusions. Here's what I found: Although our bodies are constantly renewing themselves and we admire creativity in others and we want to be creative ourselves, we sometimes feel dull and uncreative and trapped and boxed in by a boring job or tied to a meaningless routine. This is evidence, not that we are not creative. On the contrary, it is evidence that we are! "Our natural state is to be creative but...this creativity is not being fully engaged or challenged.". People romanticize about the countryside only when they have abandoned it for the city. Man only wants what he does not have! "It is only those of us caught up in all the mechanism of the industrialized world who have become obsessed with "being creative'--something that we are going to be anyway, if we could only stop worrying about it and get on with the business of living.". As I am never tired of repeating, our brains are evolutionarily built to ignore what is routine, what is regular, what repeats itself through the effect of "habituation": we "see" and we "feel" only what is "new" in our environement or simply what is "different". We are never going to be "satisfied" once we settle down to a new environment. Does that not explain our constant need for new "gadgets", for "fashion", for "spectacles" for new "sensations" and even for "news".

Peats examines traditional societies like the North American Indians. They function through small groups. At night, they would gather around a bonfire. They pass the pipe. Whoever has the pipe is expected to talk: he may sing a song, tell a joke, say a prayer, relate a story, raise a question etc. In thus speaking, he is speaking not just for himself, he speaks as a member of the tribe. The elder may tell a story to give a new angle on some of the questions posed and suggest new ways of dealing with recurring problems. Every one participates. There is an exchange of views and a constant flow of information. It is creative. Everyone has a part in such creativity. This may be what is lacking in our contemporary world: we are divided, separated, segregated, compartmentalized, isolated. There is no longer that creative flow of information of traditional tribal societies. I may ask further: what is this bloggers' world if not an expression of our common desire to reach out, to communicate, to generate an interactive flow of information and feelings between individuals in a huge metropolis each otherwise isolated in his own bedroom or study or office or office desk, a concrete expression of our desire to seek to build something, something bigger than our individual constricted, restricted, repressed, even suppressed "selves", a desire to "create" something collectively: a community for the free flow of information and of feelings, of interchange, of creative communication? In doing so, we no longer feel that we are "merely" a part of an economic machine. We do not feel fixed, forever, into a designated social or economic role, as a worker, a manager, a professional in a job, a father, a mother, a son, a daughter, in our family and our group of friends. We feel more creative. We feel freer. We feel freer to create a new self, a different self.

To Peat, traditional societies meet their practical challenges through small groups which forms "spontaneously" to carry out specific tasks eg. hunting, food gathering, clearing land, herding animals, fishing, building a boat, moving a village, making a long voyage, organizing a special ceremonies like initiation, marriage, funeral, worship of particular Natural or tribal deities etc. When the task is finished, they dissolve back into society in a natural way. To Peat such society is analogous to what chaos theorists call "self-organizing systems"., which are open to the environment, not closed off or shielded, localized in space and time. "Such systems can be quite stable and may be able to preseve their internal dynamics and even repair themselves. But this rule applies only as long as they remain open to their surroundings. Once the flow of energy, through matter or information ceases, the system dies away," says Peat. Although their social organization is hierarchical, it is not as rigid as in a modern hierarchy. "It is not so much a case of leaders imposing their authority upon others; rather, their authority derives from the group itself. When the task is finished, that sanction for authority is withdrawn, the group dissolves and the leader goes back to being an ordinary member of his or her society...Whilst the group is operating, each member has the obligation to work in harmony with the others and to use his own special skill for the good of the entire group." In constrast, our social and economic organizations for meeting market demands, offering a commerically required service, for fulfilling certain governmental functions, though similarly hierarchical, are mechanically and rigidly so, with a more or less permanently fixed internal pyramidal power structure. Often the origin of power resides outside of them e.g. in the shareholders or board of directors. Authority is extraneous to the group! The end result of all this is that most people are not fully challenged, fully engaged. They do not share a common pool of meaning. There is little communication as equal partners,only demands and commands, from top to bottom. We feel that we are seldom called upon to contribute to what we do best. We watch the clock and cannot wait for that moment when we can leave work and put all our creative energies into family, friends or hobbies.

Peat thinks that though we have energies, we may not always use them properly. That may be due to fear of the future because of what we went through in the past. We may be stopped by memories of traumatic events. We are reluctant to engage in risky adventures. We resist movement. We block changes. We divert our energies intead towards  preseving the exsting fixed structures. We act against the natural processes of growth and transformation. "To overcome this dilemma, we must become reconnected and engaged..and regain our place in the natural flow of things...and free our natural energy for more creative work".

Although we seek novelty all the time, we also seek repetition if the phenomena or experience is complex like listening to an opera, a symphony, a long poem, a novel. Each time, we discover something new in it, some aspects of it which we may have overlooked in the past: we make new associations between its different motifs, its different levels. This applies not only to reading and listening to music. It also applies to friendship: old contacts must be taken up in letters, emails, face books, Christmas and birthday cards, phone calls, reunions etc. The German artist Joseph Beuys argues that "every one is an artist". Art is not confined to the studios and worshops. Each one can engage in 'social sculpture" in social gestures within the "real" world.

But Peats warns us that there are far too many people out there working on the big world problems whose personal lives are in shambles: they don't get along with members of their own families, their spouses, their girl/boy friends, their children, their friends and colleagues.To him, it may be far better if they were to devote a little of their creative energies to solving the problems within his own personal lives and look inward instead of outward to establish the kind of harmony they claim they are working towards. "Being creative means giving great attention to one's whole being, to what one does and how one does it.", says Peat. We should strive to make a sculpture our own lives, shape it, structure it and give it a beauty which it would not otherwise have in accordance with the principle of openness to chance and randomness! That is the greatest kind of creativity we can engage in! We should see chance and randomness not as our enemy but as our opportunity and our challenge and make creative use of it.   Our actions can ripple through society in totally unpredictable ways. A chance remark by a teacher may spark a lifelong interest in a student who is primed for that at that moment. When we are in harmony with the dynamics and behavior of the whole system, when we resonate with it and feel it in our bones, we may act in ways whose effect may be much better than we think. But we may do so only if we remain authentic to ourselves and be sensitive to our environemnt and we act out of kindness and love. As Pasteur said, creative chance only happens to the prepared mind.

To be creative, Peats thinks that sometimes we need to suspend all actions.  When the source of action is in some way distorted, we may end up making things worse. He suggests that "we should remain just at the edge of an action, sensing it within the body or within the organization...a little like holding a tuning fork near an instrument: when the intrument is properly tuned, the fork will begin to vibrate in sympathy."  Creative suspenion may take days, hours, or a mere fraction of a second. What matters is acting at the right moment. This advice sounds remarkably Taoist to my ears. Has he read Laotzu?

What are his final conclusions? He says: "creativity is ubiquitous and entirely natural. It may begin outside the light of conscious awareness until it is ready to manifest itself in one of a variety of ways. For such reasons, creativity cannot be legislated or planned. It cannot be commanded to appear. Neither can it be taught. Musicians, painters, scientists, actors, chefs and others can be taught various skills and must serve long apprenticeships before being able to practice their crafts. But none of this is teaching creativity." To be creative, we need to ask questions. Sometimes, by ourselves but often by engaging in open and frank discussions with others, when we should forget about our own "self-respect" , our "ego" and the need to "protect" and "defend" it. Questions, questions and more questions. But in a calm, serene and secluded environment. He says, "Don't try to do anything or to impose any order on what you see. Just sit and discover what the environment wants you to see....Simply be yourself. Don't impose some sort of life plan or concept about yourself. Don't judge yourself. Don't fantasize about what you could be. Simply be with yourself, just as you engaged that painting for longer and longer periods of time. There is no goal to such an exercise. It's not about self-improvment or accumulation of knowledge and wisdom. It is simply an act of engagement with one aspect of the world that should be most familiar to you--your self". Has he read Buddha or Krishnamurti?

But Peat is not a Buddhist. He says, "In the end, approaches like this one are no more than simple techniques to get us to think, give attention to the world around us, and of things in different ways. They are not creativity itself. they are simply means designed to remove some of the blocks to creativity's free flow. Creativity is ever present. It streams through the firmanent. It envelops and nurtures each moment of time, and, if we will but allow it to enter, it will flow through lives and embrace us".  But from every gifts, there may be a corresponding obligation. "Gifts should be exchanged....we must take that creativity that is offered to us, in whatever form it comes, and try to use it wisely. We must use it with kindness, compassion, and engagement. In this way, its fruits will grow and multiply and so we can return them to society, nature, and the cosmos. The rest is up to us, for with intelligence and love, we too can move the world by that millionth of an inch.". Peat turns "religious". If we push anything to its limits, everything must ultimately be religious! How can it be otherwise? The ultimate is religion's homeground!