There is no greater pleasure than being yourself
Wednesday, 22. July 2009
For sheer ecstasy and ultimate aliveness, nothing else on earth beats the wonderful feeling that you personally originate your own world. You are not a wage slave; you are not behaving yourself to please the inner parent; you are not watching your back for criticism; you are not trotting out stale memes. You are the source of your own living.
The reason we look at life with the open, feeling intellect is to see ourselves more deeply and begin to have some power to originate the existence we live. But it doesn’t work if you already know the answers, having ingested the successful memes of your culture, because then all you can do is try to fit your experience into a framework. Naturally, you will also attempt to fit the feelings of everyone else into that framework, not noticing that your framework evolves to the point of transformation as your life moves on.
Hands up everyone for whom everything that passes through their mind is fresh and new as if it comes from themselves and no one else? I guess there won’t be many takers, but it is possible, and it’s not the same as that feeling of triumph when you pounce on the right answer and start blabbing it all around you. If you’ve never felt ecstasy when you’re confused and stuck in the question then you don’t know what I’m talking about yet and you have no understanding of what creativity really means.
Creativity is when your very first reached-for assumption is not that you are right or good or popular or successful or clever, artistic or sexy, but when your very first feeling is that you are unremittingly, whatever is happening, however you feel, the huge and powerful dynamo of light that is being alive.
Nobody can hold that state every second of every day in such a stressful world as this but it can be your default living experience and it’s a whole lot better than living in a head full of other people’s opinions.
Forgive me, but I always intend anyone to see some of themselves in it when I write stuff like that, because it’s in all of us and the more we get that the faster we evolve towards the joy that would be there if we were the origin of our own extences and not the victims of dominant memes.
Vincent Says:
I think the reason this has fallen on stony ground is that the positive message is upstaged by the side-swipes at all and sundry, potentially including the reader. Who likes to read a writer who insults his reader?
Steven Holmes Says:
I do, Vincent. If there were anyone out there with my insight and courage who had the skill and generosity of spirit to express it I’d get down on my fucking knees and worship them without caring in the slightest what their tone happened to be.
And I don’t take things personally unless the underlying tone is self-evidently an attack on me in person, which my remarks never are: the true target is the Universal Asshole that lives in all of us and most of us deny