A Creative Life

by Kenneth Smith

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

How these energies play together determines what is created -- the imaginings of your life and world. If you don't connect with potential, you will just be circling within the conditional field you already have. This may keep you amused, but you are not going to grow very much. When you squarely face potential, you place your life on the line -- each and every moment of it. This will move you from talk about life into a relationship with the world in which you live to the hilt.

Creating Your Life by Living a Path with Heart

Don Juan boiled down the process of creating a path with heart to using your death as a way to focus your selection of involvements in life. The trick is to consult death in such a way that it doesn't become encumbering, to use death as a tool to battle fear rather than a morbid fixation. When making a decision, for example, make it in the light that it may well be your last act on Earth. Doing so helps bring to light the deepest drives and core values of a person.

When you are suitably focused, the criteria for selecting the elements of your path are based on peace, strength, and joy. Once several pursuits have been initiated, you are on your path. Rather than pursue money as a primary objective even though you really don't like the chase, you actively involve yourself with something else. Seen in the context of an energetic logic and ethic, having a large bank account is not errant, but going after money when it doesn't resonate with your core stultifies your growth. After several years of grooming your life based on peace, joy, and strength, you will have a life with that foundation.

Other teachers suggest similar approaches to finding, expressing, and living core meaning. To penetrate the shrouds of awareness that interfere with developing a full and complete life, meditation and healing-technique teacher Stephen Levine also advises us to use death as a focus to bring ourselves to life. He advocates that this helps us live in such a way as to "directly experience the moment-to-moment process that is our lives." And he also holds that it is fear (a condition characteristic of the orientation stage) that is the major impediment to this awareness.

A leader of the positive psychology movement, Paul Pearsall points out the conditions of thriving include living a strong life, a deliberate life. As such he notes that peace and joy are aspects of such flourishing. Like others, he advises, "Don't die until you've lived." Perhaps reflecting increased investigations into metaphysics, positive psychology shares common denominators with classic mysticism traditions. Both find that awareness and flourishing go hand in hand. They both aptly highlight the common focus relating to personal and group development.

People typically derive meaning in their lives from group values rather than from within. Jung tells us that this makes individuation impossible, as the self is never developed, let alone expressed and lived. For individual imagination to become alive and functional, we need to be able to step away from the group. At the same time we are social creatures who derive value from participation with the group. The balance is to seek individuation while keeping an eye on what you can offer others. In this way, you learn to be yourself while being part of the group, which is a measure of self-actualization.

Both personally and collectively, peace, joy, and strength characterize heightened consciousness. When these qualities are manifested, the components of a path with heart -- the activities you decided to pursue -- provide the means to solidify other gains. A life formed in such a way will help you reintegrate your awareness after you've stepped into an altered state.

Creating a path with heart is a way to begin working with cohesion. It balances the forces inside and out. This produces more awareness as your life awakens your core. Remember, all of the influences throughout your life shape cohesion, the determinant of your perceptions and behaviors. Living a path with heart is a means to purposefully condition your energy body. This ongoing development is therefore a solid step toward being, a state that Levine describes as directly experiencing that "moment-to-moment process that is our lives."

Awakening the Energy Body: From Shamanism to Bioenergetics
by Kenneth Smith.

Reprinted with permission of publisher, Bear & Company, an imprint of Inner Traditions International. ©2008 by Biocognitive Technology. 

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­About the Author

Kenneth Smith, writing under the name Ken Eagle Feather, has published several books on Toltec philosophy, including On the Toltec Path and Toltec Dreaming. He apprenticed with Toltec shaman don Juan Matus and has served on the staff of the Association for Research and Enlightenment, part of the Edgar Cayce legacy, and also on the staff of The Monroe Institute, founded by consciousness researcher Robert Monroe. He is the executive director for Therapeutic Discovery, a medical science research institute, and lives in Richmond, Virginia.