Antonio Dias has a challenging post on Meaning and Action. It’s not a light read and I struggle to understand it fully but it seems like a really worthwhile struggle. This post is more thinking out loud in response and not particularly neat and tidy.
This is one of the chunks that really got my attention:
To paraphrase Krishnamurti We don’t change by trying to change. We just change. In a flash when we connect with a new awareness. This is a mirror to what happens learning to ride a bike. No amount of willing trying, striving to “figure it out” gets us there. We stumble and scramble and finally give up trying. At this point we unleash tacit knowledge. All of a sudden we are riding… Unleashing tacit knowledge – tacit, what is there without the need for explanation – opens pathways to coherence.
And if I follow correctly, this unleashing of tacit knowledge is what creativity is. As per the sainted Viola, “Creativity is not the clever rearranging of the known.” I think David Bohm aruges that this is the point where something pops out or unfolds from the unmanifest to the manifest.
This reminds me of discovering the ideas of Otto Rank (blogged here). Life is a series of separations, we leave behind old versions of ourselves as we learn. From that post:
The ego continually breaks away from its worn-out parts, which were of value in the past but have no value in the present. The neurotic [who cannot unlearn, and, therefore, lacks creativity] is unable to accomplish this normal detachment process … Owing to fear and guilt generated in the assertion of his own autonomy, he is unable to free himself, and instead remains suspended upon some primitive level of his evolution.
Antonio speaks of the self as, ulitmately, an illusion like the rainbow. We can point to it, it has some kind of meaning, but it isn’t real. If we cling too rigidly to the rainbow, in search of safety, we end up in a very dark place. Creativity is the way we let it go. I think this is where Antonio is driving when he says this:
We are so habituated to the forcing of our organism to comply with the incoherence of thought. We are worn out. We are neurotic, diseased by the effort to maintain an incoherent position. We fear we cannot do any more than just hold on.
As soon as we begin to see the dynamic of incoherence we are not only opened to the well of tacit understanding this makes available. We are brought into touch with the vitality at the heart of our organism and its efforts to maintain coherence.
Yeah, I think I like the sound of that.
