Читать книгу The Way of Nowhere: Eight Questions to Release Our Creative Potential - Nick Udall - Страница 43

This haunting (excuse the pun) image from the wisdom of the Tibetan people summarizes the aspect of ourselves that attempts to satisfy our longing for oneness in ways that are a pale reflection of the real thing. Like hungry ghosts we pour stuff down our throats, sometimes literally and sometimes metaphorically, but the part of ourselves that yearns for beauty and the experience of unity and communion starves and shrivels.

Our response is often to indulge in more of the very behaviour that fails to meet our inner need. We look outside ourselves for solutions that only reside within. When these fail to work we tend to do more of them in the vain belief that more will give us the oneness we crave for – more sex, more drugs, more beer, more shopping, more of whatever it is that constitutes our particular addiction.

These addictions can also be psychological – addictions to ways of thinking and being. We then tend to look at life through the eyes of our prejudice and use our perceptions to gather data to support this prejudice.

This distortion is a nasty and dangerous piece of work because it is a thief of time and beauty. Our addictions, be they psychological, physical or intellectual, tend to deprive us of the psychic energy needed to attain and maintain the frequencies needed for presence. They make us unable to still ourselves and stop the monkey chatter of our minds. We lack the energy to be really moved by beauty. And we fail to connect with others. Our most fundamental addiction tends to be to our own ego, that part of ourselves that wishes to remain separate.

The tragedy is that this state of separateness then becomes the norm. An enormous amount of the energy of industrial and post-industrial society goes into the hopeless task of feeding the hungry ghosts. How much has climate change been generated by activities that are related to feeding our hungry ghosts?

Our intuitive capabilities are subtle and are vulnerable to the manic pace of the rational world. Yet the more technology advances, the more we become surrounded by the incessant babble of radios, televisions, phones, computers and so on. Even if we are so daring and eccentric as to seek a moment's silence, we then face the inner babble and struggle to find the ‘off’ switch.

In order to access the creative potential of the present moment, we must learn to slow down, to turn off the chatter, access the stillness within and then move with the rational and the intuitive in balance.

If we can restore this balance, we can once more find the magic that is always in the present moment.