The Way of Nowhere: Eight Questions to Release Our Creative Potential. Nick Udall
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distortion: addiction
poor hungry ghost
you miss implicate order
through time and over pain
Poor hungry ghost
This haunting (excuse the pun) image from the wisdom of the Tibetan people summarizes the aspect of ourselves that attempts to satisfy our longing for oneness in ways that are a pale reflection of the real thing. Like hungry ghosts we pour stuff down our throats, sometimes literally and sometimes metaphorically, but the part of ourselves that yearns for beauty and the experience of unity and communion starves and shrivels.
Our response is often to indulge in more of the very behaviour that fails to meet our inner need. We look outside ourselves for solutions that only reside within. When these fail to work we tend to do more of them in the vain belief that more will give us the oneness we crave for – more sex, more drugs, more beer, more shopping, more of whatever it is that constitutes our particular addiction.
These addictions can also be psychological – addictions to ways of thinking and being. We then tend to look at life through the eyes of our prejudice and use our perceptions to gather data to support this prejudice.
This distortion is a nasty and dangerous piece of work because it is a thief of time and beauty. Our addictions, be they psychological, physical or intellectual, tend to deprive us of the psychic energy needed to attain and maintain the frequencies needed for presence. They make us unable to still ourselves and stop the monkey chatter of our minds. We lack the energy to be really moved by beauty. And we fail to connect with others. Our most fundamental addiction tends to be to our own ego, that part of ourselves that wishes to remain separate.
The tragedy is that this state of separateness then becomes the norm. An enormous amount of the energy of industrial and post-industrial society goes into the hopeless task of feeding the hungry ghosts. How much has climate change been generated by activities that are related to feeding our hungry ghosts?
Our intuitive capabilities are subtle and are vulnerable to the manic pace of the rational world. Yet the more technology advances, the more we become surrounded by the incessant babble of radios, televisions, phones, computers and so on. Even if we are so daring and eccentric as to seek a moment's silence, we then face the inner babble and struggle to find the ‘off’ switch.
In order to access the creative potential of the present moment, we must learn to slow down, to turn off the chatter, access the stillness within and then move with the rational and the intuitive in balance.
If we can restore this balance, we can once more find the magic that is always in the present moment.
opposite: unfolding
poor hungry ghost you miss implicate order through time and over pain
‘Consider what takes place when one is listening to a piece of music. At a given moment a certain note is being played but a number of the previous notes are still “reverberating” in consciousness. Close attention will show that it is the simultaneous presence and activity of all these reverberations that is responsible for the immediately felt sense of movement, flow and continuity. 5
When we become more present, we turn our attention to the source rather than the object. The source is the interdependence of all things. We are then able to hear the music as opposed to focusing on unrelated notes. We are able to see how an incident does not just happen but emerges from the whole and contains within it the reverberations of the Field. The whole is reflected in the smallest microcosm, yet we can only pick up these reverberations from a state of presence. This then is the relationship between the allied energies of presence in South-East and unfolding in the North-West.
Becoming present to this unfolding can dramatically increase our creative potential for two reasons. First, we gain access to the invisible systems and cycles that have a profound effect upon our lives. Second, a vast source of new learning opens up to us as we seek to understand how the specific arises from the whole.
neighbours: inspiration & trusting
poor hungry ghost you miss implicate order through time and over pain
Through time and over pain
In the East, we seek our sense of inspirational purpose. Yet our habitual ways of thinking and behaving do not generally create the best conditions for it. They tend to sap our energy, our confidence and our self-belief by leading us around and around the same old thought patterns. Our ability to still the internal dialogue and become present increases the chances of inspiration finding us.
Presence is difficult to attain for many reasons. For example, our ego-driven selves assure us that we must hold on tightly to our individuality or our very survival will be threatened. Also, the hurts of our past may manifest again in the present. Because of the way our memory works, we then tend to overlook the interconnected whole by focusing almost exclusively on what recurs and what hurts.
Thus, in order to gather the necessary trust to pursue life's adventures, we must first overcome the pain of our past. Presence is both the key to this and its reward. The more we are able to become present, the more we become aware of how pain manifests in the moment and the more we can deprive this pain of its power over us by calling on the allied energy of the South. In this way, we are able to become even more present. We can let go and we can begin to trust in the creative life force a little more.
the four realms of nowhere
a Way …
Many people working in the fields of psychotherapy and group facilitation have noted how groups of people take on a life of their own. Indeed, group dynamics often move through predictable phases. For example, the model ‘norming, storming, reforming, performing’ is useful for team performance, while ‘pseudo-community, chaos, emptiness, community’ maps the development of empathy in group situations.6 Although these models are very useful, they tend to reflect their psychotherapeutic backgrounds. We are of course very concerned for the psychological health of the individual and the group, yet this is not, for us, an end in itself. Self-awareness, contactful relationships and energized groups are also the prerequisite for co-creating something greater than the sum of their parts. It is what we can co-create that holds the greatest potential for healing and fun.
As we worked with groups, we began to observe the natural phases that a creative team on the road to collective breakthrough went through. We codified our learning in the following framework, which we call the four realms of nowhere.7
nowhere
A team, group or community will naturally fall into being a pseudo-community unless it is challenged to step into the unknown, where every member has to let go of their expertise, of their preconceptions and