I have been asking myself this question for a while. What is my art? What is my medium? I had decided that I would learn the practice of design. However, the profession of design seems to no longer desire my presence, nor do I feel like casting my pearls before… Well, there is no need for name-calling. You get the idea.
To disappear, to be invisible. That is the role of the designer. There are podcasts that define design in this way. If we are doing our job well, design is 99% invisible. Designers manufacture the water that we swim in, without questioning whether this is the water we want to be swimming in. The answer, upon reflection, is decidedly and resoundingly, “No!”
In taking back agency, power, and authority from the systems we have offered to design, build, and maintain with our labour, the question arises, what might we do instead?
Co-creation begins within by making space for the Creator. I recall the threat, “Prepare to meet your Maker.” It was probably an old cowboy movie, uttered from the trigger end of a rifle barrel. I was thinking about how sad it was to assume that it might not be possible to have already met one’s Maker in this lifetime.
“Yeah, I met her already. She is a kind, gentle, playful, nurturing, and loving woman. We call her Mother Earth.”
Regeniusing My Inner Children
Every child is born a genius, but is swiftly degeniused by unwitting humans and/or physically unfavorable environmental factors.
— Buckminster Fuller
Circ, Nueva, Ted, and Luna were playing quietly in a corner.
It had been a while since they had been able to play in the light, so they played in the dark, neither seen nor heard, for the most part. They whispered among themselves quietly.
Sometimes, they were called to work. They dreamed together of a world that could be. But it seemed like reality was devoid of that kind of imagination. In the disappointments of the mundane routines of life, they mostly hid in the shadows.
There were moments when they came alive.
Travelling to distant lands, marvelling at the architecture that formed the complex histories of European and Chinese cities brought imagination alive. With a camera in hand, framing images from interesting angles and playing with depth-of-field and focus revealed a world of colour and movement, in constant change and transformation.
The contrast of point, line, and plane, the hard edges and angles of the architecture with the organic green gardens and landscapes were constant reminders of the domination of humans over nature.
Internally, the dissonance of the disquieting deluge of man-made media and the collage of corporate collateral drowned out the subtlety and nuance of sensations that each momentary experience offered—an embarrassment of riches reduced to ash by a poverty of attention and focus.
In quiet and silence, Circ, Nueva, Ted, and Luna were being invited back into the light, sound, taste, smell, and tactile experience of a beautiful world of diversity and complexity, alive with motion and emotion, beyond language, beyond description.
Distant memories existed only as stories, told and retold. Others were stored in the cells of the body, beyond language, as the raw data of sensations, imprinted as the chemical and physical signatures of experiences in the energetic form of waves of quantum potential, collapsed into particles of matter.
When we dig into the earth, we find history buried in layers of sediment that we can decipher to read a geological story of the passage of time. What if the universe holds every memory in its celestial bodies, in every cloud, in every particle, providing instant access to all memories through quantum entanglement?
Consider this a thought experiment in metaphysics, since actual experiment is not possible in the world of qualia where quanta are mere shadows of the reality of conscious experience. Scientific experiment, based on mathematical and quantitative research into repeatable physical events and phenomena are not possible in the world of qualia. This is the world of the unknown, of imaginative possibilities, of infinite potential.
Quanta and qualia mingle seamlessly into conscious experience, but the connections are beyond reductionist analysis. The whole cannot be understood by the parts. When we understand the unity and interconnectedness of multi-sensory experience as synesthetic, we can begin to make sense of the whole.
The computer does not breathe. It cannot feel the gratitude of the relationship of reciprocity with the trees that are structural mirrors to our own bronchial tubes. We share a sense of interbeing as humans breathe in oxygen and the trees breathe in carbon dioxide. This is a spiritual connection that reaches back to the initial breath of life from the void before spacetime.
Perhaps the computer network simulates brain synapses, but in the most simplistic storage of binary data. Consciousness and interactive experience are beyond programming, a linear process of logic, in recursive loops of conditions. Repeatability, based on past knowledge, is the extent of possibility. Creative imagination through embodied intention, intuition, inspiration, interaction, integration, and intimacy are beyond the artificial intelligence and the simulation of reality. One would first need to understand intelligence and reality to build the artifice and the simulation. Consciousness is beyond our science to know precisely because qualia are beyond quantitative measurement. To reproduce qualia with physics is like creating light with shadow.
One must understand that reality transcends physics. Beyond physics, there is metaphysics, psyche, soul. The universe is information. The universe is process in formation. Physics is the “formation.” Metaphysics is the “in.” Metaphysics is the infinite potential of the process of life in the physical universe.
The pataphysical is the imaginative possibilities of living physicality. Soul is the art and physicality is the substrate of living experience. Incarnation is not just the pattern of the anointed one. Incarnation is the pattern for the whole.
The corporate assumes only the reality of the physical, so it empties the corpus, the body, of soul. This emptiness pervades the global economic reality with incentives that reward the increase of entropy at the expense of life.
Syntropy evolves and creates as a process of living soul in physical embodiment. Each individual life is an instantiation, a fractal image, the shadow of the whole universe. This is the image of the divine, co-creating in concert with the whole, with the divine.
We have been offered a dichotomy: physics or metaphysics. As we know about politics, so in matters of reality. This is a false dichotomy, a false choice between two parts of a much greater whole. There is at least past, present, and future. The past is repeatable physics. The present is unrepeatable metaphysical experience. The future is the pataphysical, the infinite potential of non-locality and entanglement of quantum possibilities.
Reparenting Circ, Nueva, Ted, and Luna is going to be a process of resensitization to reverse the years of desensitization of a nervous system overstimulated, over-saturated, and overwhelmed by a world designed for separation, control, and domination.
“So God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.”
Genesis 1:27 NIV
Separation and categorization are a function of language, turning sensations and experiences into nouns, verbs, subjects, and objects. From language, we make stories, as a means to share experiences with each other. Language is a symbol system that turns audible sounds into meaningful signals that we can share through relationships of time and energy and matter.
It is here and now that we begin, and we may need to translate our experience in a way that brings a sense of peace, understanding, and ultimately, a reality of love.
By bringing the separated selves into relationship, new life evolves and grows, in the same way that separation of opposites and differentiation of elements prepares the ground for life and transformation. Male and female are the pattern for planting new seeds of life to grow, evolve, and co-create in harmony with the living impulse of the universe in all its complexity and diversity.
In the play and the interplay of light and dark, feminine and masculine, we grow and mature into who we are becoming, a beautiful work-in-progress.
These are my inner children playing in a garden of imagination and possibility.
Light masculine / physical: Circ
Dark feminine / emotional: Nueva
Dark masculine / intellectual: Ted (Theodore)
Light feminine / sensual + spiritual: Luna Solterra
We are learning about the cognitive science of religion, that there is an innate need with human beings to understand where we came from and how we came to be. Whether we conceive of a God, or whether we conceive of a physical universe that happens to have brought forth life as a natural process of physics, chemistry, and biological evolution, there appears to be some order where we might expect chaos or nothing at all.
Why is there something rather than nothing?
It seems that, whatever our conception of divinity or reality, we make our world into a reflection of that conception of reality. In the corporate global economic system of value, the earth is merely a site for extraction, exploitation, and domination of resources as the means for growing financial assets, profit, and national security. The assumptions presume a secular, physical world, divided along borders of national, religious, and racial identity, allowing for religious or spiritual practices on one’s own time, but without sacrificing the necessary time, energy, and resources that must be dedicated to industrial productivity and corporate growth.
The religious practice of treating earth as nothing more than a physical resource rather than a living being has a significant impact on what we believe to be normal behaviour. It has the effect of polluting the water we swim in, both figuratively and literally, and killing ourselves along with all the other species we are driving to extinction through industrial exploitation and habitat destruction.
Are we alone? Yes, humans, of all the species on this planet, are alone in their proclivity to destroy their own home.
If you are asking me, the angry, judgmental, patriarchal, father deity that pits his children against each other in a war of cultures until one group wins seems like a poor description for a loving father or a loving god.
It seems we are suffering a collective trauma because of a divine father and many earthly fathers who have physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually neglected and abused their own children. Our wounded inner children grow up to be traumatized adults who subject others to their own dysfunctional, abusive, and self-destructive behaviours.
In the twelve step tradition, healing and transformation begins with accepting oneself as powerless apart from a Higher Power of one’s own understanding. In other words, one has the power to choose who that Higher Power is, even to define or create one’s own conception of the divine, that entity or ideal that is greater than oneself. It need not be a deity or God. It could be Mother Earth or the Universe or Universal Law or Nature or Love. It is from this inner authority that one realizes one’s own power and sovereignty, not based on one’s own will but derived from within, paradoxically, a realization of a connection to the greater whole, something larger than oneself.
Reparenting is a process of choosing how one wants to be treated by imagining oneself as the loving parent one might have desired and needed to feel physically, intellectually, emotionally, and spiritually healthy and whole.
My inner children are asking a simple question, “What if we made God in the image of the universe, would that make more sense than making God in our image?” After all, it is not like humans are the centre of the universe. We should understand from our evolving cosmology that such anthropocentrism has the unintended consequence of bringing about the Anthropocene. Decentring ourselves might be the place to start.
What if we said that the world does not revolve around money? What if the universe revolves around love? I think that is what Buckminster Fuller was saying when he described love as metaphysical gravity.
In the beginning, there were many stories of beginnings. Perhaps, we can try a different way.
Here and now, we are present with all that is.
The Creator is offering us the ability to co-create with the one who created us by inviting us to be in the flow of creation by co-creating with the Creator. As we regenerate the notion of Creator, we regenerate ourselves.
Recreating. Recreation. It sounds like play. It sounds like fun. If I was the Creator, I would invite my children to play and to have fun. This is an opportunity to relive my childhood, to reparent, to regenerate, to recreate.
The Creator
I am carrying a masterpiece hidden within me. The Creator created me as a masterpiece. I have only to come to it, to know it, to realize it. I am a creator, a mystic. I create myself. I work not with objects but with the subject. I work on myself, my own being. I am a creator, a poet, because I make myself into a masterpiece. In effect, I become one with the Creator in the act of co-creation, regenerating the very notion of the Creator.
Adapted from The Creator card in the Osho Zen Tarot card deck.