Power, Meaning, Beauty, Relationship — the creative process
The meaning goes to infinite depths. As Emerson wrote and quantum physicists discovered, ‘that deep force, the last fact behind which analysis cannot go’ expresses throughout the undimensional and the dimensional world alike. The forces of the creator are found within ourselves, and are alive everywhere within the natural world also. In fact the only place in the whole of the phenomenal world where meaning is absent or severely impaired may turn out to be in the actions and products of the malfunctioning human consciousness when it has fallen for the serpents’ — the skewed identity’s — shoddy deal.
We experience these forces in the way our thoughts and perceptions continually evolve and expand our understanding and ourselves. Moreover, our access to ‘the meaning that goes to infinite depths’ is the basis of our creativity. The reason we can, potentially anyway, ‘constantly see afresh’ is because we draw on the moving flow out of the undimensional, as opposed to becoming stuck on already existing forms, which are always primarily thought-forms: our beliefs, attitudes, routines and habits. In other words, our sense of identity is key to how and whether we create, we have to have the identity of a ‘creator’.
The connection between our identity as a creator and the way we create is further explored in some intriguing and intricate symbolism from the Jewish mystery writings known as the Kabbalah. One of the Hebrew names of god is YHWH. Only the consonants are written, as the vowels are considered too sacred because they express the spirit of god. These four consonants are interpreted in the ‘Zohar’ , a group of books considered foundational to the Kabbalah, as an abbreviated symbol of the ‘family’ of god, namely father, mother, son, daughter. Each consonant represents a family member. And these four family members have four qualities attributed to them: wisdom, for the father, understanding for the mother, beauty for the son and kingship for the daughter. These were the characteristics the author/s felt best described the nature of the deity at that time (which is not clear, it could be around the 12th century, or much earlier in the 2nd century). The notion that god can be described both as a nuclear family and as a series of qualities indicates that these are ‘forces of the creator’ that can be known in human experience. Moreover, the idea of god as a family also means that these four qualities are interrelated: one gives rise or is linked to the others.
Based on what I have been exploring so far about consciousness, I would list these qualities slightly differently and say that they are more accurately expressed today as power, meaning, beauty and relationship. The unfoldment or experience of each of these qualities cannot be separated out from the others. Power is the energy of the flow moving through and out of the endless inner orders of the transcendent or implicate realm. The manifest realm gives meaning, clothing to the movement out of the transcendent. Some of this vastness becomes explicate. Beauty is the outcropping of this relatedness; it is the evidence of power being expressed, embodied in a meaningful way. Think of a great dancer, some one who takes your breath away. Relationship is how the meaning is harvested, it is the experienced connection of the power being expressed. The sense of fulfilment, coherence that feeds back into the implicate to build deeper meaning, and so on.
If we lay out the correspondences here we begin to see that the name of god, which is also the family of god, and the four forces that characterize god, areaspects of our own consciousness:
Y H W H
father mother son daughter
power meaning beauty relationship
(wisdom) (understanding) (beauty) (kingship)
transcendent manifest mind heart
implicate explicate thought/intellect emotion/intuition
The implication of this symbolism is that our consciousness ‘spells’ the name of god. Mind and heart correspond with son and daughter, and with beauty and relationship. Father corresponds with the power of our deeper identity arising out of the transcendent, implicate realm; and mother with the meaning we elicit in the manifest, explicate realm. Together they express the ‘forces that are the creator’:
Our consciousness ‘spells’ the name of the creator, and when these ‘forcesthat are the creator’ are working in their full circuitry, we produce forms — ideas, buildings, sculptures, paintings, movies, poems, cars, computers, town plans — that give evidence of those qualities.
When I walk around the massive standing stones of the neolithic circles, or gaze up at the vaulted ceilings of the great cathedrals I am being impacted by their sheer beauty, by the harmony and interplay of architectural feature, proportion, perspective and the way light interacts with all these qualities of space as it shafts in through the multi-faceted stained glass windows. Or by the way the stones focus and interact with the wider tilt of the surrounding landscape, how they express something meaningful about their relationship to that wider space. In other words, I experience the power, meaning, beauty and relationship of these places as they are constellated in themselves and as they stir those same elements in myself. The four qualities of the name of god are always evoked when what has been created has emerged out of the interplay of the circuitry of consciousness.
In other words, beauty, meaning, power, relationship are woven into our consciousness, (as well of course our bodies which are themselves expressions of an order and complexity that is beautiful, especially when we take care of them). So when we come across places and works of art that have arisen out of the interaction of this ‘family’ we recognize it. The place or the sculpture resonates with us. And we feel it like a ‘spell’, like a kind of magic, what Christopher Alexander called: “that interior element .. which makes one feel related to it.” It summons up more than the sum of its parts, summons in fact a quality of wholeness and upliftment that expands the sense of who we are and what is possible.
The soaring archways and stained glass windows of Chartres Cathedral, or the tumbled honey gold villages of the Cotswolds could not be more different than the massive concrete grids of the Co-Op City tower blocks which rear up in cliff-like walls behind the inter-state crash barriers of the north Bronx. When I first saw these apartment megaliths, I felt dread mixed with disbelief. They are hard to describe because they are so ‘unvisual’ in the sense that, like a lot of places in the US, they lack any design aesthetic. Clustered in random groupings, 35 or more in all, they are hundreds of stories high, several city blocks wide and encircled by chain link fencing. Down on the ground, at their further edges, sprawl the bleached concrete bunkers of malls and retail shacks offering pizza, subs and auto-service. Visually, spatially, everythingly, these places are utterly without features that have meaning. Their bulk is in relationship to nothing else; they are ugly in every sense the word can give to us: burnt out shades of beige, brick and grey, small windows stencilled across them; no one can walk to or from them, you can only drive through the feeder roads on to the highway intersections. And anyway, even if you could walk, there is nowhere to go. The only way to get to anywhere is to drive, a long way away. No one can measure themselves in relation to them because they are without proportion. Forget the golden mean, or Da Vinci’s circle of man, these places were not built with humans in mind, only integers, statistics. They are vertical shanty towns. We say places like this lack humanity, but they also lack interiority: the subtle qualities of the name of god, which are the components that go to make places human.
When an environment has been built out of the lack of meaning, ways to bring meaning are more difficult to find. But it is still possible. One powerful way to bring meaning is to make one of these apartments a home. Filling it with the elements of relationship and beauty and energy and meaning of home. And, if there are people who form a community, a neighbourhood within and between the buildings, that also adds further meaning, and builds a different possibility. Even in the most difficult or barren of circumstances, we can hatch dreams of a better life. This may take something that inspires us, even just a fancy car, or knowing some one who believes in us, but meaning can always be generated from within anyone. To begin with course, the meaning appears to lie in being able to make more money, which can buy better places to live, expensive cars and so on. And of course, this is true. Yet clearly, meaning is not only a question of money. I have passed through and occasionally walked through many affluent leafy suburban neighbourhoods, places like Simsbury, Connecticut, that seem to me as desolate in their own way as the Co Op city towers, or the high and low rises of project buildings. These are suburbs where the houses are just far enough away from one another to feel disconnected, but still too close to be ‘real’ woodland; where if you walk around, you meet no one, where instead people pass by in bulky sports utility vehicles with tinted windows, so you can’t see them (they can spy on you though). However, there is nowhere to walk to, no corner shop, no pub or cafe. The towns have no centers for people to meet and be in relationship. Relationship is meaning, meaning is relationship, is community, is aliveness. Instead of town centers, there are strip malls anchored by the giant chain stores or vast covered mega-malls, interspersed with the cloned shack-like buildings of the fast-food franchises, their forests of turning neon signs lined up interminably on either side of two or four lane road ways. And of course you can’t walk here either. Each separate mall or fast-food shack has its own entrance, so to get anywhere you have to drive, turning in to endless traffic, or waiting at innumerable lights.
You cannot walk anywhere, yet there is no public transport. So people don’t meet on buses or trains either. Everyone is in their own separate little car bubble, which is why if you do see anyone in those uneasy neighbourhoods, they will say, like automotons, ‘Hi, how are you’ and rush past with their eyes averted.
This makes the vibe not that different to the depths of the ‘hood’. And in fact, as I’ve already mentioned, poorer neighbourhoods can be richer in terms of community than wealthy ones if there is a sense of relationship and home alive within them.
The houses themselves, depending on which income scale they reflect, vary of course, some have elements of design, but many are differing scales of ‘MacMansions’, with yards of fake window dividers, disproportionately large arched windows featuring gaudy chandeliers, burnt out lawns, over-watered by sprinklers (so the grass has not grown deep roots), shiny white plastic fencing. It looks like it’s a neighbourhood, but it isn’t. It looks like a white painted fence, but it isn’t. It looks real, but it’s fake. This habit of substituting the fake for the real, or a symbol for the act itself — hanging out a flag with a Hallmark pastel of pansies in the spring instead of gardening — is symptomatic of a depleted sense of meaning within American culture. We want the immediate ‘fruits’ without engaging in the creative process that would yield them. Fast-food, plastic fences, neighbourhoods where you don’t actually have to be neighbours. Isolation — which is the extreme form of the absence of relationship — is one of the results. Isolation, and a sense of meaninglessness. This is where depression begins. This is where alienation begins, when a young man buys a gun — or a semi-automatic machine gun, as the laws allow him to — and shoots his classmates. He is giving expression to the desolation of meaninglessness.
And this is where consuming ‘more’ can become a substitute for participating in the creative process. Bigger cars, houses, flat screen tvs accumulating around us as products of impaired meaning. 350 channels with nothing on them. And when a good movie is shown, it’s interrupted every 10 minutes with five minutes of ads. For the most part though, many of the movies and dramas are so removed from what is authentic in human experience, that they are probably only valuable as window dressing for commercials anyway.
