Algie and his device
Four or five years back, when I wrote that book about Life, I called the final section Creativity and Creation. It began thus:
What have you made lately – a model; a cake; a piece of furniture; dinner; a mess…? I’ll bet you’ve done quite a bit of creating over the last week or so. And how did you do it? You got some stuff; you changed it in some way – maybe shaping or cutting, heating or cooling; you probably mixed it with, or joined it to other stuff and carried on changing or modifying it until your creation was complete.
OK, so you might be protesting that all you did was take a ready-meal out of the freezer, pierce the film lid and put it in the microwave, but you still created a hot, steaming meal out of a frozen lump. You created something by changing stuff. Hold that idea. Hold it nice and tight.
I knew – at an intuitive, rather than an intellectual level – that creating ‘stuff’ was important. Not just important, but vital. I also knew that it didn’t actually matter what you were creating. It could be a painting or a compost heap, a symphony or an ad on eBay. It was the creative process that mattered.
Thimble sized machines
That idea came back to me a few weeks ago, when I was engaged in my latest hobby – creating miniature Steam Punk characters and their equipment from up-cycled dolls’ house dolls, wire, watch parts and the like.
Bella: 6 inches/15 cm tall
It takes ages. I completely lose myself in the process and come as close to absolute happiness and satisfaction as is possible when I hit technical problems and find ingenious ways to overcome them. There’s a kind of excitement bubbling up inside me as the transformations take place. Yet that’s been tempered by a mocking voice from my rational mind:
“Why waste so much time on something this pointless? What use are they? Shouldn’t I be putting my energy into something more ‘worthy’?”
Amelia – before and after
Lars
So the internal dialogue has been going. I can’t deny the rational thoughts. No one needs a 1/12 scale Steam Punk figure. Yet at some very deep level I have known that the process of creating them – battling with the limitations of the materials and my skills – is hugely important to me. I have felt the same as I did when renovating my dilapidated cottage – an initial mental image of how I want the finished product to look, a moment of doubt when I compared that idea to the reality of the items strewn around me, an intense fixation on the eventual result, an unshakeable belief that it would all work out perfectly and – finally – jubilation at having created the end product.
Henry: yes, they’re very small
It needed a mind and voice more finely tuned than my own to put the importance of ‘You the Creator’ into its true perspective. I found these words in The Afterdeath Journal of an American Philosopher:
It is the tension between the search for fulfilment or perfection and the actual performance possible in the physical world that promotes creative acts as they are understood. For true creativity always destroys limitations and increases the mental, spiritual, psychic or physical areas of expression open to man.
That’s it. It applies as much to the time warping experiments I’m engaged in with William to the little figures I’m building in my study. It applies to every creative process you are engaged in, too.
I think therefore I am; I create, therefore I am The Creator – and so are you.
“I hear Daisy has gone now,” I remarked to a friend.
It’s the third time recently that such an idea has been placed in my mind. The first was when I read a highly praised and undeniably well-researched and well-argued book called The Mind in the Cave. Its author, David Lewis-Williams, speaks eloquently and convincingly about the world view of our ancient ancestors – those who decorated caves and rocks with incredible images of animals, geometric shapes, figures who appear to be somewhere between animals and humans etc. It’s a great book, but for me, there is one huge issue I’ll be bold enough to disagree on. It’s what Professor Lewis-Williams terms ‘the brain/mind problem’. Here’s the way he resolves it (and, I’d suggest, the reason a book that deals mainly with ‘altered states’ has been so well received in scientific circles):
The second was a recent BBC documentary following three ageing British astronomers on a journey to recapture some of the finest moments of their younger days, when they had held eminent positions in observatories in the US, in the post Sputnik race-for-space of the mid-twentieth century. They were lovely guys and all had enjoyed happy and successful lives. Now, though, one was terminally ill and the others were in, shall we say, the late autumn of their lives. Unsurprisingly, as they trekked through the mountains, the discussion turned to death. One, despite his scientific training, clung to the Christian faith. He admitted he didn’t see much logic in it, but still felt comforted by the God he’d been brought up to believe in and the idea that there would be an afterlife. He mused, rather sadly though, that there probably wasn’t any need for astronomers in Heaven. His colleagues seemed to adhere more to Daisy’s view, and that, presumably, of Professor Lewis-Williams. When their bodies and brains died, so would their consciousness. That – obviously, in their minds – meant no further existence. As an 11-year-old I once taught commented, “I don’t think there’s anything after we die; it’s a bit sad really.”
It is a bit sad. Has humanity, throughout its entire existence, had to make an unpleasant choice between, a. trying hard to hold faith in a religion that often seems illogical and unlikely, or b. accepting that our brains are so great, they can almost have us believing, sometimes, that there is something beyond this existence, although they know that not to be true?
There was only one way in or out of my cottage when I bought it – the huge, ancient black wooden door that opens from the street into a shared hallway. At the end are separate doors leading to my home and the one adjoining it. A lane runs along the side of my back garden, but there was no access to it. I decided I’d feel safer if there was a second way out, just in case…
There are ways around these things. I asked a skilled craftsman friend to construct me a lockable gate that, from the outside, is completely indistinguishable from a fence panel, but which opens perfectly from the inside.
You see, I trust Jane Roberts. I’ve been to so many talks and workshops where channels stand at the front in long, wafty, pastel-coloured frocks and proclaim something like, ‘The Angel Ganneril is here with us in the room. He is pouring his pale mauve energy on to each of you. He is telling you to hold love in your hearts and to care for the animals. Feel the tingling down your spine as…’ and so forth.
We all have a conscious mind – what she calls a ‘house of awareness’. This ‘house’ has a front door, the one we open to the world for normal business and interaction, the one all messages are supposed to come to. But – she continues – there is a second door, ‘a secret back door from the time of our childhood’. This is a ‘magic’ entrance, one that opens to other worlds. Sometimes we can see it; sometimes it’s invisible. Jane speaks of the half-sensed messengers who sometimes call there and of the strange packages and papers left waiting there for us to find.
Looking at Life 