Читать книгу The Way of Nowhere: Eight Questions to Release Our Creative Potential - Nick Udall - Страница 12

inspiring-innovation: a personal practice

We can learn to live and work at a higher order of consciousness. This higher order of thinking, learning and creating is necessary if we are to transcend our limitations, embrace our whole selves and contribute to the myriad of systems of which we are intimately woven.

For each of us to make our unique contribution to humanity and to our world, we must first discover our gifts and then find a means of skilfully returning them. Discovering and harnessing our uniqueness lies at the heart of playing a creative role in society. It is how we get to know ourselves and brings a deep sense of belonging, loyalty and pride.

As soon as we awaken to the possibility of our own uniqueness, we are faced with the question: How can I release my creative potential through the work that I do and the life that I lead…?

When I began to engage with this question, one of the first insights that I had was that it was not going to be either easy or fun if I tried to do it alone.

As in any partnership, Nick and I have many similarities and many differences. We are both committed to this question and to expressing our creativity through what we do. We have both dedicated our lives to experimenting with different practices, both ancient and modern, that may help us to achieve this more fully.

We are also very different. Nick is almost a generation younger and works much more quickly than I do. I tend to champion the purity of the practices and the wisdom traditions they come from; he wants to play irreverently with whatever works.

These differences manifest as creative and emotional tensions in our relationship. People are sometimes surprised at how we bicker, argue and disagree. They find it uncomfortable, as sometimes do we! But we always stay with it. There is always an unquestioning underlying trust and respect that enables us to eventually break through into new insights and innovations.

The book you now hold in your hands is one expression of this relationship. You can trace the breakthrough questions and the overall structure back to Zen influences – Nick's primary background. The medicine wheel, the allies and distortions come from Earth Wisdom, which has been a larger part of my own development and training.

This living practice has brought meaning and challenge into our lives. It heightens our awareness of those things that expand our creative potential while contracting those things that diminish it.

Please remember that if there are any bits in this book you really don't like, they probably came from the other Nick because he works more quickly!

co-creation

The Way of nowhere is based upon the philosophy of co-creation.

Co-creation is the creative interplay or interconnectedness of all things. It is also the name we give to the process of releasing the creative potential that exists within and between all things.

One of the core teachings at the heart of the Way of nowhere is what we call the Diamond of Consciousness. It was given to us by one of our most influential teachers at a critical point in the development of nowhere.⁶ He said it had come to him in a dream and that he had a strong intuitive sense that we should integrate it into our work.

 The North of the diamond represents our everyday consciousness. Whilst constituting a relatively small part of who and what we are, this aspect of ourselves takes up a hugely disproportionate amount of our awareness.

 The South represents our subconscious, our emotional Self, which is also a very small but extremely influential part of who we are, as it drives our needs and desires.

 The West represents the largest percentage of who and what we are. It reminds us that we are forever and always from the Field,⁷ part of an interconnected whole.

the diamond of consciousness

 And lastly, the East represents that very small and under-developed aspect of ourselves which we have called creative-consciousness. This is our ability to be present and at one with the Field, with our wholeness, and the interconnectedness of all things. Our teacher went on to outline how this capacity had diminished in modern society and how vital it was that we increased our ability to access it to face the challenges and opportunities ahead.

Our teacher also described how the developmental and personal growth work that many people are undertaking today, particularly in West, contributed greatly to cleaning the North and South axis of the diamond. He explained that the cleaning of this space was a prerequisite for tapping into the power and insights that flowed along the West–East axis of the diamond.

When our teacher passed this to us, we instantly recognized that the diamond gave us a new and useful way of looking at what we were doing and an insight into what we should focus on going forward. Thus a vital difference between the Way of nowhere and other developmental approaches is that while we both recognize and work with processes to expand our conscious and subconscious, we do so in the interest of awakening our creative-consciousness – our co-creative Self.

Creative-consciousness is our innate ability to gain inspirational insights from the whole. Such insights often have an ‘Of course, why didn't I think of that before?’ quality about them, yet they have the potential to bring innovation to the world. They also enable us to move towards being the inspiration and innovation we want to see and be.

This book introduces what we call the art and practice of inspiring-innovation (i-i). The art is how to apply the virtuous circle of inspiration and innovation to families, communities, organizations and any other form of social system. The practice is how to apply this virtuous circle to the only social system which we can control: ourselves. We refer to it as a ‘practice’ because we literally have to practise it, like yoga or running. We have to internalize it and embody it. The more we do so, the more profound its effects will be, just as a professional marathon runner develops more blood vessels than a sedentary person or a highly experienced meditator's brain structure differs subtly from that of a non-meditator.⁸

This book has been designed to trigger this virtuous circle of inspiration and innovation within us, thus significantly increasing our ability to access breakthrough insights. It then supports us in finding ways to turn those insights into innovative form, one continually fuelling the other in constant motion and exchange.

6 A gift from RainbowHawk, one of Ehama's grandparents and keepers.

7 For an excellent explanation of this vital concept, see Lynne McTaggart, The Field, HarperCollins, 2001.

8 Inspired by a lecture by Andrew Newberg, Fred Travis and Antoine Lutz entitled ‘Neural correlates of meditative experience’, presented at ‘Towards a Science of Consciousness’ conference in Tucson, Arizona, 8–12 April 2002.