Shamanism for the Age of Science: Awakening the Energy Body - Kenneth Smith 2018

Discovery
Building a Creative Life

Creativity, or bringing something into being, results from weaving form and potential. Form is cohesion, a type of energy field. Potential is abstract energy, energy that has possibilities of realization but isn’t there yet: perhaps a rarified type of form. Pure potential is completely abstract, the infinite creation, which contains everything but has no structure.

How these energies interact determines what you create—the imaginings of your life and world. Remember that whatever you experience results from your cohesion, or rather the capacity of your cohesion to perceive. Cohesion also determines how you continue to connect with potential, which influences what you experience as the energy body meets greater and more expansive emanations.

If you don’t connect with potential, you circle within the conditional field you already have. This may keep you amused for a while, but you aren’t going to grow very much. When you squarely face potential, you place your life on the line—each and every moment of it. This moves you from talk about life into a relationship with the world where you live to the hilt. The following perspectives serve to help you to orient to this edge and gauge how you build your life on it.

Discovery

Part of creativity is discovery, which can take many forms. There is the brilliant flash of intuition, when all effort suddenly comes together to deliver an expanded knowing. This Eureka! mode of invention has been a mainstay since humans became conscious and curious.

Another form of discovery is serendipity, the seemingly accidental or chance discovery. When Alexander Fleming noticed that bacteria were not growing around the mold that had appeared on some unwashed culture plates he had casually left on his lab bench, he turned that observation into penicillin. Yet, as mathematics professor Steven Strogatz points out, serendipitous discoveries are not chance revelations. They occur because people are alertly looking for something; they “just happen to find something else.” In his book Sync: The Emerging Science of Spontaneous Order, Strogatz entertainingly reveals processes of entrainment, resonance, and cooperation as being parts of a greater synchronicity occurring throughout life.¹

There is also discovery as measured by the time-honored plodding of a disciplined mind as it wrestles with what is known, what it sees that doesn’t fit convention, and eventually illuminates the unknown: that which waits behind a veil. Einstein remained on track for years as he developed the thinking that eventually led to his theory of relativity. The simple truth is that the heart of discovery contains many styles, these and others, and that each supports the others.

Discovery is regulated by models—small or large landscape views—which at once open and close perception. All of the different avenues of discovery are constructs that allow us to focus awareness in ways that deliver results. Even serendipity, where discovery-by-chance may seem random, needs the support of a context in which the discovery may take hold. Fleming, for example, had extensive scientific background that guided the application of his observation; penicillin didn’t surface like a rabbit from a hat. At the same time, discovery also requires a suspension of what is thought to be true—a form of deautomatization—to allow imagination to come forth.

In one bioenergetic model, discovery hinges on how well a person aligns with the energy fields that contain what is awaiting discovery. This suggests that the thing being discovered already exists; awareness just needs to unfold into that realm. Put a different way, the inventor entrains to the discovery already existing in imagination, and then the inventor’s skill in creativity determines the outcome.

Creativity hinges on the interplay of learning and imagination. For example, the wildly commercial success of the previously unknown “pet rock” was based on the known commodities of “pet” and “rock.” Placing the two together was new but not foreign. Likewise, it took some time before the idea of a submarine became a concept worth developing, and then it took longer still to make it work.

Perception closes when data of a new and wider view is not recognized or is dismissed as irrelevant. The person advancing the ideas often suffers ridicule or worse by those who, for whatever reason, have a stake in the current scheme of things. Even in the midst of the technological development of undersea travel, in which supposedly foolish ideas became reality, the mere talk of something that could fly would have almost ensured a hard rebuff; the prevailing model regarded air travel as impossible and inhibited forward movement.

The process of discovery is like being part of a motion picture set that is so well designed that there lives an implicit assumption about its reality. Then the curtain lifts, revealing yet a new landscape and people say, “Oh, great, now we found the real world.” This happens time and again as human knowledge increases, yet we are not taught that the curtain will rise once again to reveal yet another entirely new vista. Going backstage to observe what is really going on, rather than remaining focused on the special effects, is also at the heart of creativity.