I like to think that we all share this immediate reality in front of us, the physical reality but we also share another reality that we don’t even notice is there without putting our attention on it directly. It’s like your nose on your face, you’re likely unaware of it throughout the day how much it sits right in the middle of your perception until I mentioned it.
Once you’re aware of it you can’t unsee it, and we become aware how our vision is slightly obscured by our nose. Our self concept is similar its like a dot in our perception, it is always there and always in full view but its invisible to us through our day to day activities.
The shared reality I am mentioning is the imagination and the dot in that perception is your concept of yourself. Your self concept is just that, an idea that you ascribe to about you. It’s the version of yourself that you imagine in various situations, moods, and circumstances throughout the day.
What you think you are is just that, it’s just your idea, someone else has a separate different idea of you. So there is no objective “you”, that is seperate from your imaging of “you”. To understand it better I’ll give you an example of how it doesn’t work to show you this dot within your perception. This is a somewhat gruesome example, some may think, but I think this illustrates the point well so bare with me for a moment and you’ll see my point.
Consider a dog for a moment, if you take a stick and beat a dog long enough the dog will stay beaten. They will either be scared for the rest of their life or become hostile to everyone around them. They cannot change, the dog will remain psychically beaten for the rest of its life.
This isn’t so for a human being, a human can be beaten into the ground by almost cosmic forces and through reflecting and understanding what happened in their life and more importantly the role it is that you played in creating it, can change the idea of themselves in the privacy of their own mind without the consent of any other person and come back like a phoenix out of the ashes.
Gone Fishing
But what is this? And where is this coming from? This is the other shared reality that we all have access to which is the imagination. David Lynch, the film director, has a great quote about creating art he says that when he meditates he says to himself he is “Going Fishing”. He sees it as he is sitting in his imagination and around him are ideas, some of these ideas pass through his awareness and then suddenly one comes up and attaches itself to his bait.
Before reeling it in he sits with it and notices other ideas coming to him, similar ideas, ideas that could be amended to the previous one and so forth. I think it’s important to realize we have the ability, in our imagination to call anything to mind, an animal, a place, a person…anything its completely infinite and this is what it means to be human. To have connection to this infinite ethereal domain of life.
Every thing around you from this computer you are reading this on to your shoes or stop signs all came from the imagination and only exist in the shared imaginal space that you have with other people. To a dog a stop sign or a median doesn’t exist as a concept, it’s only real to those who have been given the gift of speech and mind.
So what does that mean? What does it mean that I can call my past into my mind, and imagine my future but also imagine myself in another persons place. If we all share the imagination that what is the difference between you imagining yourself and I imagining for you in your place? Honestly after diving deeper into Philip K Dicks writings on simulation theory I’m not sure what the difference is, personally.
So what is the benefit of understanding this for creativity? Well I think that if we come to a understanding that the idea itself is floating in a sort of liminal space and we are just selecting these ideas and bringing them to life we can let go of this pressure you have to be “a successful artist” in the real world.
Today we address being a successful artist as someone who can make money at the craft, this is understandable artists have to make a way in the world and the soul calls to express itself fully without obstruction. But the trap we fall into is looking to the results of others and trying to compete with this artist or look at what others who are making money at art are doing and copy that. The result is that you end up being miserable because you are not that artist so your way of working will always fall short and you will beat yourself up over it and then burn out.
This is the exact opposite of what happens when you are fully aware that its not you that is doing anything and instead it is you submitting to the imagination and opening yourself up to receive the ideas that are specifically suited for you not cyncially creating for the market.
You also stop feeling overwhelmed. Which is another dot in our perception, a log in your eye that keeps you from doing the work, one that is specifically an issue for creatives. Have you ever felt like there is not enough time to get all the things you want to do done? That you have more ideas than time?
Well if what I stated before is true, that the imagination is a shared realm we all inhabit and pull ideas from into a physical manifestation of them in this world, Im not surprised that I have 10 times the amount of ideas v.s. what I can execute at any given time because the imagination is infinite and so I’ll never have the time to convey all of these ideas in one lifetime.
It’ll take more lifetimes, which is you.
The one reading this article, the other me that is living a different variation of the same life. That idea that you fell in love with but also scared the shit out of you is your path. Fear is a compass telling you to march in that direction, because through that process of realizing that goal you will be radically transformed.
So there’s no need to feel overwhelmed because I don’t need to bring every idea into being, it's not possible. I don’t know for you but for me when all of this understanding clicked into place a great sense of peace and ease came over me. I was then able to drop trying to create like such and such illustrator so I could get work for a company that I really don’t like in the first place.
This is not a career path, it’s a lifestyle. Don’t forget that, it's a way of life. The irony is is when you submit to that path completely and live that you will naturally find yourself in the position you always wanted to be in. But it's interesting to me that even now I have fear, fear that it could go away. How much time is wasted being fearful in the past of whether I would be where I am right now, but here I am yet the fear of losing it is there too.
Then you start creating from that authentic place, fear and anxiety drop like a deadweight. Confidence bows before the seeker and you live from a place of inner peace and creating from that place and being connected to that creative energy is the real payment that artists get to enjoy and relish in daily that other people don’t have access to.
Their reality is that of being an adult, making sure to put on the proper mask when dealing with society. I often felt out of place growing up like I wanted to be someone else, but now I realize what the imagination is I realize I wouldn’t trade who I am for anything else.
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