MOYERS: You Write in The Mythic Image about the center of transformation, the idea of a sacred place where the temporal walls may dissolve to reveal a wonder.  What does it mean to have a sacred place?

CAMPBELL: This is an absolute necessity for anybody today.  You must have a room, or a certain hour or so a day, where you don’t know what was in the newspapers that morning, you don’t know who your friends are, you don’t know what you owe anybody, you don’t know what anybody owes to you.  This is a place where you can simply experience and bring forth what you are and what you might be.  This is the place of creative incubation.  At first you may find that nothing happens there.  But if you have a sacred place and use it, something eventually will happen.

Tags:

campbell, creativity, myth, meditation

“A genius! For 37 years I’ve practiced fourteen hours a day, and now they call me a genius!” –Pablo Sarasate (Spanish violinist)

Think of the greatest athlete, musician, artist or business professional that inspires you. The amazing talents that really stand out. Michael Jordan. Tiger Woods. Warren Buffett. They were each born with a special gift: wired from birth with talents and abilities that most of us don’t have access to, right?

Research is showing that it’s not that simple. In fact, many child prodigies don’t go on to major success in the area of their early gifts. And many of the greatest performers, athletes and business people never showed any early signs of aptitude.

So, how did they become great at what they do?

A couple of years ago I read an article by Geoffrey Colvin in Fortune, What It Takes To Be Great. The article is fascinating and delves into the question of innate abilities, usually referred as “the talent myth”.

Click here to continue reading the article (complete with links to download mindmaps). Thanks to Luciano @ LiteMind and, in particular, guest writer Don Campbell.

I was at the book store the other week, saw a book on his life and works, and decided to pick it up.  While reading the book, I saw reference to one of his famous works: Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and its Attainment.  I’ve been briefly skimming the book (thanks to Google Books) and found 2 great passages that resonated with me.  Steiner discusses the importance of patience with respect to the pursuit of knowledge (pg. 31).

“… no student should spend more time and strength upon these exercises  than he can spare with due regard to his station in life and to his duties; nor should he change anything for the time being, in the  external conditions of his life through taking this path.  Without patience no genuine results can be attained.”

AND

“When the student seeks the path leading to higher knowledge in the way described in the preceding chapter, he should not omit to fortify himself; throughout his work, with one ever present thought.  He must never cease repeating to himself that he may have made quite
considerable progress after a certain interval of time, though it may  not be apparent to him in the way he perhaps expected; otherwise he can lose heart and abandon all attempts after a short time.”

Tags:

philosophy, quotes, tips, patience

Here’s a quick sample of some of my favorites on this uber list:

4. Learn mind mapping.
25. Exercise!
39. Simplify!
47. Capture every idea. Keep an idea bank.
50. Keep a journal.

Overall, great post. Please do check it out!

From the article:

“Ten days ago, on Friday, June 13th, 2008, I had the extraordinary privilege of talking to George Carlin. As far as I know it was the last in-depth interview he gave before he passed away yesterday at age 71. Originally it was slated to run as a 350-word Q&A on the back page of Psychology Today. But I was so excited to talk to him—and he was so generous with his time—that I just kept on going. By the end I had over 14,000 words.

On stage, George Carlin came across as a grouch, often vulgar and sometimes misanthropic. But with me he was patient and warm, happy to talk through the minutiae of his creative process and eager to share stories about his childhood, his evolution as a comic, and his influence. What struck me most was the joy in his voice as he talked about the wonderful feeling he got in his gut while writing. I was also moved by the gratitude he expressed for his mother, who he said “saved” him and his brother—leaving her bullying, alcoholic husband when George was just two months old, getting a job during the worst years of the Depression, and raising two boys on her own.”

One particular Q&A that stuck out to me was Arthur Koestler’s influence on Carlin’s work. I’m only partially familiar with Koestler’s works, but I’m assuming the book he’s referring to is The Act of Creation (now officially on my reading list).

“You asked me to remind you to tell me about Arthur Koestler.

That was another impact. I was doing nightclub comedy down in the Village. I was down there in ’63, ’64, and my friend told me about Arthur Koestler’s book about the act of creation and it had a section on humor.

He was talking about the creative process. There was an illustration on the panel that showed a triptych. On the left panel, there were these names of artistic pursuits. There were poets, painter, composer. And one of them was jester. I was only interested in the jester. What he said about each of these, he said these individuals on the left hand side can transcend the panels of the triptych by creative growth.

The jester makes jokes, he’s funny, he makes fun, he ridicules. But if his ridicules are based on sound ideas and thinking, then he can proceed to the second panel, which is the thinker—he called it the philosopher. The jester becomes the philosopher, and if he does these things with dazzling language that we marvel at, then he becomes a poet too. Then the jester can be a thinking jester who thinks poetically.

I didn’t see that and say, “That’s what I am going to do,” but I guess it made an impression on me. I was never afraid to grow and change. I never was afraid of reversing my field on people, and I just think I’ve become a touch of each of those second and third descriptions and I definitely have a gift for language that is rhythmic and attractive to the ear, and I have interesting imagery which I guess is a poetic touch. And I like the fact that most of my things are based on solid ideas, things I’ve thought about in a new way for me, things for which I have said “Well, what about this? Suppose you look at it this way? How about that?” And then you heighten and exaggerate that, because comedy’s all about heightening and exaggerating. And anyways I guess I was impressed that there was another thing from my early life that probably at least influenced me to some level.”

On a parting note, I think George’s thoughts on death are appropriate:

“The most unfair thing about life is the way it ends. I mean, life is tough. It takes up a lot of your time. What do you get at the end of it? A Death! What’s that, a bonus? I think the life cycle is all backwards. You should die first, get it out of the way. Then you live in an old age home. You get kicked out when you’re too young, you get a gold watch, you go to work. You work forty years until you’re young enough to enjoy your retirement. You do drugs, alcohol, you party, you get ready for high school. You go to grade school, you become a kid, you play, you have no responsibilities, you become a little baby, you go back into the womb, you spend your last nine months floating …and you finish off as an orgasm.”

—

George Carlin

R.I.P.

John Houtz is a psychologist and professor at Fordham University. His most recent book is The Educational Psychology of Creativity (Hamptom Press, 2002).

Julia Cameron is an award-winning poet, playwright and filmmaker. Her book The Artist’s Way (Jeremy P. Tarcher/Putnam, 2002) has sold more than three million copies worldwide. Her latest book is The Writing Diet.

Robert Epstein is a visiting scholar at the University of California, San Diego. Contributing editors for Scientific American Mind and former editor in chief of Psychology Today, Epstein has written several books on creativity, including The Big Book of Creativity Games (McGraw-Hill, 2000).

Source: http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=how-to-unleash-your-creativity

One key take away I had from this article was Robert Epstein’s model of Four Different Competencies of Creative Expression:

• “capturing” — preserving new ideas as they occur to you and doing so without judging them.
• “challenging”— giving ourselves tough problems to solve.
• “broadening” — The more diverse your knowledge, the more interesting the interconnections—so you can boost your creativity simply by learning interesting new things.
• “surrounding” — which has to do with how you manage your physical and social environments.

Definitely an interesting read……

I’ve spent the last couple weeks setting up my new personal wiki.  My ultimate goal is to use a wiki, and other open source applications/tools, to act as a personal knowledge manager and learning aid.  I’ve also been evaluating a fantastic extension called Semantic MediaWiki (or SMW).  SMW essentially “upgrades” the capability of a wiki, which really is blobs of inter-related text by adding semantic meaning to various items in each page.

I figured I’d experiment and make a real-world application.  Since I was a teenager, I’ve been intrigued by dreaming, and lucid dreaming in particular.  And, starting last year, I experimented with keeping a consistent dream journal for about 4 months.  I managed to import all of the data into my semantic wiki and can now run some pretty elaborate searches on the dream actors, location, clarity/type (lucid or not), and major objects or themes in the dream.  With just 4 months of data it’s shown some interesting patterns and has started to give me insight into some of the dreams.  I’ve decided to keep up with the dream journal habit, and we’ll see what interesting things I can discover.

Now…. what’s with all the finger and toe mention?  I was searching for some lucid dream related articles a few minutes ago and came across this bizarre/interesting post on somebody who was having a lucid dream and decided to take acid (while he was in the dream, of course).

Here is an excerpt to think about:

“I can’t stop feeling like my life is a dream, that everyone I know is actually just a personality dreamt up by my own mind, that even my own self is an imagination, and that really there is nothing at all, nothing whatsoever, except for this one mind with no dimensions and no time that dreams up life to escape the horror of its utter isolation. I think I now understand the meaning of the Zen phrase “I alone am the world-honored one.”

Now I think that it must be truly horrible to be God, to be IT! Nothing else beyond you or apart from you, no help, no world, no god to pray to, no nothing except your own self. Maybe he couldn’t take it and blew himself up into fragments just so he’d have some company and something to do for a while, and that’s what our universe is. Maybe we are so frantic to live this life because we’re terrified of the truth, that we are all that is, and we are ALONE! We are fingers and toes making friends with eachother, making up stories and dramas so that we don’t have to think about the terrible eternal nothingness.”

Source: http://www.yahooka.com/forum/51459645-post1.html

Tags:

lucid, dream, journal, reflection, zen, trip, alone

“Now and then it happened in my practice that a patient grew beyond himself because of unknown potentialities, and this became an experience of prime importance to me.  In the meantime, I had learned that all the greatest and most important problems of life are fundamentally insoluble.  They must be so, for they express the necessary polarity inherent in every self-regulating system.  They can never be solved, but only outgrown.  I therefore asked myself whether this outgrowing, this possibility of further psychic development, was not the normal thing, and whether getting stuck in a conflict was pathological.  Everyone must possess that higher level, at least in embryonic form, and must under favourable circumstances be able to develop this potentiality.  When I examined the course of development in patients who quietly, and as if unconsciously, outgrew themselves, I saw that their faces had something in common.  The new thing came to them from obscure possibilities either outside or inside themselves; they accepted it and grew with its help.  It seemed to me typical that some took the new thing from outside themselves, others from inside; or rather, that it grew into some persons from without, and into others from within.  But the new thing never came exclusively either from within or from without.  If it came from outside, it became a profound inner experience; if it came from inside, it became an outer happening.  In no case was it conjured into existence intentionally or by conscious willing, but rather seemed to be borne along the stream of time.”

Tags:

jung, quotes, potentiality, change, growth

Summary from YouTube:

Using a computer generated photo of the ideal beautiful woman as a baseline(credited to faceresearch.org), I fed this photo into a face transformer (from perceptionlab.com). This transformer can convert a photo based on age, race, and other options into a new photo. I then used a morphing application to transition between these photos.

Link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uENxJAlN1wM

A few people have asked what song I used for the background music. And, the answer is that I actually created the song using Garage Band. I posted about my first song last July (titled “Transition”) in the article Creating Music With Apple Garage Band. I started work on a second song, but only partially finished. Then, a few months later I completed the song. As I was working on the Morphing Faces of Beauty video, I realized that this song would be the perfect fit.

Here is the song:

M3U Stream

MP3 File

Here’s an overview of the podcast:

“Kelly and Michael Gelb chat about mind maps, which can be used for almost any activity – for brainstorming, problem solving, setting goals and achieving them; and especially for writing and learning. Essentially, mind maps integrate the left and right hemispheres of the brain, and by creating new connections in your brain, they help you to be more creative.

Michael learned mind mapping from Tony Buzan, and his inspiration for mind mapping is Leonardo da Vinci’s notebooks.”

I hadn’t heard of Michael before, but after listening to the podcast will definitely check out some of his books.