Between this world and the next

The lifelong business of self creation involves two things: looking for new possibilities and bringing them into reality.

We are driven to create something new, and uniquely ours – this is evolution by design. We are innately creative.

In imagination we can consciously find new versions of ourselves. But there's a much greater, deeper pool of possibilities contained in the unconscious. To be the most that we can be, we search in these pools of potential and realise them through action. We move constantly between that murky world and the cold light of reality.

Self creation is difficult because it is balancing between two worlds: the imminent and the transcendent. It's all too easy to get lost in one or the other, and madness is the result.

Dreams

Artists for example live most of the time in potential, with neglected material lives. They explore the realms of possibility until they are lost. Madness in artists is no longer even a surprise.

There's an ingrained romantic myth that living in dreams is somehow more noble than being a materialist. The most famous Chinese novel, "Dream of the Red Chamber," is about the struggle between Taoism and Buddhism (on the side of transcendence), and Confucianism (realism). Like many dreamers the hero gives up the world to become a monk in the end.

But potential is only ever an empty promise until it is realised. It is a ‘nothing’ because nothing exists except in reality. It is a dead end.

Plato dealt in ideal forms – some greater truth out there we can neither see nor touch. Aristotle in contrast collected evidence of what he saw in the real world – and gave birth to science which changed our world beyond our wildest dreams.

There is a complex interplay between imagination and reality – they change each other.

Reality

The other example is interesting. Relentlessly materialistic people who spend their lives pursuing wealth and success are just as likely to be unhappy when they get there. This is a different kind of madness – that of never exploring alternatives.

Buddhists say this is the fault of endless desire, even when we get everything, we want more. Therefore they say desire is bad. But I think this is missing the point. Endless desire comes from our endless potential – which is simply a part of human nature.

Desire is the driving force of life and meeting its challenges with grace is the stuff of adulthood.

It's like a tug of war. We can get lost in either world, but for the pull of the other one pulling you back. It's strange how opposites melt into each other. Try to escape from reality through art or religion and you get lost in endless, empty potential. But try to cling to reality and you find it is itself a manifestation of endless potential.

The only real solution is to face endlessness directly.

This requires coming to terms with freedom and choice (more later), which is the only remedy to being lost.

The road less travelled

Everyone remembers these two lines from the Robert Frost poem, "Two roads diverged in a wood, and I - took the one less traveled by."

But I looked at the poem recently and the more important part is the verse above:

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

When I was at my soul destroying finance job many people advised me to stay there for three years, get a professional qualification and then pursue my dreams. Others justified their lives there by dreaming about some vague time after retirement.

In my mind this is about as logical as planning to marry a rich man, wait til he dies and leaves you all his money before marrying the poor painter you're in love with.

But this simple minded solution was an incredibly difficult and frustrating thing to argue against, because it papers over a point that no one wants to hear. The point made in that verse - that choices lead to other choices and you will never come back to that fork in the road again. It's impossible to keep the other road for another day.

It's impossible to have it both ways. And nowadays, that's a very controversial thing to say.

I recently met an aspiring, female writer in her late twenties. She was looking for a husband, and with it all the trappings of surburban respectability - 2.4 children, house and white picket fence. She concluded that the only way to have it all is to find a highly paid businessman who would support her while she writes. In her words "there can be only one artist in the family."

I wanted to shake this woman so hard - she's symptomatic of all that's wrong in the world.

What kind of writing would she produce with this kind of set up, this kind of mentality? Maybe she'd write great chick lit about women finding rich husbands. A conventional life produces conventional work. She didn't seem to understand that her means have defeated the ends because writing is a mirror for the soul.

Being an idealist, an artist, means really living on the edge of life, reporting back from the extremes of human experience. The edge of the abyss.

For me it's not about being a writer, it's about being that type of person. Writing is only the wrapping for a present. Too often I read bloggers who want to be writers with long, winding entries that have nothing to say, no point to make. Like a gorgeous present that's empty when opened.

I blame in part the relentless consumerism of modern life that tells us we should have it all because we're worth it, and we can have it all if only we try hard enough. But in that case what's the meaning of decisions? How do you find out who you are? Or what is worthwhile vs what's not?

The road less travelled leads to inbalance, and I'm struggling to accept my choice. To be unafraid of extreme experiences, and to not require the conventional.

What is wealth?

This is a weird one, bear with me...

Being wealthy is when you would still want to do what you are doing now if you won the lottery tomorrow

Because it means the things you have now is worth about the same as that $10 million, or maybe even more. It means you already have that wealth.

On the subject of worth and wealth...

It always surprises me how people make these decisions, how much is something worth, and how much they would exchange for it.

Like my father who always said to me 'Not many people are geniuses, you're unlikely to be one of them, you're unlikely to be special'. He was really trying to convince himself. I think he really could have been a genius, could have been special. He was already starting to gain national levels of recognition and fame when he married my mother - chaining himself to a deeply flawed and problematic burden. That bad decision cost him his life purpose.

But in order to justify it to himself, or just to avoid admitting it to himself, he gave up the whole idea of being special, or even the existence of greatness. So that he didn't have to admit he was wrong and make changes.

It always surprises me that people can give up things of the greatest worth for things that are worth really nothing at all. By some magic, some slight of hand, some trick lighting, somewhere along life's path one can appear as the other.

Or maybe that value judgement is really the hardest test.