Overcoming Prejudice - Being Creative.

I am a fan of a blog, Lateral Action which focuses on all aspects of creativity. Today, I read an interview with John T. Unger, a creative entrepreneur. I was delighted to find in Unger thoughts a "perfect" description of the overcoming of the third temptation and prejudice.

Here are Unger's thoughts:

One of my favorite personal mantras is:

If you can't think anything at all, you can't think anything at all.

By which I mean that in order to think clearly and accurately, I believe you must be willing to consider a problem from any angle, no matter how disturbing, personally distasteful, contrary to public opinion, unpopular, ridiculous, or scary. I could make the statement clearer by saying:

If there is anything you are unwilling to think about, you have lost the ability to think.

But that's just not as succinct. In order to create something that is truly new, one of the best paths is to explore the "unthinkable." I practice experiments of imagining exactly how it feels to take a position opposite to my own, or imagining things backwards, sideways, upside down and generally examining the opposite of everything I come across. A large number of my best ideas have come from this practice as well as an intellectual flexibility that serves me well both as an artist and a social being.

Another way of putting this is that I'll go way out of my way to mess up dogma, but I don't do this to people antagonistically. I just try to eradicate any preconceptions or assumptions I catch myself with because I know that they're always holding me back from a more complete view of the world and how I can interact with it.

To read the entire interview click here.

Backwards Review of Your Day - The Ruchshau

A very freeing, healing and strengthening exercise is the Ruchshau or the backwards review of your day.

Each night for five or ten minutes before you fall asleep, review your day backwards. Begin at the present moment and run the fill of your life on that day in reverse. Review the perceptions, thoughts, feelings, actions and interactions of all the hours of your waking day. You can focus on the central experiences or put some effort in to noticing the peripheral experiences. Here are a few examples:

I walked into town and passed a woman pushing a stroller but did not look at the baby.
I ate a hamburger and french fries for lunch - the fries were salty.
I worked on my big project but checked my email 3 times during the session. I felt restless.

The Ruchshau unwinds your experiences before they get rigidly consolidated into memory during sleep. This frees your soul from the weight of the earthly as it enters into spirit while your body sleeps.

I once heard a wise man share he would go backwards through the day and recall what he was doing at 10 minutes past the hour. If I have been in public, maybe at the grocery store, I will remember five faces I saw - this is a peripheral memory release.

All of us will sleep better physically and spiritually if we create and follow a nightly rhythm of sleep preparation. Consciously chosen rhythm is deeply nurturing to our being. Without rhythm we become prey to distraction and indulgence, to stress and anxiety. Make the nightly backwards review part of your bedtime ritual.

Freedom from Prejudice Exercises

Prejudice is thought held captive by a particular point of view and by a particular moment. It is a temptation very few of us can vanquish. The ease of forming opinion, perspective, attitude or conviction numbs most of us to the pain of dead thinking, feeling and willing.

As children every perception, thought, feeling or action is new and unique. A child does not have memories to fall back on or project forward. However, families and education often demand that a child adopt family and cultural prejudices. They are asked to obey and conform. Contrary opinion causes punishment and exclusion. We learn quite early in our lives that it is safe to hold prejudices and grasp the power of dominion over the the inner and outer kingdoms of our lives.

Morally we long for the freedom and responsibility to know the truth. Yet truth and prejudice deny each other. Sadly, we are so accustomed to prejudice and automatic thinking that the challenge to free our perceptions from a fixed perspective in a fixed moment feels daunting.

Rudolf Steiner said that Truth lives in the vicinity of the intersection of twelve point of view. Truth is not in the "eyes" of the beholder. Truth lies in the object beheld.

There are two demanding exercises to help you find the blessing of the twelve points of view. Place an object (a cup or flower or whatever) on a stool in the middle of a room (or go outside and find a tree in a field). Take a sketch book and a pencil, pick your first point of view and do your first sketch. Imagining this first sketch to be at 12 on the face of a clock, move to 1 and do your second sketch, then move to 2, then 3 and so on until you get back to 12. Each drawing will reveal a part of the cup, but not the whole cup. Notice how the light changes the intensity of the colors and the shadows move.

Another exercise is to draw an object in twelve different styles - like Picasso in all his different periods or twelve different colors like Andy Warhol. Even my Mac comes with Photo Booth so that I can take my picture using different effects. We want to loosen up our ways of perception. See things upside down and inside out.

Now pick an opinion you hold dear or a political leader you dislike. Write down your opinion (12 on the clock). Next write down the opposite opinion(6 on the clock). Then write down two more opinions that are midway between the first two but opposing to each other (3 & 9 on the clock). The difficulty here to to not just think the points of view, but to feel them, make them your own, as well. If you have the creative intelligence, continue to fill in the other eight opinions - not easy! This brings freedom into your thinking and feeling and definitely gets you unstuck from all temptations of prejudice. It may not change your mind, but it will make you alive in the moment of choice and discernment.

Another important benefit of these exercises is the enhanced capacity to maintain your center, your balance, your sense of selfhood when life falls into chaos. Too often we are tempted to sell our souls to the devil, in order to maintain a status quo, an identity or style of living.

Imagine knowing yourself as a being of many realities in many circumstances!

In the Moment in Time

When we take a momentary perception give it everlasting significance, we serve Satan. We give up the divine capacity to create and imagine. We get stuck in time and space.

In the moment we are only in one place with only one point of view. We cannot perceive living truth, feel empathy or strive for goodness, because we have turned our soul to stone (a high mountain).

Perceiving living truth, feeling empathy for others and striving for goodness in our deeds requires us to have multiple points of view.

How many perceptions in a moment have turned a part of you to stone? Make a list in your journal of these perceptions. What is their power and their glory? What is your power and your glory when you are frozen in that moment?

Make sure you consider all the moments of victimhood and woundedness.

The Third Temptation - What are the Kingdoms

It is quite natural to assume the "kingdoms" seen from the highest mountain are geo-political areas. However, if we recognize that the 40 days are the time it takes for the Cosmic Christ to experience and come to know earthly embodiment, then it becomes apparent that the temptations all relate to the biological realities of human embodiment.

Here is the third temptation : And the devil, taking him up into a high mountain, showed unto him all the kingdoms of the world in a moment of time.
6 And the devil said unto him, All this power will I give thee, and the glory of them: for that is delivered unto me; and to whomsoever I will, I give it.
7 If thou therefore wilt worship me, all shall be thine.
8 And Jesus answered and said unto him, Get thee behind me, Satan: for it is written, Thou shalt worship the Lord thy God,
and him only shalt thou serve.


From the experience of embodiment or incarnation the high mountain is then understood to indicate the brain and the nerve/sense system that is the biological source of all mental images. The kingdoms are ways in which perceptions of the world are formed and the perceptions themselves - sight and the seen, hearing and the heard, taste and the tasted, smell and the smelled, feeling and the felt.

Spiritual beings do not have these perceptions. Perceptions occur in the experience of separateness and there is no separation in the spiritual world. We enter into the world and the world enters into us through our senses. Spiritually, there is no "into" as it is all one and unified.

We must know our senses and their perceptions, but not be seduced by them.

Fantasy

When we fall into the temptation of Fantasy, we imagine something as true or evident in the future. It is the collapse of thinking into unreality due to an absence of will. When we fantasize we do not evaluate, plan or act - we simply wish or desire.

We fantasize a future that absolves the present weaknesses and delusions. This has been a very difficult temptation for me to vanquish. I survived my abusive and unhappy childhood by fantasizing a perfect adulthood - perfect relationship, perfect career, perfect bank account, perfect body, perfect, perfect, perfect! Just by surviving, all would turnout perfectly.

When I reached adulthood I was so attached to fantasizing, I never knew how to make something real. Dealing with gravity, practicality, limitations, setting goals, building a creative community did not live in my consciousness. I could advise others, even organizations, on the steps to manifestation, but I could not follow my own advice. I could just dream - confident that the angels would lift me up before I hit bottom.

Where are your fantasies?
Career?
Relationship?
Body image?
Vacations?
Spiritual Development?
Recognition?

What feeds your fantasies?
Media?
Fairy Tales?
Inflationary praise for your talent?

Pick one fantasy and make it practical? What are the stones you need to step on, even stub your toe on, to make your fantasy an exercise in reality and manifestation? Find your will forces!

Poem on Incarnation

I just found this poem by Wendell Berry (from Collected Poems)

And the world cannot be discovered by
a journey of miles,
no matter how long,
but only by a spiritual journey,
a journey of one inch,
very arduous and humbling and joyful,
by which we arrive at the ground at our feet,
and learn to be at home.

Inner Lent is a journey of one inch. In the last few weeks what of your Inner Lent Journey has been arduous? humbling? joyful?