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August 18

Creativity, Thoughts and the Self 

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For awhile now my thoughts seem to precipitate what I observe in the world. This happens everyday, all day long, and has been this way for a while. It happens with you now with your daily meditations, with television, the newspaper, the internet on a daily basis. 

So I am having a hard time distinguishing what thoughts are mine and what are premonitions, especially since I am a creator and writer. What thoughts do I trust are mine and thus [should be] put out into the world? 

Thanks to you I know I'm not crazy, but how do I use or understand it? Can I make any money off of this blessing or curse? Or better yet, how can I help people?

There are so many different ways of approaching this question, but today the answer will be via a discussion of thought itself.

What are the various kinds of thoughts we may have? 

Many of the thoughts we have on a daily basis are what we might call idle thoughts, or speculation. These are thoughts related to the ego, to our sense of individuality and our identity with the small 's' self. These thoughts generally have to do with the past or the future: 'If only,' 'what if': what's going to happen, what should have happened, what should I have done, what will I do next time, what did she mean by that, etc. These are pointless thoughts that serve no purpose other than to entrench us further in our identification with the ego. These are thoughts we are living in when we are letting ourselves be pulled out of present moment awareness. Interestingly we believe these thoughts are necessary because we need to 'figure things out,' and yet nothing ever gets figured out, and rather than being helpful, the process of living in these thoughts leads only to suffering. Always.

Closely associated with speculation are what we might call practical thoughts. These might have to do with deciding where we're going to have lunch or what exercises should we do at the gym today. These thoughts occur to us, we take care of what needs to be taken care of and then we move on. If we insist on second-guessing ourselves and our choices, these mundane thoughts can blend in with and become more speculation, but by and large they are simply functional and not a subject for concern one way or the other.

Then we have what we would call cognitions. These are thoughts that come to us from the collective, from what Professor Goswami calls non-local consciousness. These are the creative thoughts we so value. These are ideas that come to us, suggesting that we write a certain story or song or script. Play a certain note. Dance a certain dance. These are thoughts of synthesis. We take care to learn what we need to learn, gather our information, structure parameters. We take care of the work involved in the creative process, and then we open ourselves up for synthesis to occur; we make ourselves available for a leap of knowledge and expression that goes beyond what we know. 

The fact is that these thoughts are not my thoughts, not if I am thinking of myself solely as this individuality. They belong to something greater than me. They come through me from something greater than me. 

When we begin to see things in the world that echo or support our inner vision, this is an indication that we are stepping beyond ego identification and finding ourselves aligning with the flow of nature. This is truly the way to create. When we are aligned with nature, we know that none of the thoughts are 'mine.' They belong to nature. Nature wants something to be expressed. As a meditator, I am volunteering to be a part of the expression of nature. I daily am letting go of the stresses that cloud my vision of nature, and I am able to see ever more deeply into this moment of nature. In this moment are the seeds of all possible futures. I'm not having premonitions, I merely am seeing deeply into this moment, thereby seeing how this moment will play out. 

This alignment of self with nature, this stepping into the unknown, this is how we create. We leap into the unknown. And by doing so we are calling upon God, nature if you will, to guide our leap and to express through us. We are demanding to be met as co-creators with the Self. We leap. And if we don't like where we land, we leap again. We seek joy in every aspect of our lives, we follow our desires, our cognitions, knowing that these cognitions, these desires, are not ours. They are God showing us where It would have us be and would It would have us doing and what It would have us expressing.

When the world around us is responding to us by mirroring our inner process, this is nature nodding and smiling and encouraging us, thanking us, celebrating us as good partners in creativity, good agents for progressive change, good tools for the Craftsman that is Totality. This is nature telling us we're doing a good job in making ourselves available to be a part of this thing that is so much greater than we are, and the joy that is inherent in being a part of the process is a reward that always is greater than the one we think we would get by creating something on our own.

 Today I will open myself to expressing from a place of not-knowing.