- Alchemy
- Archetype
- Artful Living
- Creative Processes
- Hardware, Software & The Internet
- Health
- Muse
- Mystery
- Myth
- Mythic Images
- Mythogem
- Mythopoesis
- Mythos
- Nature
- Pantarbe
- Personal Myth
- Personal Mythos
- Prosperity
- Recreation
- Society
- Speculative Genre
- The Artist
- The Arts
- Travel
Alchemy
Traditionally, alchemy is a chemical philosophy that aims to transmute base metals into gold, to discover the panacea (a remedy for all diseases, evils or difficulties), and to prepare the elixir of longevity. Alchemy often refers to other seemingly magical powers or processes of transmuting.
Beyond the claim to create gold, cure-alls, or potions of youth, alchemy concerns change, particularly changes within ourselves. I consider alchemical philosophy to be metaphoric for various psychological, even mythic, procedures or processes that involve changes in life. Life is full of changes. Learning to deal with change artfully, it seems to me, is an — if not the — underlying goal of an alchemist.
Anyone who works creatively as an agent of change is both an alchemist and an artist. Art involves creativity; alchemy involves metamorphosis — creativity and metamorphosis both involve change.
An artful life is one’s dance with one’s muse.
Archetype
An invisible, primal model, paradigm, metaphor or symbol within one’s mind that remains unchanged over time and space, which represents aspects of one’s self, controls how one experiences the world, and inspires similar patterns in the creative arts, literature, myth, legends, religion, and dreams.
Artful Living
Approaching one’s life and finding solutions to life’s many problems with the same creativity one would apply to any of the arts or writing.
Creative Processes
A creative person is an agent of change, fabricating something new from the old. Creative processes are characterized by originality, expressiveness, imagination, and productivity. They are defined by theories and methods or techniques.
“The creative act is not hanging on, but yielding to new creative movement.”
Diane K. Osbon, editor
Reflections on the Art of Living: A Joseph Campbell Companion
copyright 1991 by the Joseph Campbell Foundation.
“Most books that concern the inventive work of artists, scientists, or business people are about creativity, a personal trait. ‘Creating’, on the other hand, is a name of a process. It asks how the creative person thinks, not what the creative person is.”
D.N. Perkins
The Mind’s Best Work
copyright 1981 by D.N. Perkins
“Creating is the process by which a maker achieves a creative product…
“The process is a teleological one, governed by plans restricting the final product that exist at the outset and plans that arise during the course of creating. The plans lead to the marshaling of the maker’s resources to realize them. Accident occurs abundantly, but realizes, arises out of, or is assimilated to purpose…
“Understanding how creating occurs requires understanding how originality and other qualities that make a product creative get put into the developing of the product…
“To explain this, it is useful to view creating as a process of selecting from among the many possible outcomes – arrays of words, formulas, pigments on a surface, and so on…
“The preselections of the maker’s personal history and the histories of the culture, the species, and the physical world channel what the maker will attempt and equip the maker with skills and schemata to attempt it…
“Although the simplest sort of making would involve a direct jump from preselection to a final selection, makers, by adopting roundabout tactics of selection, increase the reach of their efforts. The basic roundabout tactics are planning, abstracting, undoing, and making means into ends…
“The resources of minds…noticing, realizing, directed remembering, problem finding, schemata, hill climbing, critical reasons, and many more – each contribute to creating by helping to accomplish selection…
“These same resources of selection explain masterly and more ordinary creating. The master will notice more, exercise better critical judgement, and so on, but the processes involved are the same in kind…
“The creative quality gets put into a work primarily through skillful selecting for it or selecting for features that favor it. The selective processes involved need not be intrinsically creative, but simply responsive to what is being selected for…
“Originality may occur through direct selecting for it or as a spinoff, a side effect or selecting for other qualities…
“In any case, selecting for originality cannot dominate the selective process…originality adds little worth to the product unless the product achieves competence in other respects…
“Creativity involves style, values, beliefs, tactics that specifically favor selecting for a creative product…
“Creating at an extraordinary level depends on superior learned and inborn abilities to do the relevant work or selection. However, for the most part, these abilities shouldn’t be considered a part of the maker’s creativity, since other persons equally able may function quite uncreatively. Creativity concerns what we do with our abilities. Any normal person can be creative in terms of whatever abilities he or she has or can acquire…
“To understand creating as a process of selection, to understand how various psychological phenomena contribute to the work of selection, and to understand that products become creative because that is what is selected for, to understand all this is to grasp, in one way at least, the nature of creating.”
D.N. Perkins
The Mind’s Best Work
copyright 1981 by D.N. Perkins
Hardware, Software & The Internet
Information technology has allowed us to create and share our creative works in several media at once.
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Health
Health is any state of optimal functioning, well being or progress which is free from disease and abnormality, when all involved is dynamically balanced.
“Art is the set of wings to carry you out of your own entanglement.”
Diane K. Osbon, editor
Reflections on the Art of Living: A Joseph Campbell Companion
copyright 1991 by the Joseph Campbell Foundation.
Muse
Within each person is a faculty I call the “muse”. It is that aspect of a person which is in tune with his or her personal mythos and which brings it to his or her awareness through intuition, imagination and dreams. It is one’s inner ability to create – the “artist within” which is one’s source of inspiration.
The muse combines problem solving, decision making, everyday consciousness, dreams, memories, ideas, facts, talents, skills and feelings. It is one’s intuition or “gut feeling” of whatever lies beyond one’s awareness in one’s environment. To some the muse embraces one’s unconscious self – those aspects deep within, even one’s soul or spirit. Empathetically, through archetypes in myths or dreams, the muse may provide insight into other people and our universe.
“…One day I realized suddenly that the seeing and the drawing had fused into one single undivided act. I called it seeing/drawing. It was a revelation, and it changed my life… Seeing/drawing is not something apart from my life, it is my way of being in total contact with life within and around me. Having discovered the artist-within me, I began to see the artist-within others, sometimes hidden within others, the human core of EveryOne. The artist-within does not just look at things and living beings, the artist-within has the capacity to see.
“The artist-within, the only authentic one, however repressed and distorted, is for real. The artist-within does not indulge in self-labeling; the artist-within has no pretensions…”Frederick Frank
Zen Seeing, Zen Drawing: Meditation in Action
copyright 1993 by Frederick Frank
“Our work is artful when we, like the potter at her wheel, are ‘alive to the concreteness of a moment’ and ‘create out of the materials of the moment’. Being alive to the concreteness of the moment means being fully attentive to all that is happening in the present.”
“The materials of the moment are more than the physical things in front of us – more than simply the clay, a report from a task force, a page of numbers, a set of charts, a machine, or ideas written on a white board. The materials of the moment include emotion and spirit. When we include them, we become who we truly are and bring all of ourselves to our work. We become centered and artful.”
“All work concerns spirit and soul and involves our ability to connect them with surface realities.”
“The artist does not normally take full responsibility for inspired work but honors it as a gift from the divine.”
“We are ‘on center’ when our entire self is present in what we do, including our emotional self… In almost every office, conference room, and factory,in almost every organization, we have created a vast emotional undercurrent, a world of unexpressed, unaddressed feelings… We cannot overestimate the importance of this emotional undercurrent… Alongside the emotional undercurrent is a spiritual one. Its workings are every bit as profound and powerful as those related to the emotional undercurrent.”
“Consistent and conscious use of the self suggest that we express the undercurrent and convert it into constructive energy…
“Consistent and conscious use of the self in work requires that we become intimate with our own interior world. That is, of course, a lifelong task… It means becoming more practiced at sensing our emotions, imagination, spirit and soul, our dreams, reflections, and reveries while at work, and using the energy they contain to move our work forward.”
“Besides bringing our interior lives to work, consistent and conscious use of the self also requires encouraging those around us to give voice to their interior lives. This does not involve playing amateur psychologist. The point of encouraging others to give voice to their interior lives is not to fix people or to solve problems. The point is to bring the powerful energy of the interior life to the task at hand.”
“Consistent and conscious use of the self within work also requires learning to utilize the energy of the interior world to move our work forward.”
“Consistent and conscious use of the self means taking back our disowned feelings and spiritual longings. It means treating unpleasant emotions as clues that some kind of healing is occurring or is required. It means observing the manifestations of spirit and soul. It means listening and seeing what is being revealed to us by our interior lives. Finally, it means using the meaning we gain through observing these mysteries to create work and organizations where artfulness will thrive.”“Faith is belief in something that cannot be proven… Faith requires an artist to embrace a vision without knowing exactly how the vision will come alive.”
“Exactly how a leader makes dreams come true is a mystery. The process is akin to art… Leaders are experts in conjuring faith – faith in them and faith in ourselves. Leaders trust their invisible guages and encourage us to trust our own. Leaders inflame our faith in their visions and awaken our faith in who we can be.”
Dick Richards
Artful Work: Awakening Joy, Meaning,
and Commitment in the Workplace
copyright 1995 by Dick Richards
“One way of evoking your deeper wisdom and higher possibilities is to cultivate what we call the ‘Inner Shaman’…
“The shaman’s powers and ecstatic visions provided guidance and explanation to tribal peoples for natural events that wer otherwise unfathomable. The shaman was an artist in relation to the culture’s guiding mythology, adept at guarding, transmitting, and transforming it. As myth-making has become more highly personalized, modern individuals are called upon to become skilled in developing such facility with their own personal mythologies. To cultivate the Inner Shaman is to develop within yourself the skills for becoming a thoughtful agent of your own evolving reality. Your Inner Shaman can be a guide to the hidden and unutterably rich landscape of your unconscious…
“The Inner Shaman has three essential responsibilities. The first is to maintain a conduit between the waking consciousness of ‘Ordinary Reality’ and the hidden reality of the ‘Other Worlds…’ The second responsibility of the Inner Shaman is to creatively and effectively bring new circumstances into accord with your guiding mythology… Third, your Inner Shaman guides the evolution of your existing mythology.”
David Feinstein, Ph.D. and Stanley Krippnet, Ph.D.
Personal Mythology: The Psychology of Your Evolving Self
copyright 1988 by Feinstein and Krippnet
Mystery
A mystery is unknowable. It is something profound, inexplicable, or secretive that is not understood or beyond understanding. Only through personal experience or by revelation can one learn a mystery, but once learned it ceases to be a mystery.
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Myth
A story, real or fictional, that appeals to the consciousness of a people by embodying its cultural ideals and/or giving expression to deep, commonly felt emotions through mythogems.
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Mythic Images
A mythic image is an archetype or mythogem – an elemental pattern of a myth or mythos, cultural or personal – as expressed through the creative arts. While usually visual, or described by words, Mythic Images can also be evoked through other senses or media.
“Mythology helps you identify the mysteries of the energies pouring through you.”
“Mythology is an organization of images metephoric of experience, action and fulfillment of the human spirit in the field of a given culture at a given time.”
Diane K. Osbon, editor
Reflections on the Art of Living: A Joseph Campbell Companion
copyright 1991 by the Joseph Campbell Foundation.
“Jung has spent much time in studying myths, for he considers them to be fundamental expressions of human nature. When a myth is formed and expressed in words, consciousness, it is true, has shaped it, but the spirit of the myth – the creative urge it represents, the feelings it expresses and evokes, and even in large part its subject matter – come from the collective unconsious. Myths, it is true, often seem like attempts to explain natural events, such as sunrise and sunset, or the coming of spring with all its new life and fertility, but in Jung’s view they are far more than this, they are expressions of how man experiences these things.”
Frieda Fordham
An Introduction to Jung’s Psychology
copyright 1953, 1959, 1966 by Frieda Fordham
“Myths, in the sense that we are using the term, are not legends or falsehoods. They are, rather, the models by which human beings code and organize their perceptions, feelings, thoughts, and actions. Your personal mythology is rooted in the very ground of your being, and it is also a reflection of the mythology held by the culture in which you live. We all create myths based on sources that are within us and sources which are external, and we live according to those myths…
“Through your personal mythology, you interpret the experience of your senses, give order to new information, find inspiration and direction, and orient yourself to powers in the universe that are beyond your understanding. Without your mythology, your experiences would be disjointed and chaotic. Myths, in this broadest sense, are not properly understood as being true or false, right or wrong. They are ways of organizing experience that may ultimately be judged as more or less effective for the well-being and performance of an individual or group.”
David Feinstein, Ph.D. and Stanley Krippnet, Ph.D.
Personal Mythology: The Psychology of Your Evolving Self
copyright 1988 by Feinstein and Krippnet
“One name for a paradigm unashamed of its a priori structure is myth. A myth is not something which is untrue but a shared cultural context for communication. As Claude Levi-Strauss, the anthropologist, has shown myths may vary in fanciful details while sharing a common structure or pattern which is one with the pattern of mind itself. Levi-Strauss holds that, ‘What man says, language says and what language says is said by society…'”
“Myths are ways of teaching unobservable realities by way of observable symbols.”
Charles Hampden-Turner
Maps of The Mind: Charts and Concepts
of the Mind and Its Labyrinths
copyright 1981 by Mitchell-Beazley Publishers Limited
and Charles Hampden-Turner
Mythogem
A recurring theme, motif, symbol, or character type which is usually supernatural, ancestral and/or heroic and often patterned after achetypes.
Mythopoesis
The production of myths, or myth-making. Whereas mythology, in the broadest sense, studies and analyzes the mythic patterns of people and their cultures, mythopoesis (also mythopoeia) involves the creation of new myth or mythoi either through gradual cultural change or by the works of those in the creative arts, or both.
Mythos
The pattern of basic values and historical experiences of a people, characteristically transmitted through the creative arts as a collections of myths.
Nature
All that exists, which is studied through through experiments and observation in various sciences.
“Nature, in the common sense, refers to essences unchanged by man; space, the air, the river, the leaf…
Ralph Waldo Emerson
“Nature”
from Selected Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson
edited by William H. Gilman
copyright 1965 by The New American Library, Inc.
Pantarbe
A pantarbe is an alchemical gem which shines like the sun and acts upon gold like a magnet. To me it is an appropriate alchemical mythogem for the creative life which is both prosperous and healthy.
Personal Myth
A story, real of fictional, that appeals to the consciousness of an individual by embodying the individual’s ideals and/or giving expression to deeply felt emotions through mythogems.
Personal Mythos
The pattern of basic values and life experiences of an individual, which serves as a model or map for interacting with reality and its mysteries.
Prosperity
To prosper is to have good fortune, especially financial success – to thrive or flourish. I believe it is important for creative people is to prosper from their works. While this is commonly considered in financial terms, it needn’t be. It is also whatever brings satisfaction, fulfillment and happiness to the creative person.
“The goal of life is rapture. Art is the way we experience it.”
Diane K. Osbon, editor
Reflections on the Art of Living: A Joseph Campbell Companion
copyright 1991 by the Joseph Campbell Foundation.
Recreation
Recreation is done to relax or have fun and enjoyment. This includes the various arts, either the creative activities or the repetition of what has been created or both.
Participation in any endeavor that is entertaining, relaxing, or refreshing. Recreational activities may be personal or private (e.g., reading, painting), social (e.g., team sports or dance), physical (e.g., hunting), or mental (e.g., meditating or praying); they may be active or passive. Many recreational activities combine more than one of these elements.
Speculative Genre
Among my favorites for exploring mythogems in the creative arts and writing are the genre that are speculative. These include fantasy, science fiction, horror and history — real events with a new spin or alternative histories.
Often described as the ‘What if?’ genre, speculative fiction (spec-fic or SF) describes any work where the writer makes conjectures about a fictional scenario. Look more critically and the matter isn’t so straightforward. As a definition, this one is so loose that it can be stretched to include all fiction. At the very least it fails to capture the particular flavour of the genre.
To find the essence of speculative fiction, we need to look at the nature of the conjecture being made.
Speculative fiction is distinguished by being based on unusual ideas and elevated imagination.
The Artist
I define anyone an artist who works creatively with visual images, words, sound and music, performances (stage or screen, even radio), computer presentations, or who regards anything they do as a craft to be done with finesse.
“Proclaiming oneself to be an artist is all too pretentious. Art is neither a profession nor a hobby. Art is a way of being…”
Frederick Frank
Zen Seeing, Zen Drawing: Meditation in Action
copyright 1993 by Frederick Frank
“M.C. Richards also wrote: ‘Every person is a special kind of artist and every activity is a special art…'(M.C. Richards; Centering: In Pottery, Poetry, and the Person; Wesleyan University Press, 1989)”
Dick Richards
Artful Work: Awakening Joy, Meaning,
and Commitment in the Workplace
copyright 1995 by Dick Richards
The Arts
The Arts include visual art, music, literature, stage performance (drama, dance, puppetry, etc.), screen peformance (TV, cinema), and computer software (graphics, interactive fiction, cyberspatial designs, multimedia). In a more general way, any human endeavor can be an art.
“Nature, in the common sense, refers to essenses unchanged by man; space, the air, the river, the leaf. Art is applied to the mixture of his will with the same things, as in a house, a statue, a picture.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson
“Nature”
from Selected Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson
edited by William H. Gilman
copyright 1965 by The New American Library, Inc.
“Science and art are two sides of the same coin. They are both attempts to craft a view of the world around us. All work is part science, part art.”
Dick Richards
Artful Work: Awakening Joy, Meaning,
and Commitment in the Workplace
copyright 1995 by Dick Richards
Travel
Travel commonly involves moving from one place to another in space. One focus is the final destination of the trip. Another is the journey itself.
In its broadest sense, travel is a change in a state of existence (from one place to another, or from one mode to another). This change can be alchemical, mythic, even artistic. While often defined by the outcome, the process from an original state to a new state is the journey traveled.
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