無 / 有 – Sungwon Peter Choe Online

Rock ‘n Roll is The Devil’s Music: Heavy Metal and Music in the Evolution of Consciousness

The Devil has long been associated with secular music. The myth of the virtuoso fiddler who sold his soul to the Devil at the crossroads was translated into American folklore with a long history of Blues players like Robert Johnson selling their souls for devilishly good musical abilities. My favorite music genre, heavy metal, has a close relationship to Satan and evil, from the somewhat silly urban legends arising from an incident in which the “Prince of Darkness”, Ozzy, inadvertently bit the head off a real bat to the more serious Black Metal church burnings and murders in the early 1990s. The relationship between metal and Lucifer is often very clear and explicit with many bands, Black and Death metal bands in particular, labeling themselves as Satanic. Yet even mainstream bubble-gum pop idols get labeled as doing the Devil’s work by some religious fundamentalists. Even innocently dancing in a family setting is viewed as deviantly sinful by some extremists. How did rock ‘n roll come to be the Highway to Hell?

"That's my niece Diane, and she's going to Hell... Why? Because she dances."

While reading an early (1981) Ken Wilber book called Up From Eden, I was struck by the depiction of the Devil’s place in Wilber’s model of the evolution of consciousness (a model of human development derived from the great philosophers and mystics from both the East and West) and immediately related it back to my love of devilish music. I believe this model provides a good framework for explaining the Devil’s manifestation in popular music and in Heavy Metal in particular.

Here, then, we must digress into the evolutionary model of human development laid out in Up From Eden to provide our theoretical background. I will paraphrase liberally from this book throughout this article.

The Great Chain of Being

There are a multitude of ways to divide up the evolution of consciousness into hierarchical stages. Perhaps the simplest way to do so is with the 3 stages subconscious, self-conscious and superconscious. Note that in our culture the distinction between subconscious and self-conscious is generally understood thanks to Freud et. al. However, there is deep confusion between the pre-personal subconscious and the trans-personal superconscious. This confusion is what gives you feel queasy when you hear new age babble that just doesn’t sit quite right. A lot of so-called spiritual paths and literature lead downwards into regression. A truly trans-personal understanding comes not only from being able to feel and experience directly, but also to interpret that experience in a meaningful intellectual way. The trans-personal transcends the mind and ego, but also includes it. The pre-personal simply abandons the mind to sensation alone.

In Up From Eden, Wilber further divides these 3 basic stages of the Great Chain of Being into the following 8 levels: Nature (uroboric, reptilian), Body (typhonic, magical), Early Mind (membership, mythical), Advanced Mind (rational, mental-egoic), Psychic, Subtle, Causal and Ultimate. We can see the first 7 levels of the Great Chain of Being represented in the Chakras of Kundalini Yoga as well as in the Caduceus.

Caduceus with corresponding Chakras (root, sacral, solar plexus, heart, throat, third eye, crown)

It is no simple coincidence that the evolution of levels of consciousness have parallels in biological evolution (from matter/nature to life/body to mind) . It is also important to note that each level of consciousness transcends the previous level but also includes it in the unconscious. Thus, we, with our average level of consciousness at the mental-egoic level, have within our unconscious access to all the previous levels. This is easily seen in our unconscious dream life where the relationship between and to dream images is often understood symbolically (i.e. magically or mythically). This also manifests in psychoses. Suppose a child at an Early Mind level of development is traumatized by a woman in a red dress. As an adult, this may take the form of an irrational fear of the color red. At a rational level, he knows this is completely silly, but in terms of a magical understanding of the world, it makes perfect sense. Voodoo works along similar principles.

Repression and Indulgence

At each level of consciousness, Spirit (God or Godhead) is understood in different forms. For Body consciousness, it is the Typhon. For Early Mind consciousness, it is the Great Mother.

The Sorcerer of Trois Freres: A typhonic half-man, half-beast

Healthy development from one level to another involves both transcending and including the previous level. With the rise of the mental/egoic consciousness in the West, this did not happen and the body-level consciousness associated with the Typhon and Great Mother became disassociated from the modern psyche. With the exception of the Communion ritual (transcending and including the body by eating and drinking the body and blood of Christ), this body/mind split is clearly embodied by the dominant Western religious tradition, Christianity. Major sins are involved with indulging in the pleasures of the flesh: food, drink, sex, even dance and music. The feminine along with the Great Mother was also repressed in favor of the masculine Sun/Father God. While this disassociation between mind and body has historically taken the form of repression, more recently it has taken the form of over-indulgence. Yeah, Sex, Drugs and Rock ‘n Roll!

Paleolithic Venus: a Great Mother figure

Rock ‘n Roll: Indulging in the Senses

Rock music is very much a product of the 20th Century. Plainly, the amplification and sound technology had not existed before to create such walls of sound that embraced the listener with a kind of sonic physicality. But also new media (radio, tv, records) was available to unite the ambition and rebellion of a previously disconnected new youth culture and market freed from labor and poverty by the burgeoning wealth of the United States. Rebellion is naturally attracted to the repressed, the taboo. Foremost among such repressed desires was sexuality (what’s a clitoris??). Rock music incited youth to dance in obscene ways to the driving rhythm, mimicry of the sex act itself (see Dirty Dancing). Elvis Presley was infamously not televised below the waist for the obscene gyrations of his pelvis.

By the’ 60s, men were getting in touch with their repressed inner feminine, growing their hair long and “dropping out” of pursuing traditional social roles. For rock musicians, having long hair became almost a requirement (as it still is in the otherwise testosterone-dominated metal scene). The Great Mother was being unearthed into the consciousness of the counter-culture, from the Feminist movement to a deep desire to heal humanity’s estranged relationship with nature. Much of the counter-culture regressed back into sub-conscious indulgence in sensation (e.g. the drug culture), but sometimes you have to go backwards before you can go forward, right?

In the ’70s, bands like Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath lay down not only heavy metal’s powerful sound, but also it’s fascination with the epic, darkness and the occult. KISS donned ritualistic costume and makeup echoing pagan ritual (Gene Simmon’s character was in fact named the Demon). Heavy metal surfaced in the ’80s and ’90s, offering not only repressed sexuality, but also the repressed aggression and blood of bodily violence (embodied by the mosh pit). The music itself, loud and powerful, has a physical quality that reverberates throughout the body.

Metal and the Typhon

Popular music presents a cultural space where we may indulge in bodily senses of lower levels of consciousness that had been disassociated and repressed during the past few hundred years of Western culture (raves and dance clubs, for example, are modern send-ups of pagan rituals with the imbibing of mind-altering substances, the courtship between youth and the expression of the body moving to the driving rhythm). As these lower levels are only now beginning to be reintegrated into our cultural consciousness, most of us overindulge in physical pleasures: food, drugs, sex, alcohol. In Heavy Metal, this indulgence is made explicit and clear and is often celebrated. Our lusts come out of a place of darkness (the subconscious). A close relationship between metal and the master of indulgence, Satan, is only natural.

Album artwork for Symphonic Black/Death Metal band Dimmu Borgir's In Sorte Diaboli

The album artwork for Dimmu Borgir’s In Sorte Diaboli album features a classic depiction of the Devil that is almost exactly identical to figure 24 in Up From Eden. From the caption to that figure:

[T]he god(s) or sacred images of one stage of development become the demons, devils, demiurges, or disparaged gods of the next stage of evolution…What is natural and appropriate at one stage becomes archaic, regressive and infantile at the next.. the lower stage–which was once worshipped and revered–is now looked upon as something to struggle against, to subdue, even to scorn…

[The Devil as depicted] is clearly typhonic, half man, half animal…In fact, it is strikingly reminiscent of the Sorcerer of Trois Freres [see Sorcerer image above]. That Sorcerer, which was the supreme god to the typhonic hunters, is now the supreme demon to the mental-ego… Second, this figure also shows the serpent-uroboros, and it is correctly portrayed as having evolved only through the lower three chakras–food, sex, and power [or root, sacral and solar plexus, see Caduceus image above]—which is perfect typhonicism. And third. it is hermaphroditic or Great Mother infused…

Only in the West, then where the disassociation of ego-mind and body-typhon was often severe, did the typhon (now cut off form conscious participation) assume truly menacing proportions (as Satan) and appear to take on an ultimately and absolutely evil significance….”Give the Devil its due” really means that the typhon serves an appropriate if limited function, and when exercised in an appropriate if non-obsessive fashion, serves the reproduction of the pranic level of the human compound individual. The typhon disocciated, however, shows up in obsessive overindulgence, on the one hand, and repressive puritanism and life blockage, on the other…Psychologically it manifests itself, on the one hand, in hedonism, obsessive genital-sexuality and the perversions, exclusive aestheticism, dominance of the pleasure principle, degenerate emotionalism; and on the other hand, in hyper-intellectualism, schizoid mentality, arid abstractionism, history divorced from nature, ego terrified of body.

Death Metal: Nightmares Made Flesh

Thematic material for extreme forms of metal clearly land on the side of hedonism and perversion. Death Metal, rather being “terrified of the body”, revels in its base, material nature, a celebratory orgy of blood and gore. Most Death Metal subject matter revolves around three main themes: death, Satan or otherwise anti-Christian themes, and gore. This is readily evident from skimming over band names alone: Cannibal Corpse, Morbid Angel, Carcass, Deicide, Decapitation, Vital Remains, Bloodbath, Death and so on. 

Black Metal: Digging Into the Grave of The Subconscious

While the lower level themes are well-represented in Death and other genres of Heavy Metal, they are not as clearly differentiated as they are in the sub-genres of Black Metal. The thematic progression (or regression) of Black Metal beginning in the 90s Scandinavian scene in particular, offers a fascinating depiction of the unearthing of subconscious levels of the Great Chain of Being.

Many bands then delved deeper into their mythological past, creating sub-genres of Viking Metal (Enslaved, Thyrfing among others) and Folk Metal (Finntroll, Ensiferum, Korpiklaani).

Other bands then branched further back into paganism, expressing a fascination with nature (Neofolk bands like Tenhi, Nest and Agalloch).

This progression of thematic interest is strikingly similar to exploring the Great Chain of Being backwards from Advanced Mind (Satanic individualism) to Nature.

Spiritual Metal

As a side note, not all metal bands are thematically linked to lower levels of the Great Chain of Being. Cynic and Aghora are both excellent bands that lyrically explore themes of higher levels of consciousness over their hybrid genre of Extreme (i.e. Death and Thrash) Metal and Jazz Fusion.

Scratching the Surface

I have essayed to show that Heavy Metal and popular music in general is representative in the cultural consciousness of the over-indulgence/repression of the Great Chain of Being’s lower levels. However, there are many more unanswered questions than insights raised in this cursory overview. Of particular interest to me are the following. Why is Heavy Metal so overwhelmingly masculine in both style and participation? Where are the feminine aspects of the Great Mother (or are they simply manifest as obsession with sexuality and the female body as celebrated by mainstream pop music)? Why did Japanese Visual Rock bands reach back thematically not to their own ethnic past, like the Scandinavian metal bands or even Korean Black Metal bands Oathean and Sad Legend, but to 17th and 18th Century Europe? Is their feminized look representative of their cultural emasculation? Perhaps the most intriguing question is what popular musical culture would be like in a healthy, integrated cultural consciousness.

Freedom: Self-Development, Anarchy and Spirituality

Freedom is understood in many different ways by different people at different levels of intellectual, moral and spiritual consciousness. It is the masculine in us all that seeks autonomy and freedom (as noted by David Deida and others). The feminine yearns for fullness and relationship. This is yet another manifestation of emptiness and form as the masculine and feminine. We all have both the masculine and feminine within us whether we are men or women, but these aspects of us may be at very different stages of development. Nevertheless, the masculine within all of us seeks freedom.

Revolution

When I first started ‘waking up’ a few years ago, I became interested in Anarchism. Like many people with a liberal background (see previous article on the individual and socio-cultural environment), I was impressed by how social structures constrain and limit people. 

Most people who don’t take the time to think about themselves and their environment simply adopt the values and culture supported by the social structures around them. Using our individual-environment model, we can say that the environment feeds strongly into the individual, but most individuals simply regurgitate this feed of values and culture back into the environment, contributing little to its growth and evolution. Most of us are like the human batteries in the Matrix (what would we ever use for analogies had that movie never been made? , never questioning the reality or legitimacy of the environment presented to us.

At the time, I determined that if the social structures were forcibly changed, that individuals could be changed, in this case freed, as well. This is true to a large extent, of course, but it also neglects the role of the autonomy of the individual, one of the very ideals we are trying to realize through social change in the first place. That is, it focuses solely on how to change the society to effect change in (”freeing”) the individual. It does not consider how it may be possible to develop the individual to change society.

The Individual is the Society

I became conscious of problems with a solely revolutionary approach to freedom as I began reading Krishnamurti. As a rational Atheist kneeling at the altar of Science, I was naturally skeptical of this don’t-follow-gurus-preaching-guru. But as I read The First and Last Freedom, my skepticism turned to confusion (I was largely inspired to begin having an open relationship even though it has almost nothing to do with what Krishnamurti was saying) and then interest and respect. Although the romantic notion of revolution was alluring, Krishnamurti’s cautioning that all revolutions lead back to the status quo resonated with me. He noted that the means are the end (violence leads to violence) and that revolution, as it is a reaction to a tyrannical government, is ultimately defined by it. A revolution is often just that. Another turn of the wheel. How can revolution effect real change if the individuals in that society don’t also transform themselves?

The T.A.Z.

I reread Hakim Bey’s (pen name of Peter Lamborn Wilson) T.A.Z. and his poetic argument that the individual himself need only free himself to live as a free Anarchist. He simply need not accept the given social structures and cultural values to determine his own freedom. T.A.Z. also takes the Anarchist dinner party analogy to its artistic conclusion. Bey, in his beautiful poetic essays, explored how spaces (like pirate utopias) and the collection of people who inhabit them can espouse many Anarchistic ideals through their emergent behavior. He called such spaces Temporary Autonomous Zones (T.A.Z.s). Early ravers, the Burning Man Festival, the music of Bill Laswell (which is how I came to first know of Bey back in high school) and many others have been influenced by the T.A.Z.

Self-Development

Following Krishnamurti into the present through Deepak Chopra (Chopra was inspired by what Krishnamurit had to say, but believed he would be better able to express it to people) and through Steve Pavlina (his article on 10 reasons never to get a job was the catalyst that first began my journey of awakening in the first place), I was led into the world of self-development. I had once been extremely skeptical and dismissive of self-development material, but I was soon reading and gaining respect for even the likes of self-help giants like Anthony Robbins. Soon, it wasn’t just self-actualization, but other specialized areas like personal finance, seduction and fitness. 

Self-development is ultimately about taking control of your own life according to a lifestyle of your choosing. Its practices and philosophies can be tools in discriminating in what values you choose to inherit from your culture and what you develop in yourself. As you change and become more conscious of yourself and your relationship to society, you influence your environment in turn. This is, of course, the opposite of a political approach to freedom like revolutionary Anarchism, focusing on changing the individual rather than society, with complementary strong and weak points.

Spirituality

Another path opened up to me through Krishnamurti and Chopra, that led me away from faith-in-Science Atheism and towards Spirituality. Many spiritual practices are approaches to finding higher levels of spiritual freedom beyond rather than within the feedback cycle of individual and environment. Traditional approaches have largely found this freedom in the ground of being (ultimate freedom and emptiness before time or space). However, most serious modern spiritual practices are concerned with how to manifest this freedom in the world of form as well as being able to realize your true self in the ground of being. Andrew Cohen interprets this as a Kosmic evolutionary drive towards freedom. Ken Wilber sees this drive as unfolding through the lines and levels of development and quadrants of Integral Theory.

Libertarian Socialism

Earlier this year I finally got around to reading Chomsky on Anarchism. Chomsky is sympathetic to forms of Anarchism that are related to Libertarian Socialism in a lineage that goes back to the Enlightenment. It’s interesting that he stresses both the libertarian, i.e. focusing on the autonomy and freedoms of the individual, and socialist, i.e. celebrating the communion and society of individuals, traditions. Indeed, any philosophy of freedom must understand or at least recognize both sides of the individual and environment relationship to be effective in the world of form (though this understanding can simply be a context for a specialization in either side). 

Integration

Reading Chomsky again after several years and within the context of a more spiritual and integral understanding, I realized many of my interests over the past few years were related in terms of this common theme: the search for freedom. I began to see how these different levels of freedom related and flowed into each other. I believe there is a progression, albeit rough and overlapping, in searching for and understanding freedom.

Spiral Dynamics provides a useful model for understanding this progression, as does any other developmental model like Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs.

The basic freedom is freedom from want. Once you have your basic needs of food, water and shelter satisfied such they are not short-term concerns, you are probably living in a structured society that helps provide these resources. But although such a society frees you at one level (basic needs), it imposes restrictions that constrain you in other ways. This is true going all the way up the hierarchy of freedoms to spiritual forms of freedom, each level solves problems of the previous level and creates new ones for the next level to solve.

With this understanding, we can see how self-development tools helps free the individual in several important ways. Self-imposed individual psychological restrictions can be broken through with psychotherapy, dream analysis, seduction community “inner game” techniques, meditative exercises and behavior and habit changing methods. Personal finance, Tim Ferris-style Lifestyle design, and entrepreneurship can help free the individual from debt and time- and wage-slavery. When “free time” is abundant and finances under control and sufficient, one is free to discover one’s own creative passions (one of the Anarchist ideals). As more individuals on the leading edge achieve self-determination and self-actualization, the society and culture itself will advance.

This doesn’t mean that bottom-up change is the only way to go. Top-down approaches are also needed. Chomsky argues that Anarchists and Libertarian Socialists should support social programs in government if they are aligned with their values even though they increase the scope of government and its involvement. Whereas the ultimate goal of an Anarchist agenda is to be free of hierarchical government, religious and other forms of control, the path towards that goal follows a progressive hierarchy of steps. Within a Spiral Dynamics and Integral Theory understanding, this makes perfect sense. There is no “skipping levels”. From “blue”, a society must progress to “orange” and then “green” (though of course, in any society you will have individuals at many different levels). This is why if you have a revolution attempting to build new social structures to match a Utopian Anarchist (or other ideological) ideal, it doesn’t work and you get something that is pretty similar to what you started with. The level of social consciousness must develop progressively through a hierarchy of developmental levels before the society at large is ready and responsible enough for such an ideal. That being said, we need the leading edge of social activists and revolutionaries to ensure not only that a society’s social structure upholds its values and morals, but stretches them and pushes them up towards the next level.

The modern spiritual practitioner, if she is serious, can find freedom in the ground of being through meditation and contemplation. Spiritual practice alone helps to literally raise the level of consciousness of a culture. But the spiritual practitioner can bring more to the world of form by developing her other lines (moral, psychological) or by engaging in social activism. By doing so, she expresses compassion for the world of form and those within it by helping them reach the next level of freedom.

As in Defined by Limitations, in each level in the hierarchy she pushes beyond the limits of the previous one, embracing a bit more of the world in compassion. The search for freedom in this world is, like the limitations it pushes past, never-ending, but that does not mean that there is no progression. We can continue to discover and expand into higher levels of freedom, becoming progressively more loving and compassionate for all of manifestation.

Individual and Socio-Cultural Environment in Synergy

Individual and Environment

An individual’s thoughts and actions shape her environment. The environment in turn shapes the individual. We have a simple feedback system. 

The individual shapes the environment and vice versa.

This seems like a simple and obvious truth, but many misunderstandings arise when the context of this simple model is forgotten. 

For example, if your English is good enough to be reading this blog than you’ve probably inherited many of the values and frames of the Western Neo-Liberal culture as I have. One of these frames is that society (the Environment) is bad. Bad society, bad! Society is blamed for, well, society’s ills (hehe) in everything from middle school student essays to mainstream media news outlets. But we as individuals are all integral parts of the society. Someone like Krishnamurti would goes as far as to say that the individual is the society and the society is the individual.

The Inner and Outer of Politics

At the risk of complicating our simple model, let’s introduce Ken Wilber’s AQAL model. Basically, if we split the individual into an interior and exterior component, we get the top two quadrants in AQAL (I = thoughts, feelings and It = body, behavior). Likewise, if we split the environment into an interior and exterior component we get the bottom quadrants (We = culture and Its = systems, society). These four basic perspectives are available to us in any given moment, though we usually are only aware of one.

The Four Quadrants of Integral Theory (source: gaia.com)

Ken Wilber has pointed out that politics in America are largely dominated by Democrats focusing on the exterior quadrants and Republicans on the interior. Let’s take the plight of the inner city youth coming of age in a low-income community. Why does he not get a job? A Republican would say that it’s the individual’s responsibility to be proactive and make his own opportunities. The Democrat would say that the socio-economic conditions facing the individual are near insurmountable. To allow the individual to get a decent job, we have to first improve the socio-economic structure. 

Hey wait, seems like Republicans are blaming the individual, not society! That’s true. But they do also blame the culture. Why isn’t Joe the Unempolyed being proactive? He doesn’t have the right “family” (i.e. cultural) values. The AQAL model distinguishes between culture (”we”, an inner quadrant) and society (”its”, an outer), two concepts that are often confused (in every sense of the word). Thus, Republicans also take on the anti-environment bias of the Neo-liberal tradition but in its inner form as culture (damn that Hollywood, Marilyn Manson and those video games!). 

Psychosis and Society

In Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand presented in so many words her dystopian vision of a totalitarian society where the justification for all kinds of horrible things is the greater good of society, usually at the expense of the individual. Rand points out that society is in fact made up of individuals, claiming that working for the good of one’s own individual self will actually lead to a better society overall (”rational selfishness”).  

The antagonists in Atlas Shrugged disassociate the individual from her role as an integral member of society. We know from Psychology that elements of the psyche that are disassociated and repressed live on in the shadow (i.e. the unconscious). In Rand’s dystopia, the individual thus becomes repressed and demonized. Atlas Shrugged clearly resonates with the libertarian ideals of the United States as it reasserts the importance and autonomy of the individual in combatting this kind of disassociation.

However, disassociation goes both ways. In the U.S., the individual is put up on a pedestal and it is society (or culture) that is often demonized. This seems to have manifested in popular consciousness as a kind of narcissistic self-deprecation of one’s own American culture. 

Cultural Differences

After becoming conscious of this frame in myself, I began noticing it in many other ex-pats living here in Korea, as well as in American popular culture. Ironically, this disdain for and disassociation from mainstream American culture identifies oneself clearly as being a product of that culture just as much as espousing the values of the supposed mainstream.

Of course, it is not just Americans who are prone to overemphasizing one or the other of these synergistic elements. It’s interesting to see that Koreans who are well-versed in the English language and and hip to American culture also often adopt these kinds of anti-mainstream values and frames. 

In conversations with other Koreans not as well-versed in American culture, they often credit my less constrained lifestyle (polyamorous, no plans to work for a company or get married, taking on several roles at a time: grad student, rocker, spiritual practioner, etc.) to having been brought up in American society and culture. (While there is a lot of truth to that perspective in that my upbringing was an undeniable formative influence, my values and lifestyle are also the result of having the freedom to reflect on who I am and what my relationship is to society by being outside of my home culture in a foreign country.) I often hear: “Yeah, I’d like to do that, too, but I can’t because I’m Korean.” While it is true that Korean culture imposes more rigid social expectations that are harder to avoid, that self-disqualification also neglects the fact that the individual is an integral part of the society. Society and culture changes with the shifting tides of individual values and behaviors. And vice versa. 

Interestingly, however, supposedly open-minded Westerners are often befuddled by Koreans who are more inclined to follow their own paths (i.e. who are on the leading edge of societal change). A good friend of mine is often told by such Westerners that she is “not like other Koreans” implying somehow that she is not authentically Korean because she stretches the confines of her social roles. This turns out to be a common psychological device, by the way, according to Psychology Professor Dovidio:

“Even when presented with multiple exceptions to the stereotype, we often keep the broad category and simply create a subtype.” [New York Times,  My friend's blog excerpt of the same article has much more entertaining pictures.]

Games for the Lazy

The bias that society, or more generally an individual’s environment itself, is a hindrance to the individual pervades even the Computer Science research community.

A currently hot area of research is Ubiquitous (or Pervasive) Computing. One of the projects in my lab has to do with designing ubiquitous games to make boring life tasks more fun. At first I didn’t want to join this research project because of the assumptions and approaches that, as a limited and focused research paper, it must make (I later joined to help with the conference paper writing). One such assumption is that technology should change the environment to suit the individual.

There is nothing wrong with that in of itself (in fact it is a part of the history of human technology and society), but the narrow focus of research paper-writing leads to short-sighted design approaches that only focus on the technology and how it can be used to shape the environment. Such approaches don’t take into account the individual’s level of development or potential for growth. As a result, many such design approaches do away with “good pain” that can lead to personal growth as well as “bad pain” that is just plain pain. But that is a subject for another article.

Aligning Yourself with the Creative Impulse: The Birth of 無/有

Some spiritual philosophers, like Andrew Cohen, teach that it all began with a creative impulse, a “must” akin to God becoming sexually aroused to the point of imperative action. He argues further that the universe has a direction, an evolution that we are not only part of but indeed responsible for. But the creative impulse, that is the stuff universes are born of.

Flow

Can we get a taste of this universal creative impulse as individuals? Can we drink from the celestial creative juices of the Gods? But of course, my love. We often feel the creative impulse coursing through our being when we are “in state”, when we experience “flow”, or the “nimbus” as known in some seduction circles. 

Creativity and Competence

Creativity is the defining characteristic at the pinnacle of achievement. It’s almost cliche. The highly-educated physicist who receives an insight from a chocolate doughnut in a dream. The free, flowing improvisational technique of a jazz guitarist after years of calloused-fingered training. In NLP, they have a model for competence within a deep skill: 

• unconscious incompetence – unaware that you’re a bumbling fool
• conscious incompetence – aware that you need a lot of work
• conscious competence – aware that you’re kickin’ ass, and knowing how you do it
• unconscious competence –  not even thinking about it how you naturally excel

Flow occurs, of course, when you have reached unconscious competence. A few people seem to be born naturally in touch with the creative impulse, most of us can reach it by training in a skill or art until we’ve reached unconscious competence (yet again few do, I urge you to be one of those few, commit to your love of an art or other deep endeavor). And nearly all of us have had a glimpse of flow no matter how skilled or not we may be at the time, just as many of us have had glimpses of higher levels of consciousness from time to time before, if ever, we reach them (see the work of Ken Wilber).

Following the Creative Impulse

There is, though, another way to feel the flow of the creative impulse. That is simply to do what you want. When you follow your passions, you are driven by a rush of motivation and creativity. This begs the question, though, what do you really want to do?

Here you have to trust your heart, I’m afraid.

Going Astray

Several months ago I decided to start a blog. I wanted to express myself in writing and make some money on the side, as it were. I had a few different ideas for blogs, this being one of them, as well as an English language blog about investing and personal finance in Korea. I talked to some friends about my ideas, and most of them suggested I start the investing blog. It did indeed seem like the most practical route to go.

It was fun setting up the blog and at first it was satisfying to publish articles that could potentially be of help to people. Over time, however, the articles I wrote got fewer and far between.

Researching and writing articles for the blog began to feel like work. It had become a burden I’d placed on myself, taking time away from doing the stuff that really inspired me. Now I’ve decided to put that blog aside altogether. I still think there is a need for the information the blog aimed to provide, so I hope that someone else will take it over or start something similar, but my heart, as they say, is not in it. 

Finding the Way

My main interests for the past couple years have been in spirituality and self-development. In the Fall of last year, I was browsing through the Integral Theory websites and found one that offered Integral Life Coaching classes. Looking over the program, I realized I really want to do something like this. 

That seed of an impulse started as an interesting idea that I was toying with in how I could integrate my various interests and practices, but over the months, it has grown now into my mid-term life goal. I started to tell others about this goal, tentatively and almost embarrassed at first, now fully and confidently almost as if it was so apparent that the question didn’t need asking. I have made this goal part of my identity.

Defining Identity to Refining Action

The more I identify with this new role, the more I am driven to take action to actually manifest it. The area where I seek to specialize in is in integrating various interests and areas of your life so that they have a synergistic rather than antagonistic relationship. This means that I necessarily will be continuing with my diverse interests and practices, but I realized that some of my activities, like the investing blog, were diverting my energies away from my passions. 

Aligning with the Creative Impulse

When I started thinking about writing down my thoughts in the form of this blog, I began to feel excited and happy about the possibilities. When you are filled with such positive energy, you know that you are indeed aligning yourself with the creative impulse.

My point is this: take the time to evaluate your life and where you are directing your energies. When you strip away all that you “should”, all that is “work”, does your passion emerge naked and radiant, free to embrace you in the flow of the creative impulse?