The Power of Play

by morton_h, the blogger

There are basically two ways to overcome or prevent stagnation in this world. Be it in business, in politics, in the social structures, in your mind, in your spirit or in your body.

One way to understand it, is by applying the Hatha Yoga attitude of overcoming pain. This is the practice of molding and shaping your entire being by working on/with your body. Knowing of course, that the body is the access to your mind and spirit.

Since this is NOT a blogpost about Yoga, consider this as an example.

Anyone who has practiced the classic series of Hatha Yoga excercises will know, that there eventually will be a moment of pain where a part of the body reaches its boundary of stagnation, and the response of the body is pain, meaning you are onto something. Since the human psyche is geared to avoid pain, the normal response is to go any other way. Your body remembers and withholds pain and your brain and spinal chord fights or flees any pain.

The Yoga practitioner thinks otherwise and un-chooses beforehand the mental-physical escape route. The pain is where you should linger in order to overcome pain and the courses of pain. But how to linger, that is the question?

1. The first method is to go into the pain, identify the exact location, intensity and quality of the pain, accept the pain while confronting it. A strange thing will happen: the pain will start to move its position, its intensity and its quality. The pain is on retreat, and eventually it may even dissolve. You have broken the stagnation.
   
   
2. The second method is by breathing and removing the awareness of pain into a sort of pre-release of the pain. You are already beyond pain while still in pain. The breathing is a kind of meditation in motion transcending both pain and physical limitation.
   
   NB! The second method is NEVER a denial of the pain. This is where the New Age deception comes in. New-Agers deny pain and darkness. New Age is the late-20'th century escapism picking up those who fell out of Christianity.

The Daoists would call the two methods the yang way and the yin way. The masculine and the feminine way (not the male-female way). The way of the warrior and the way of the monk. The methods are not, what some may believe, opposite and contradictory. They are complementary. The warrior and the monk may very well be contained within the same person.

So

You can either focus on the obstacles or the beyond-obstacles. You can either reveal and release the pain held in darkness, or you can invoke the light hidden from the too-much-darkness.

Problem

• If those, who investigate the darkness are in denial of the light and have fallen in love with the darkness to the extend, that they can no longer act but hold themselves in a state of analytical paralysis, which is one kind of imbalance.
• If those, who invoke and promote the light are in denial of the darkness, and have fallen in love with the light to the extend, that they can no longer think clearly, but hold themselves in a state of wannabe bliss, which is another kind of imbalance.

We need to avoid the yin-trap and the yang-trap.

We need to maintain our ability to feel, think and act.
We need to learn about the Dao.

There are plenty of well meaning people, thinking and highly skilled analytical people with great concerns for the World of Dystopia caught in translation, tending to fall in almost-love with this World of Dystopia or even their own pain, but unable to act.

There are also plenty of well meaning people, emotional people with great empathy and longings for a World of Release tending to fall in almost-love with an ideological illusion, caught in a World of make-beliefs and self-projections.

In a conversation, these people will most likely try very hard to convince the other, that they have the right attitude and view of any given subject or problem and that the others are wrong.

How to Avoid It

Make sure to test your analyzes within action. The yin needs the yang, since stagnated analyzes is too much yin

Make sure to test your make-beliefs by going back to grammar of thinking (what, where, who and when), since stagnated emotional beliefs and ideology is too much yang.

The yin should be liberated, envigorated and balanced (the Dao) by the presence of yang and vice versa. Some of the stagnation or conflicts we see among people is due to the missing envigoration. An example is the relationships between male and female after the more than half a centure old implantation of Feminism in Western culture, that made it almost impossible for a lot of men and woman to have fruitful and stable relationships - and for children to benefit from that. You see broken marriages, broken families, conflicts, disrespect and destruction of natural polarity and complemtarity all over the Western world, spreading to the East and the South since Western Imperialism and predatory Capitalism has exported the cultural imbalances.

Much of the imbalance and distorsion is, as many have realized, here by design and purpose, as was Feminism. As was any ideology. Certain destructive forces with great power and ill intent have used and almost perfected imbalance as a means of self-empowerment on behalf of other. But since that long and winding road is not the subject today - the subject is examining possible ways to regain balance and dissolve distorsion - and since we are looking at just one field of distorsion, the actual recognition and thorough analyzis of the source and course of distorsion is one way. Or should we say: one important component of any way.

What Fenimism was all about

We May Ask

1. Should we concentrate on the recognition of the present distorsion forming the future - and maybe as a side kick trace back, what came before?
2. Should we even forget of what came before, because only present and future matters?
3. Should we forget about the present and know everything about what came before to ever be able to trace forward from the past and thereby recognize the present and the future?

The answer is - of course - that it is highly complementary. May we be reminded of the Orwellian frase (here refrased):
Manipulation of history is a way to control the future by the present.

Meaning
If people are highly confused about their origins, their past, their history, their culture, their traditions, their people, their nation, their gender, their race, all that came before, all primordial - and being confused is a present matter - they will never be able to influence their future.

Meaning then:
If some minority would want to confuse the majority, they would need to steal the history of the majority, their past, their-all-that-came-before and replace it with something else, a construct, a perversion.

NEVER UNDER ESTIMATE THE POWER OF NEITHER FALSE NOR TRUE HISTORY!

This is why, I would not recommend any of the statement above: forget about the past, forget about the present. If you want to forget about the future, be my guest. It will arive anyway. But if you want to forget about your past and your present, you and we will have a problem.

A Fourth Statement

• We need to know enough about our past, knowing that knowledge will evolve and unfold as we recognize the consequenses of past into present.
• We need to look at the present with the optics of 'presented' past, the consequenses of past arrived at the present. We are a product of decisions made by our forefathers - and those who pulled their legs.
• We need to visualize a future based on actual dreams of a future, not based on pro-grosis, machine statistics, grand-scale planners or fictive escatological / apocalyptical scenarios. 

THEN WE NEED TO BE FULLY PRESENT.

We Need

• People that are dedicated and therefore becoming skilled at trawling through the Labyrinth of History with all its falsifications, 'noble' lies, omissions, re-arrangements, re-makes and what-not's.
  Looking back.
• People that are dedicated and therefore becoming skilled at spotting and describing the imbalances of our time.
  Looking into.
• People that are dedicated and therefore becoming skilled at visualizing and realizing.
  Looking forward.
• We need thinkers and developers and people willing and able to act while thinking.
• We need visionaries and true dreamers (not escapists).
• We need the passionate and the couragious.
• And: We need to play!

What we do not need is infighting among those, who are qualified in either of those directions. We need conversations. We may disagree, we may be at different stages of knowledge, we may have chosen different angles or fields of mental expansion and developement. We do not need to have others shut up. Which is what the socalled thinking segment of mainly Liberal academics with their political correctivism spend all their energy on.

The Power of Play

Did I say: We need to play? Did I say why?

Maybe go back to former blogpost Imagine and Play. But I will further suggest, that Play is the flow of Nature, the Universe. By playing we overcome stagnation and by playing imballance with dissolve itself. The Play is the Dao, the Dao is The Play.

Someone asked me: But how to play, if I forgot it?

No you didn't, is my first answer. You are always playing, when you forget not to play. Didn't you play with your children? Don't you enjoy helping them to maintain their ability to learn by play? And I hope you play, when you have sex and don't regard it as a routine, a duty or piece of hard work ;-)

It's like musicality. Someone would say: Oh, but I am not a musical person, but I love good music.How can that person not be a musical person? It takes the equal amount of musicality to perceive music as to perform music, since music is neither the compostion / the score, the performer, the media nor the sound. Music is an event, a resonance where the created is re-created within the receiver. If you are not creative, you cannot recreate. What the person meant, of course, was: Oh, but I am not a performing musician, and that is different. But if the audience did not have the equal amout of musicality, the musician or the composer would perform in vain. The event, music, would not occour.

Furthermore musicality is not limited to music. I would suggest, that a true conversation - meaning not a monologue, a lecture - is a human piece of music. Some of the most perfect classical music is composed by J.S. Bach. A musical form, which he mastered to ultimate perfection, was the fugueconsisting of two or more parts actually performing the same theme, but never simultanious. When a part, a voice, an instrument doesn't perform the fugal theme, it performs a complementary counterpart. This musical form once was characterized as an exquisite conversation among learned people, which is exactly what it is. A second part may even start the fugal theme before the first has finished. It sounds like chaos, but is highly organized and total balanced. Listen to women having conversations. It may sound like a chicken den to men, but these chicks are able to talk and listen at the same time.

The Musical Offering

 

Cronos

A strange phenomenon arrives by both performing and listening to a good performance of this music. Time is bended and even dissolved. Infinity seems to be build into it. Don't we all know that phenomenon? When we are not bored - when we in fact are playing - time is kind of infinite. It flies until we realize it, and then it lands again. It went so quickly, we say, when we in fact mean the opposite: it wasn't there. When we are bored or stressed, it is very finite. It sticks to the no-fly-zone. It feels so long, we say, when we in fact mean that the density is heavy.

Time is Cronos eating its own children. Which could refer to an actual celestial event where the planet Saturn became de-ignated or un-loaded as the former sun of our solar system whereby the planet Helios became ignited / loaded, or should we say positively charged. Cronos / Saturn swallowed a certain amount of celestial objects, that became its rings.

See The Thunderbolts Project

http://www.thunderbolts.info/

Cronos as Goya saw him

Astrologers would say, that Saturn is the controller of time. The satanic / saturnian quality is therefore the prison of time. The rings are the chains. Someone even mentioned, that the meaning of the Lord of the Rings or Richard Wagners The Ring (four huge operas) is the struggle for the un-casting of the Saturnian power. I will suggest, just a theory, that it is Saturn / Cronos itself, that is in chains, in rings, and that it is the enslavement of the Saturnian force, that produces the time prison. Saturn may be the local second sun of the Solar system, whereas the star Sirius is the real second sun in the Galactic scale. Who knows? Maybe Saturn wil re-ignite and be 'liberated' with the return of Sirius, that started appr. 400 years ago where Sirius shifted from being a red star to a blue star (according to the rule of starlight called the red shift, where objects removing themselves from our place is red and objects approaching is blue). And then we are not talking about immense amounts of time, but just a cycle of 24.000 years. The story of Cronos and all the other myths of anthropomorphic celestial objects or Gods and Godesses, meaning the birth of the Archetypes is not in some undefined past but within human memory! And that would, of course, include certain catastrophic events, that seems to have traumatized the human race(s).

This is the Great Play of the Universe / the Galaxy / the Solar system. We could go the other way in scaling: the cell, the molcule, the atom. And just in the middle of this scaling is the dimensions of the human being. Or is that just because we happen to be so? Hard to tell. By the way, if you have come to believe, that the Earth has become flat again like in the Catholic Middle Ages - and there is a meme flying around right now, believe it or not - all this is total bunkum. We are living on a pancake, and the Universe is a projection inside a giant dome. Be my guest ...

But how to regain the power of play, the flow of the Universe? C'mon tell me!

Sorry, there is no single recipe. And why would I know it, I am no enlightened guru or expert? But I seldom get bored, except when I have to do something I didn't chose myself, that is repetetive and not challenging. And if we sell our working ablities to someone else to make a living, we will eventually run into that. Apart from that, I always find some new playground.

What I can say is what I actually do, when going into or am in the middle of the play / the creative process. Whether I would be the right to do it, is questionable. Much has been said and written about creativity. Some bogus also, but that is probably due to the fact, that human consciousness is hard to describe. A fish doesn't know what water is before it is pulled out of the water. We can't see what we are made all up of.

I'll try anyway.

Thoughts on Creative Methodology and Attitude

You need an offspring, an ignition. Some would call it inspiration. The Greek called in amusement, since the Muses were the 'goddesses' or the personified forces of the arts. It may even be a musical partner, a Muse - here we go again, and remember we are talking about musicality in the broader sense. Anyone can be a Muse, and it goes beyond gender. As a composer I was amused by my English friend who is a great poet and former playwright. He would send me a bunch of poems to read, and one or more would resonnate with me. It would make me curious and I would start to develop a very vague overall feeling of the may-be-coming piece of music.

So the offspring already contains a structure. Language already contains rhytms = series of stresses and un-stresses = a metrum. Words contain meanings and emotions. But before going into the details, I would have this audible vision of a finished piece sort of coming from a distance, a sort of creative dream. So find your ignition, find your muse.

Another method needs more luck and can go wrong - though it may actually work and succeed. Just start somewhere in total blindness and ignorance not knowing where you will end. I once wrote a novel that way, and it can be great fun. Start somewhere, introduce a character, place it in a situation, create a dilemma or a riddle, take it from there, surprise yourself, amuse yourself.

Painters may do the same. They are 'in process'. Take a look at the documentary 'Vinterbillede' released by the Danish Film Institute (taken off YouTube now, but you can order it for borrow at any serious library), where the internationally known master painter, Per Kirkeby, does something like 10 different paintings on top of each other, each a brilliant painting in itself, but since he didn't stop his process, he just painted over and over till he was satisfied. Which by the way makes the film an artwork in itself.

The man at work - or is he at play?

He just started, and then amused himself. You go into a dialogue with yourself and the material, you produce. You make a kind of split brain or inner distance. In music you become your own audience, appreciating, experiencing, suggesting where to go next. You play with your self ... that didn't come out well ;-) ... but in fact the creative process has a certain element of intermediary narcissism. I would rather call it self-love, self-nurture and inner dialogue.

The Artists Way

Which leads to another important aspect of the creative process, the process of play. You must un-learn and avoid being dominated by self-censorship. Don't censor youself too soon, get it out, so you can see it / sense it. Then critizise, never before.

You may want to check out Julia Cameron and her book The Artists Way. As a spiritual person - which you may find appealing or not appealing according to your personal view - she describes creativity as God's gift to Us and using that creativity as Our gift back to God. Or the Universe or the Great Nature, if you got stuck with the angry Jahwe-figure with a long beard.

Julia Cameron also points out, that artists seldom are loners but create in communities. So find your playmates, let them provoke and invoke you. Let them amuse you.

Take a look at some of her tools:

The Morning Pages

https://vimeo.com/21502701

This is a kind of therapy for artists - and actually for others than artists too. You wake up in the morning and write down all your thoughts without censoring or trying to be artful. If you wake of grumpy with all your morning hatred, they will be your Mourning Pages. It cleans your mind so that all your negative thoughts will not be in you way for the rest of the day. Grump them out by writing them down. Or if you wake up with crazy thoughts or in the middle of an unfinished dream, write it down. Anything goes. Three pages only. Then your day-brain starts to take over.

So: avoid self censorship, but also avoid spontanious refusal of other people's ideas and avoid creative obstruction. There will be a place for killing you darlings, or whatever they call it in the film industry, but the morning is not a place for that.

The Artist Date

https://vimeo.com/21502471

With her own words: Once a week, go on a solo date with youself alone for the purpose of enchanting yourself and wooingyour consciousness like a lover. People are reluctant to go play, they would rather go work. But all creativity is drawing from an inner well, and if you work too hard, you are fishing from that well, and the well will eventually run dry unless you fill it up.

So if you get stuck, don't try too hard. Do something completely different. Many artists have two personalities, the civil person and the artist, that will fill the other up with energy. An artist date, therefore, is a deliberate refill of you consciousness.

The Lady has written 40 books on art and creativity!

Get Rid of the Vacuum

Next: set some rules. Nothing is more frightening that unlimited possibilites. You will be paralyzed with no limits. Limits are your best friend. Horror Vacui (fear of empty spaces) may be you worst nightmare.

This is why my relationship with poetry in making music making was a perfect trampoline. The limitations and the stepping stones were already there.

There are many stepping stones. The painters and the composers of the Middle Ages and Renaissance knew the Palimpsest and the Parody. The palimpsest is the paint-over, like Per Kirkeby doing an auto-palimpsest as a process of painting. The Parody is 'stealing' or samling a preexisting piece of music, it may be from someone else or from yourself, and using it as a starting point. You take the ownership and bring it onto you own ship in your own direction. There was no silly, paranoid copyrights in the Middle Ages, art was not corporatized, and the genious self-centered artist of the Romantic era did not exist. You could steal any idea and concept, because everything in art was kind of Open Source. That is why you often don't find the signature of an artist on the Medieval artwork. We do not know the name of the master builders of the Gothic cathedrals. And the Farao Keops, for sure, did not order the building the pyramid of that name, because he was not born in that age in time - but that's another story of Empires cultural theft.

What I am talking about here, is not like the Romans being so jealous of other people and cultures, that they had to steal their cultural achievements and then destroy these cultures. I am talking about the harmless and benevolent 'theft' of ideas, shapes, forms, structures thus making them you own. The thing is, that having stolen and played / worked with it, it will transform and morph into something else, and should it eventually return to the 'victim' of theft, it will be experienced as a fresh new structure. It would be the phenomenon, Julia Cameron calls community creativity.

It Can't Go Wrong

Especially in storytelling, be it in book form or in spoken og visualized form, the archetypes are magnificent creative forces, like small nuclear bombs of dynamics. It is the story of Joseph Campbell's The Hero with a Thousand Faces, the never ending story of gaining selfhood. These dynamics were true for our ancient forefathers as for us as they will be for our descendants. Knowing that there is nothing new under the Sun, we may drop our anciety of not being so damn original. And moreover, knowing that the same story will end up being fresh and new and different all the time, makes it even less frightful to create. It can't go wrong! Say to yourself: It can't go wrong, It can't go wrong ... make it you benevolent mantra and just do it.

The Must-Read of books

And make your mistakes. For Gods .. and your own sake make a hell of a lot of mistakes! Be shameless of your mistakes and even showing them to others. Afterwards admit them, laugh of them, learn from them. But without mistakes there is no progress. My estimate is, that some of the most stunning inventions of this World and in human history are made by shere mistake. Which is why It cant go wrong. You know what I mean! Of course it can go awfully wrong and you can end up killing someone or yourself in dangerous creativity. But I am not talking about irresponsible experiments. The world is filled with psychopaths doing just that on the expense of everyone else but themselves, and don't get me started here.

What I am talking about is the playful, self forgiving (the most difficult person to forgive is yourself), humorous, and bat-out-of-hell'ish attitude, that will make any play and any creation totally possible. With that in mind, it will become impossible to indulge youself with the fear of your own inadequacy. Your low self esteme has no place on earth. And you cannot suffer any longer from destructive perfectionism - uhuh, it has to be so-and-so perfect, before ...! I see this shit all around me, and it pisses me off, pardon my French! I mean, instead of two regular writers on this blog, I reckon there could be at least seven or more. You guys know who I am talking about, and you may want to reexamine your petty excuses for not making your knowledge available, since the world needs this knowledge now, for Gods sake NOW!

And again, this does not mean, that you should let any old unfinished and sloppy piece of work out. What I am saying is, that you should practice the delay of self critique to where it belongs: The Finish. Or even better: In Wave-Form. Make it a cycle: Let it out - do your critique - let it out ... aso. This is the split brain I was talking about. Be your own audience, your own reader, your own viewer, but don't punish and suppress yourself by doing creative obstructions onto yourself. Also remember: what you do to yourself, you will do to others. If you censor yourself, you are a part of the censorship of the global call for censorship. Is that what you want?

Keep it Tight - and Don't Keep it Tight

Same-same but totally different. I am talking about two things. When you have an idea, when you conceive a new project, don't go out and tell it to the world. And why not? Because it will destroy your idea and your project.

This is a piece of psychology rarely talked about. Haven't you noticed from yourself and others, that we often brague about our New Year's resolutions? We tell it loud and clear, that we hereby have declared the solemn decision for the new year to become a better person by starting so-and-so. And what happens? After two-three weeks you fall into you old habbits. And why is that so?

It is due to a strange program in the brain being activated by prematurely announcing what is not yet a reality. The brain then thinks, that it is already a reality and therefore shuts off the initial energy needed for the bringing about.

What you should do instead, is keep it in your heart like a hen on the egg untill the chicken jumps out and begins to squeek. Even then you should be careful as a responsible and a caring chicken mother not to let it all hang out and run open. There a predators / destructive forces out there - and more important: in there - that can kill a yellow fluffy chicken.

On the other hand, when your creation has grown to a certain extend, and when you know that it already is an inevitable reality, do not keep it tight! Make it available, make it open source, make it mutual fruitful to others. Let it all hang out. What happens then, is that you will receive more that you have provided. An effect of synergy will emerge.

I see a lot of angst and paranoia in that phase of creation.

• What if others should steal my creation/idea and profit from it?
• What if I don't get recognized and payed for my creation/idea?
• What if my creation is not ready for exposure because it is not strong enough?

You have probably heard about the Law of Jante. This is the mental auto-immune-defect version of the Law of Jante.

One example from the applied field of holding tight (to the body) creations, that by now could have been a beneficial reality for the whole of humanity. It is the field of Pure Energy Systems (PES). I prefer this term instead of Free Energyor Alternative Energy, since nothing in the Universe is free, and since 'alternative' is much to un-ambitious just meaning wind mills and solar cells that are totally unsustainable when you figure out the total costs. These are already obsolete technologies.

Pure Energy Systems are right now the best kept secrets, since no one knows about them, since no media tells about them and since no politician (being stupid anyway) are told about them.

With the exception of mr. Pure Energy System himself, Nicola Tesla, later genious inventors all kept their technologies for themselves. Or - I don't want to do these important people injustice - were kept for themselves by certain predators, like Tesla himself.

The Inventor par Excelence

What I am talking about here, is the keeping too close of inventions while being un-aware of the enormous benefits they - and the rest of the world - could have had with a proper open-source attitude. Get it out and make it real! What the inventors did instead was to keep it a potential business secret, thinking that this invention could make them rich and succesful. What they didn't recognize was, that certain groups of watchers, observers, sharks-in-the-ocean did not play by the rules. Result: one day they had their inventions stolen, then destroyed (after being stolen, that is - and do we know that from studying the Roman strategy of cultural/technological theft-and-destruction?) and themselves being character-destroyed, professionally destroyed or even physically destroyed.

Had these brilliant genious'es and inventor-nerds been as brilliant in strategy as in science, we would all have benefitted from their inventions, and the World as we know it would have been totally different. They should have spread their blueprints like a virus, so that enyone with a brain and an urge could have copied and realized it. AND - they would have been rich and famous by doing just that!
Forgive them, for they knew not what they did (semi-quote from mr. Jesus).

Let me hereby round up this blog by saying:

Dear Friends!

Protect your good stuff while in creation.
Be responsible to you creation and yourself.
Make it become real.

Expose your good stuff while created.
Be responsible to the rest of the world and to generations to come.
Make a real thing real.

You may want to read: Imagine And Play