Thanks for opening up A Creator's Personal Growth Lab. Here' we will learn to integrate our creative nature and raise our performance excellence.
This may be the first time you've ever seen heard or seen something like this. Many people are not interested in you knowing this information but it is yours and you should know it.
In fact, you should master it. As you do, share it with your children, your friends, your co-workers. Share it with those in charge. They can master this too. And they should.
All of us can become Masterful Creators.
This knowledge belongs to all of us but we are not all knowledge holders. Even fewer put this knowledge into practice.
It is not so much that it is hidden. Most of us just ignore it. The first great secret of a masterful creator is
we become what we pay attention to.
My name isFarrell North and I've spent a lifetime learning how to bring things into existence out of nothing more than a dream and an idea. I've learned this the hard way -I learned by doing. I loved learning how to create and have spent my life studying how we master creation in what we choose to do.
When I was young, I started a business in design and development. I wanted a school for myself where I could learn to create by making things for others. It would be my personal creator's growth lab. You can see some of the folks I've served on my Clients and Comments page. And you know, it worked. This service to design and create for others enabled me to learn a lot! Just to make it work, I had to learn a lot. I had to grow on every project I contracted.
The most important thing I learned was what it takes to live as a creator and, more importantly, how it feels to be a creator, how it feelsto take the risk of creation.
Because of those lessons, my work is focused now on helping others master two things:
how to live as a creator and
how we create.
If you want to learn that, I can help you begin. If you are all ready practicing creation, practicing living as a creator, I can help you improve your game. We share the desire to master a creative life so I'm giving you the plans for my Creator's Personal Growth Lab.
How To Practice in Your Creator's Growth Lab
Before we go further, let's stop and prepare to exercise and experiment in this private, development lab.
To begin, this lab is all about you. Yes, it will explain and explore how we cause change in the world around us, but the focus is on your inner workings - how you transform within yourself to transform the world around you. That means the work we do here is very intentional - if you want to bring about your personal growth and development, you will have to intend to do so -intend to learn, intend to practice, intend to grow.
This is a lot to think about. Really! Most of the people who see the invitation bounce off in less than 20 seconds. They have an instinctive sense this is too much for them. You, however are different. You know this is for youbut it is still a lot to think about.
Pace yourself.Do this one step at a time, one step after another. You can't swallow this in one sitting. This lab is full of many smaller sections. At the end of each section you'll see a line of "READ MORE" tags. Click on the one on the left end of the line and it will open the next section. When all of these tags are gone, you have reached the end of this lab. Each section is a very readable chunk of knowledge. This lab isn't about reading a lot of information. Learn a concept and go experiment with it. Then, come back and read some more. Take in as much as you are comfortable with at a time, as much as you can absorb, as much as you feel comfortable practicing. This is not about memorization. It's about understanding the ideas and making them a living exercise in your life. Don't rush. Self-mastery doesn't have a deadline. Its always an on-going, flowing process. You can always come back and pick up where you left off. You can always review and study in greater depth. Come back and review again and again.
Do the experiments. We master our nature in real time with real world activities - the things you are dealing with in your life right now. Each experiment is designed so that you can apply it to some problem you wish to solve, some dream you wish to make real, some situation you need to navigate. That is true for any one topic and it is true for all of the topics as a whole integrated system.
This takes time. We become masterful over time - taking chances, winning, losing, getting better with each effort. Mastery matures like the rings of a tree, we grow into it as we feed on real-world experience.
Mix it up.As you learn to apply the concepts in the development lab, mix them up with each other. They all work together at all times. Pairing up a couple of ideas, weaving several of them as one thought process - all of these activities help perfect your creative insights and your creative skills.
Make up your own experiments using your own real-world needs.Take something you currently can't do, something you don't have, something you want to achieve and utilize these ideas to bring that into existence.
Every failure leads to success - you can not lose in this development lab. Trial and error are your friends here.
Value every small success.Whenever you succeed in your development, appreciate it. Use it as fuel for your confidence to try more and achieve more. Grow on your personal creative experience.
This Is an Experiment
Make one for yourself.
Take the principles I'm sharing with you now and
combine them with a dream or idea you want to make real in your life.
You need both for the lab to work. What is it you wish to create? What goal would you like to attain?
It could be just one little thing. You may succeed with that very quickly. It could be very big. That will take more time. Perhaps you have a series of small steps you'd like to make come true in hopes they will lead to something better. Treat anything you wish to do as an experiment in you development lab.
Experiments have one powerful quality - they don't have to be a success!
Failure is always acceptable in an experiment. Experiments are how we learn how things work. By conducting an experiment, we discover the ideal way to make something happen.
Experiments are a powerful tool for you as a creator. The more you realize that anything you undertake is experimental - thatit might work - it might not, the greater your freedom to attempt some act of creation. Because you can't fail, you can make up any experiment you want! This is the great secret of innovation. This is the power of improvisation.
When you think about it, all of our life is an experiment. We never really know the outcomes of what we want to do. We just have to take a chance and do it. Then we find out how it works. So, teach yourself to look at life as a whole, look at every detail along the way as an experiment - one more exploration in a lifetime of explorations.
Our willingness to be part of life's great, creative experiment allows us to become spontaneous. If we allow ourselves to be vulnerable and take the risk of creation, we gain the ability to learn anything. It just requires us to take a chance and the willingness to...
Get Your Hands Dirty
Creation is a hands-on affair. It is our daily, moment-by-moment mission to create. The ideas in this creator's development lab are important ways to understand our place within this creative mission, However, you can only appreciate them when you learn them in a practical effort.
We have to do the mission before we know what the mission really is (the experiment).
Learning to ride a bike is a perfect example. You could read stories about it. You could watch someone do it. You could learn a lot by listening to someone who knew how to ride a bike talk about riding a bike.
But you could never ride a bike until you got on the seat, put your hands on the handle bars, put your feet on the pedals, pushed forward, wobble around and fell over.
We learn to ride a bike by falling over.
After our fall we get back up and say, "That didn't work." We get back on and try it again. Then we fall over. Over time, We stop falling over. When we stop falling over, we can ride a bike.
That is the whole of creation. It is an experiment in riding a bike. You can't fail when you learn to ride the bike because falling over is how you learn.
You can never fail in creation because failing is how we learn to succeed.
So read and study these concepts. Come back and review them often. Whenever you do, directly apply them to the experiment you are doing in your creator's development lab. See how that works. Fall over. Get back up and do it again until you no longer fall over.
No one can do that for you. We all learn by falling over for ourselves. Then we get back up. Make that your definition of creation.
OK. That's how this will unfold. You could take a break, now and think about all of this. Often the mind needs time to absorb what's its discovered. When we say, "sleep on it," we recognize the mind integrates things while we relax and let go.
So, let go.
Then, come back and review what you've just read and go forward.
Welcome back. Now that you've had a little breather, let's get into how big you really are.
This lab will help you understand the full scope of your creative life and how you navigate the details of creation in a competent, on-going way. That's important because being a creator is a life-long endeavor. We begin it when we are born and it continues through our last breath. We are a creator in every moment.
No matter who you are or what you do, you can learn this because creation is the heart of you. My work is to hold up a mirror so you can see yourself and better understand the power of being always and everywhere a creator. If you like what you find in this introductory lab,
you are invited to log into this site whenever you wish.
You've earned that by desiring to know more about your nature. There's much more here for your to explore. I will serve you everything I know about the art of being a creator as long as I can and as long as you are willing to learn.
Share This Art of Creation With Others
If you find it useful, there's a good change you know someone else who would also like to learn this. Your children want to learn this. You have friends who would like to know this. Everyone you work with would benefit from knowing this.
The world will become a better place when we each fully live our creative nature and fulfill the wonders of our individual and collective, creative life.
Tell friends, family and associates about this andsend them to
You are going to learn a basic sequence of concepts that are always present in us. Being creative is typically treated as something special, something some can do but most of us can't. Nothing is further from the truth.
We are all creative in every moment.
Existence is one creative event composed of an infinite number of smaller, component events. For every one of these creative events big and small, there is a creator.
If it exists, a creator brought it into existence.
We're also taught creation is something unique, original - something that has never existed before. This is also untrue.
Creation is a change of state -
we turn one thing into another.
We find the world in one arrangement and we re-arrange it. Physics tells us energy can neither be created nor destroyed. This means we can only re-purposed energy, put it to another use. This is what creators do - we take the world the way we find it and we re-purpose its parts to make a new arrangement.
This Is Mental
We are re-arranging the information of existence.
Information has no dimension or shape. It is formless. You can not measure it. You can't capture it in a bottle. By re-arranging information in our mind, we re-arrange the shape of things in the world. Every creative act is a mental act.
Let's go back to learning to ride the bike. Every step of the way, you were working with the information about riding a bike:
You thought about what you saw people doing.
You thought about the bike and all of its parts.
You thought about how you were supposed to deal with those parts.
When you tried to ride the bike, you thought about what you were doing.
When you fell, you thought about what's going wrong. You thought about the pain.
When you got back up, you thought about what you would do differently this time.
When we learned to ride a bike, we spend all of our time thinking about all of the information related to bike riding.
Learning to be a masterful creator is learning to manage how we direct the information of our mind to re-arrange the conditions of the universe.
When I say universe, I mean the way you experience the universe in your local world. That may seem very small compared to how big the universe is but it is all relative. Learning to ride the bike is the whole of the world when you are doing that.
Creation is the same process on these small, local scales and on the increasingly larger scales that surround us. As humans, we find ourselves somewhere in the middle, arranging information in our mind with our consciousness then muscling it into matter to move the world around.
In everything we do, creators echo the common function of the cosmos - creation.
You Are a Cognitive Being
As creators, we are cognitive beings. Creation begins in our thoughts and feelings, then we move it into the physical world. Everything we make begins as a dream or an idea, a yearning, an aspiration. We then imagine it, give it life with our emotions. Then, we begin to take action and make the dream come into existence.
Because creation is a cognitive endeavor, most but not all of our creative development takes place entirely in our mind. In our efforts to become masterful creators, there are many things we will do with our muscles but directing creation is a mental and emotional game.
This development lab presents a suite of meta-cognitive arrangements of mind that direct other cognitive processes to move the muscles that move the world.
We'll do that in two parts:
learn a creative, cognitive principle,
practice a mental exercise.
Learning the cognitive principle will seem familiar - we'll read something. We can think about that idea. It may seem obvious, something we all ready know but don't take its familiarity for granted. Even these concepts seem familiar, their influence is far-reaching.
Mental Experiments Can Be Hard
Practicing the mental exercise is more challenging. Experiments, particularly when they are evolving in real-time like creation, spiral into becoming something. To know and experience the experiment, we have to evolve with it.
When we practice a mental exercise we typically uses a handful of seemingly familiar mental functions:
we pay attention - focus our thoughts on one thing;
we imagine - fabricate an arrangement of ideas in our mind;
we visualize - specifically use the visual cortex of our brain to "see" what we imagine;
we viscerally experience what we create in our mind.- we feel it, we experience it.
Any way you look at it, this is all make-believe, its entirely constructed in our mind. If you have a left-brain bias that make-believe is illusory and not valid, then you will never succeed as a creator. You will be stuck in analysis the rest of your life. To be a successful creator, we learn to imagine, formulate, arrange and manifest. That's all in the head, all imaginary thought and feeling moving the inner and the outer world around.
So, as a practicing creator, the burden is on you to keep your brain in line and on-track to imagine and experience what we do in the experiments.
The secret of success in this development lab is
pay attention - imagine - visualize - feel it.
If you've made it this far, this will work out great for you!
Two Things To Learn
Being a creator consists of two main disciplines:
how we create (action) and
how we feel (emotions)
as we create our re-arrangements of existence. From the many experiences of my practice, I outlined this suite of functions that comprise our creative evolution called the
It reveals the mental zone where we integrates these two domains of action and feeling and helps us discover our "undivided wholeness in the flowing movement"of creation(David Bohm).
In our lab, we are going to be introduced to five distinct regions of this suite. Its important you understand these are not five separate things. They all work together simultaneously throughout life. We only break them up into these divisions to study them.
When we practice creation, we use them as one integrated process. It is always useful to study, practice and develop the skills of any one area. Simply remember, creation takes place all at once. When it does, these functional territories of our mind whirl along together to unfold what we create.
Study Then Practice
Here's what I want you to learn about yourself as a creator. These ideas will appear over and over again. As you learn them, look for them in your own life. They are always present. I didn't make these concepts up - I observed them in my professional contracts and personal activities.
Observe them in yours. Find these lessons in every moment, in everything you do throughout your creative life.
Recognizing their presence is half the game. The other half is to use them.
The image on the left below is a cognitive glyph to visually display how these aspects weave together. Elsewhere in this site you can see it broken out in more descriptive ways. Here's an example of how in might appear. The graphic characters in this glyph each represent one facet of your creative existence. They pulse together as an integrated whole in every moment.
It opens in another window. Keep it open while you study in this lab.
For now, visualize the integration of these ideas flowing through each other as you bring what you intend to create into existence.
This is another moment when its a good time to step away. Let these ideas simmer inside for a bit. After you've let your brain catch up with what you've just learned, review this last section and move forward.
You Are Consciousness Living in the Mind's Body in a Living Universe
Welcome back. This begins to get thicker, now. Pay attention and suck every bit of this knowledge into your cells for ever more.
You have a creative core. Nothing can remove it. It is the very root of your creative presence. It flows through your life as a central ribbon in every thought, feeling and action in your life. Whatever you pay attention to in your life, you are this ribbon of consciousness minding your creative presence in the world. Reflect on that until you make that yours.
Experiment 1.
Here's an experiment to reveal this element of your life. Close your eyes. Look carefully at what you see. Pay attention to whatever appears to you. Pay attention to whatever thought arises. Now open your eyes and take in the world around you. Pay attention to everything you sense. Now close your eyes and repeat the first internal exercise.
No matter where you directed your thought, your consciousness absorbed your experience. You took in information, then you thought about it, felt what it was like to experience it. Think about that. Now, try this experiment again and be more attentive to your internal process as you do it. We call this self-reflection - we become mindful of everything we pay attention to. Continue to do this. exercise often and pay attention to how your consciousness is always present in your attention.
Learn how consciousness is the central axis of your creative life.
Repeat this exercise until it becomes a stable habit in your life.
Your Undivided Wholeness in the Flowing Movement
Chaos is your home.
You may feel you live in the local territory of your home or neighborhood, your city or village. In fact, you actually live in the entire universe right now. It is not separate from you. You just have a habit of ignoring it.
This home, the creative universe is always wild an unpredictable. No matter what you wish would happen, anything can happen. No matter how stable and secure your world feels in any moment, things change.
Beyond the local sphere of your attention, the world is roaring about with incredible motion and activity. You are simply ignoring it. But you are present in this great circulation of unlimited creative activity, regardless of what you are paying attention to at this moment.
Experiment 2. Try this experiment. It works like the first one we tried. Look about you and pay attention to everything you can sense. As you do, home in on greater detail. Begin to observe the various parts that make up the world about you. Pay attention to how they go together, how they depend upon each other. You could pick up something you use on a daily basis.
How many things go together to make it what it is?
How do they interact?
Now, move your attention to something else and repeat your expanding attention to detail. How do they interact? How do they interfere with each other?
Expand this exercise and look around you more. Imagine what's happening outside the room or space you are now in.
Close your eyes again and imagine beyond the limits of your perception out to the larger world around you.
How much can you imagine?
How large does the world get within your imagination?
How far can you allow your imagination to extend out into this world?
How much can you know?
Expand your range. How are things interacting and interfering with each other?
How much can you be aware of right now?
How much are you ignorant of right now?
Get good at exploring the complexity of the world you live in. Become increasingly open to how big the world is. Wherever you are, whatever you do, ask more questions about everything you experience, like a small child asking,
"what?" "Why?" "How?"
Then, as your sense of the chaotic world grows, pay attention to how you are
moving,
changing,
thinking,
feeling and
acting within it.
Get good at being present as a creative being in the chaotic, creative ecology of becoming. This what you have come to master.
Now, the next series of lessons get denser. Take your time.
Don't overload yourself with the ideas. Its more fruitful to take in one aspect at a time, do the experiments, sleep on it then come back and continue.
You're in charge. Make sure you make these assets alive and well within yourself.
When you think, feel, observe, act or wait, these five sovereign functions are at work. Become aware of them. They are the cognitive elements that let you know you are conscious mind living in the mind's body in a chaotic, creative world. These are very ancient ideas.
Because they describe consciousness, you can observe them both within your mind and in the world about you. So, as we've learned, our exercises will always be a mental exercise.
1. Our consciousness toggles between an inner and an outer world. You have an inner life and an outer life.
Experiment 3. Close and open your eyes and watch how your consciousness alters what you experience within and what you experience without. Repeat this. Move your view about as you toggle between the inside and the outside of your experience.
What is your experience?
What is it like when you are paying attention to the outside?
What is your experience when you are paying attention to the inside?
2. We mirror the outer world within us. We mirror our inner world in our external experience.
Experiment 4.Pay attention to one object near you. Close your eyes. Visualize what you were paying attention to. Open your eyes and check how well you visualized what you saw in your mind.
What details to you observe in the outer world?
What details do you observe in the inner world?
Increase your attention on both levels. Increase your capacity to observe details both outside of you and within your mind. Repeat the experiment.
Does your inner vision duplicate your outer perception?
What details do you miss?
Why?
How would you increase the accuracy of your internal representation of the outer world?
3. Consciousness does this toggling and reflection across every conceivable dimension.
Experiment 5. Taste something. Close you eyes and experience the taste. Listen to something. Close you eyes and remember what you heard. Touch something. Take your hand away and imagine the feeling of the touch. Smell something. Step away and try to remember the smell.
How many different dimensions can you experience with your outer senses?
What limits your experience in the outer world?
What would expand your experience in the outer world?
How many dimensions can you experience in your inner world?
What limits your experience in your inner world?
What would expand your experience in your inner world?
4. Because consciousness has these capacities you can understand how everyone and everything about you integrate and interfere with each other. You understand how life fits together, hold it folds in upon itself, how it unfolds from itself.
Experiment 6. Reflect on a problem you currently are facing. Explore all of the relationships involved. Spend time considering what the viewpoint might be from the view of any part in the problem. Imagine you can understand how elements of the problem individually and collectively see the problem.
What does your problem look like from your viewpoint?
Imagine how another outside of you might view your problem?
How would another person you know experience your problem?
5. Because your consciousness can toggle between the physical world and your mental interior; because it can reflect between the two; because you can do this across all dimensions; because you can feel and understand that folding and unfolding complexity, you have the conscious ability to accomplish anything.
Experiment 7. Revisit the problem of the last exercise.
Now that you've considered it, what would you do to solve it?
Ask someone else what they would do to solve it?
Do some research.
What other problems look like yours?
What were their solutions?
This is the nature of your conscious presence. These are constant, conscious functions. Even when you sleep your consciousness is busy with this, managing the biology and chemistry of your body.
You brought these qualities with you at your birth. You will take them away with you when you leave. Grow familiar with these functions. Reflect upon them and make them your steady, reliable allies.
How can you increase your understanding of them?
How might that advance you situation in life?
These five functions run non-stop. They all operate at the same time. In every moment, they are integrating with each other to form the experience and the expression of your life.
Your presence in the creative world is the non-stop chorus of these functions arranging and directing everything you think and do. Take the time throughout your life to observe them, reflect upon them, and refine how you use them to master the great, creative event of your life.
Personally, I find these five aspects to be self-evident but ASTOUNDING. Don't take them for granted. Take the time to thoroughly explore them and reflect on them. They are the foundation for everything that is to follow. When you feel like you get their significance, then move forward.
Ready to go on? Great. This section is incredibly important and useful. All of the sovereign qualities of mind we just learned are remarkable, eternal assets of creation but here in this section, they take form and begin to change the shape of the world.
Although you may or may not be familiar with this, be assured, this knowledge is deeply understood and applied by successful creators everywhere. That's true on the little local levels of many individuals and it is most certainly true on the level of very large and significant organizations who wield enormous influence over your world.
If you want to bring the power of this training to bear on the immediate issues of your life, you will want to study, and master these four, critically important levels of creative power.
Whatever you are doing, these five, sovereign functions of mind we just learned form an ongoing creative enterprise. It is a big, complete whole of your creative existence. It is all the endless details of your day. this is where your vision and your attention make the shape and meaning of your world. The creative enterprise of your life on every level has these four elements:
1. There is a big picture where we see how all the critical issues work together. This is Executive Vision. It looks over everything, it thinks about the whole system.
Experiment 8. Stop and reflect on something you wish to do. Ask and answer for yourself:
What are the critical issues you must face in this?
What are the trends of how these issues are changing?
What are the key factors you must address?
2. There is an organization to this enterprise. You must administer it. Things must be arranged in the correct manner. Resources are required. Activities must be done.
Experiment 9. Referring to the issues you explored above,
What would you do to address them?
How does that go together?
Who would do these things?
What resources are required?
What activities must be engaged?
How will you know they are done correctly?
How will you know when they are done?
3. All of these things must be executed. They need to get done. This is creative production. Whenever something is envisioned and organized, it doesn't come into existence until someone does it.
Experiment 10. This is easy to understand. Do the things you outlined in Experiment 9.
4. Keep track of what you do.
This is the Data level of your enterprise. To plan it, you outline it. To organize it, you create more information about specific organizational elements. When you do it, you have lists of what you need, lists of what you do. When you are done, You have lists of what you've done.
Experiment 10. Go back through Experiments 7-9 and write down all of the critical information for each level of your imaginary exercise. This may seem incomplete. It would, of course be more accurate if you had written everything down as you went along but this exercise brings home the importance of the data involved in your creation.
Don't be confused by thinking this is merely some business exercise. No matter what we are creating - a beautiful painting, a dance, a song, a war, a new house - in everything we create, these four overlaying stages are present.
Experiment 11. As you go about your daily life, creating on-the-go, observe what you are doing. Where does it reside in your creative enterprise?
Are you working on the big picture?
The organization?
Producing the details?
Keeping track of it.
Watch and learning how every one of your creative acts had these four levels of creative activity. Also reflect on how you form this creative structure with the five elements of your creative sovereignty. Creation is always what consciousness does in the mind. Once we have formed a mental image of our creation, we move it into the world.
This is definitely a point to stop and step back.
The creative enterprise is well understood in major organizations but very little know on our personal level. Take some time to work with these ideas. Take any and everything you are exploring as a creator and run them through this filter of ideas.
Its like a sieve - you pour a creative project through it and the creative enterprise model will help you sort out the various levels of your creative event.
Get good at this. Practice seeing the world through this lens regularly. If you do, you will develop great prowess at creating what you want.
You have five, sovereign functions of consciousness that showed up with you when you were born. You will take them with you when you leave. In the meantime, they are the lenses of consciousness you both experience the world through and express every creative act with.
Whenever you either experience or express, you do so through your creative enterprise - a four level structure of creative organization that helps you integrate the big picture of your creative life and all the little details you can't let slide.
Within your creative enterprise, you, conscious creator, only do one thing:
you make waves.
The world is chaotic because creators make waves. You cannot help but do this. If you create,
you make waves.
Everything you do makes a wave of change.
Every wave you make changes the world.
Then, the world changes you in return.
This is the only thing consciousness does in the world.
When we make waves. They always move in the same fashion. They move through these four phases.
You may make waves that are nearly invisible, or perhaps you make waves like a tsunami. On any scale, in any dimension, every wave that moves in the flowing wholeness of the universe moves through these stages.
1. A wave has to begin. Some pulse sets the wave in motion. It has to have enough energy to move.
It doesn't move in a vacuum. It moves in the middle of an infinite sea of other waves. So, it has to acclimate to the neighborhood, get used to being in the sea.
Maybe it has enough energy to survive here. Maybe not. Beginnings are very fragile and tenuous for a wave. They need a lot of luck to go forward.
2. A wave will grow. If a wave does have enough energy to survive, if it can pick up additional energy from the waves around it, it will grow.
When it does, it grows as fast as it can, as long as it can. If you make a wave like that, be prepared to hold on for the ride. Things change very quickly when a wave is going as fast as it can.
3. A Wave can stabilize. In a sea of other waves, it takes a lot of energy and work for a wave to continuously keep growing stronger and stronger.
Eventually it looses the support it requires. When this happens, it can settle in to a steady, sustained state. This too goes on along an even level for as long as it can.
4. A Wave always collapses. Nothing lasts forever. Even when you can keep a wave flowing in a steady state, the world eventually changes. It is chaos.
When this happens and the wave wears out. It inevitably dies. As it does, it gives its energy up to other waves who consume that as quickly as they can.
Waves are important for us to understand as creators. Everything we create will behave like a wave. We need to be prepared for every stage of our creation:
We will have to get it started.
We'll have to manage its growth.
We'll have to keep it alive.
We'll have to surrender it back to nature when it runs out.
Experiment 12. Find a pool of water or fill a bowl with water. Take your finger or hand and push it into the water slowly. Watch the wave it creates.
Can you observe the four phases?
The bigger the body of water, the more force you can apply, the greater the wave and the easier it will be to see its phases.
Experiment 13. Now reflect on something you recently did, something you intended to do in your personal, creative enterprise of life.
Can you see the wave of change you created as you did that?
Can you identify the turning points when the phases changed?
What changed in your environment that caused the wave to change its phase?
Experiment 14. Now, Imagine something you want to do in the future. Use your five sovereign functions and imagine the enterprise it takes to make that happen. Once you've constructed your imaginary enterprise, imagine the wave you will pump into the world to bring the product of your creative enterprise into existence. Imagine the phases it will pass through.
Experiment 15. Move beyond your imagination and make that creation a reality. Observe how your wave of change moves and alters as it establishes itself in the world.
Now, this is a real thick experiment to undertake. At this point, you have learned enough about your conscious presence in the act of creation to literally see and feel the complexity of your creative life.
Take time with this experiment . In fact, now utilize this model in every aspect of your life and viscerally experience how you as a sovereign, conscious creator brings about the creative enterprise of making waves in the chaotic, creative world.
Living as a creator, making a creative event is not theoretical. This is not a conceptual model. This model of creation represents a actual living engagement. When we create, things happen. Stuff gets done.
In fact, to exercise these principles and concepts, you must have a target. WE call that target a mission. A mission is our intent to change something. When we experience the world in some way and wish to change that experience,we will have to do something to make that happen. We will have to form an enterprise and make a wave.
Those efforts will be directed at some outcome. To achieve that outcome, we will have to change how things are now into how we want them to be. Your mission is this complete circuit of transformation. We saw it earlier. It looks like this.
In a mission we take things as we find them, move them through the enterprise of change and hopefully achieve our goals. IF we don't, we need to change again and repeat this cycle of transformation until we succeed.
Even when we do, One mission may be over but a new mission will arise.
As a creator, our whole existence is a mission to create. Creation is a moving target of changing missions.
Creation is visceral. Whatever we do in creation, we feel it. This means the feelings that show up because of the five elements of conscious, creative sovereignty have a very big influence on our creative thoughts and actions.
We feel creation as we make it.
If we feel well about what we're doing, we do it better. We can still make mistakes (it is chaos) but we are resilient enough to correct them without being too upset about it. If, however, we are angry or depressed, the intensity of those feelings can turn our creation against us. When our emotions cloud us with emotional smog, we cannot create masterfully. We are too busy with the smog of our feelings. They dominate our attention and distract us from our normal, habit of success.
Even if our emotions are even and balanced, the emotions of another creator can be completely clouded. That will readily influence what we are doing. Just as all creators are engaged in a creative field of activity, so too are we all engaged in a great field of emotions.
Because of this, learning to master our emotions is equally important as mastering our other creative skills. In recent years, we've come to understand their is an intelligence to our emotions. This emotional intelligence is comprised of five important aspects. Our ability to mature these emotional aspects of our creative nature creation directly impact our success as a creator. These five aspects are:
Be aware of our presence as a creative being. Feel yourself present in every moment.
Be motivated to create. You are present in creation. Move to take action in your world.
Once you take creative action, you are responsible for your creation.
These three elements of awareness, motivation and responsibility are difficult for every creator, Be sensitive to taht. Be empathic with them.
Mature the ability to work with each other to improve creative life. We are all creators together.
This is a remarkable bundle of emotional skills. If we mature these five elements, we become a very clear, sensitive and spontaneous creative being. This benefits us. It benefits others. The whole, creative ecology flourishes when we master these emotional skills.
Think About It
Experiment 16.Stop for a moment and then do some simple thing. Raise your hand. Pick up a cup and put it down. Turn your head. Clear your throat. Anything you do will work for this exercise because everything you do is a creative act.
Whatever you did, you generated a thought in your mind, then, you directed it towards some action. That action had some effect. It changed the arrangement of something in your world, and because it did, you just changed the shape of the world with your mind.
Now your world is different even if it is in just some little way. Now that the world is a little different, you also will have to change because the world you now deal with has changed.
Try this exercise again and observe yourself more closely:
observe your thoughts,
observe your feelings about your thoughts,
observe what you do,
observe what changes,
observe your thoughts and feelings about the change.
Because you payed more attention to some simple action in your life, your mind is fuller, it has both more experience and senses more about what you just expressed as change.
This little moment of creation may not seem that special but once we become actively aware of any one creative moment, we can see it is full of creative expression and experience. Every moment of our life is this full of creation. We just ignore it.
We take our creative presence for granted.
We are asleep at the wheel of creation.
That's OK. Even if we are asleep, as most of us are, we still live as creators in the world. We simply fail to recognize our creative presence.
Become Creatively Awake
You, however, have the opportunity to awaken to a remarkable, wondrous life in which you are aware of your creative presence. If you do that whenever you can, paying more attention more often, building a habit of paying attention to your creative life, you can make a living laboratory for your creative development.
When you do, you can experiment growing within yourself a Habit of Success that uses even the tiniest opportunities in your life to improve your creative skills,
lift your emotions and feelings and weave those two together into true creative strength and freedom that can never be taken from you.
Experiment 17.Go back and review the five aspects of creation we talked about above. Now, perform another one of these tiny, personal creative exercises and reflect on how any of those five elements were present in your creative act. Then reflect on another element until you can recognize how they are all present in your exercise. Repeat that and reflect again.
The more you repeat this effort, the more your brain begins to work as your personal creative assistant, helping you to recognize your creative nature and reminding you of your skills and possibilities. That will really lift your game!
This site and the work I share with you can help guide you on this journey of discovery and development. It's all very personal and private. No one even has to know you are becoming masterful as a creator, though, in time, it will simply begin to show in your personal nature and bearing. You will find yourself becoming
more confident,
more capable,
more flexible,
more at peace,
more engaged with your creative life.
One of the benefits of living as a creator in a big random universe is that the opportunity to create goes on for a long time for most of us. That means we can align ourselves with an ongoing effort to improve in anything we wish to do better.
We always begin with something we can do but that we desire to achieve. We then progress through a cycle of imagining ourselves doing it, then trying to do it, then winning or loosing in our effort, then slowly acquiring skill until will ultimately make it ours.
Here is a series of steps that help you understand the process:
You can't do something.
You want to be able to do it.
You imagine you can do it.
You try to do it.
You either succeed or fail in your effort.
Step by step, you begin to be able to do it.
Finally, you accomplish it.
Now, you extend your achievement ot do more.
Any of these improvements are actually habits we form in our mind. We can enhance all of these habits of improvement by establishing in our living, creative laboratory, a Habit of Success.
This habit is very simple on its surface but it requires our attention and constancy to see first be established and then applied on a constant basis to become a steady state of growing creative mastery.
This habit is a simple cycle of improvement. In anything we want to do, practice moving through these stages of creative transformation. If you do, you will find you move steadily forward in mastering any creative ability. The cycle consists of:
Reviewing and understanding our current situation;
Establishing goals we can achieve if we extend ourselves;
Make a plan of action for how we will achieve these goals;
Take action and do it. Get things done step by step;
Watch ourselves as we do it. Pay attention to details;
Evaluate what we are doing as we do it;
Fix and refine anything that doesn't work;
Repeat the effort. Do it again and do it better.
Experiment 18. Think up something you would like to do but can't do, perhaps some simple skill, something simple that's an opportunity to try right now. Try it Look at the upper diagram that begins with "can't do it." Then begin your effort. Apply yourself to the mission of attaining this simple skill.
As you progress through this cycle, study the lower diagram with "mission" at the center. Perfom the steps in the list that help you attain this skill. Watch how both cycles interact and unfold together.
Use these cycles to understand and form the Habit of Success. Then, use this Habit of Success to achieve anything you desire. That is now your mission, creator.
Ongoing, Incremental Improvement
If this seems like its a lot of work, you are correct. It's particularly hard if we have never applied yourself to steady growth and improvement.
Most people who were invited to accept this free, personal development training just passed it by. They knew they had no interest in it.
But you recognized growth is important to you. So, you know something about this effort. Perhaps you are highly disciplined or are inconstant in your efforts. Either way, you can see that this cycle of steady, incremental improvement requires that we pay attention to refining our skill in everything we do.
If we can establish this Habit of Success, the improvements we make in anything will feedback and help us improve other areas of our life. As we do, this Habit of Successitself becomes the dominant skill of our creative life. We very simply fall in love with getting better at getting better.
Creating anything always takes place in the chaotic world. Creating anything always takes place in our mind. If we wish to become masterful creators, we learn to marry these two so that they become one singularity in our life. Think about that. Feel that. Touch that as a creator.
Increasingly understand the rolling integration of mind and matter:
how we move matter with our mind.
how the movement of matter changes our mind.
It is a give and take that is constantly present.
A Masterful creator is always aware of the motion between mind and matter. We can see this cycle take place in every event in our life. When we shrink it down to its simplest, creative parts we see that as a creator we
experience an event;
we make a response;
we create an outcome.
Perhaps you are beginning to see that being a creator is a nest of cycles within cycles within cycles. As we move from event to response to outcome, we are present in the five aspects of creation we have studied.
We're also moving through the cycle of bringing something into existence - not having the creative skill then developing the creative skill. As we do that, we're practicing the cycle of building our core creative confidence with the Habit of Success.
All of this is real work. We can't read it in a book. We can't watch it on Youtube. We have to actually take the risk to really try it and hopefully accomplish it.
That may or may not happen. We can always as easily fail as succeed. There is that risk with every creative act.
That makes creation and the life of a creator stressful. This isn't a bad thing. Its part of our creative life in chaos. When you create in the unknown, it is always unknown.
Creation is an act of faith that we can bring creation into existence.
When we use that faith to move ourselves through these cycles of creation, chaos organizes in our direction and we make things happen, just as you have done in any of the exercises you have done during this lesson.
the ongoing development of your creative skills married to
the ongoing maturation of your emotional intelligence
unite to give birth to a remarkable creative being - you, creator. The benefit of this union reveals itself in every moment of your life, in everything you do.
It is an experiment to bring these two together. You can do it. You are born with every asset required to undertake this practice - all of us are.
You, however are wise enough to search for this. Having found it, practice it. Practicing it, get good at it. Make yours a masterful creative life.
Inside this site waits more of these insights. They are free for the taking. They only require your commitment to make them come true. You can do that. I can help.
If you'd like to explore more, add a password to the form below and and move forward. You'll access a growing body of brief, insightful trainings you can put to work immediately to advance your personal, creative mastery.
No matter what you wish to achieve in your life, this self mastery of your native, creative assets will lift your performance. It has for me. I look forward to it working out for you.
What do you think, shall we continue? If, yes, then let's consider
When I was young, I started a business in design and development. I wanted a school for myself where I could learn to create by making things for others. It would be my personal creator's growth lab. You can see some of the folks I've served on my Clients and Comments page. And you know, it worked. This service to design and create for others enabled me to learn a lot! Just to make it work, I had to learn a lot. I had to grow on every project I contracted.
Before we go further, let's stop and prepare to exercise and experiment in this private, development lab.
Failure is always acceptable in an experiment. Experiments are how we learn how things work. By conducting an experiment, we discover the ideal way to make something happen.
So read and study these concepts. Come back and review them often. Whenever you do, directly apply them to the experiment you are doing in your creator's development lab. See how that works. Fall over. Get back up and do it again until you no longer fall over.
Welcome back. Now that you've had a little breather, let's get into how big you really are.
Let's go back to learning to ride the bike. Every step of the way, you were working with the information about riding a bike:
As creators, we are cognitive beings. Creation begins in our thoughts and feelings, then we move it into the physical world. Everything we make begins as a dream or an idea, a yearning, an aspiration. We then imagine it, give it life with our emotions. Then, we begin to take action and make the dream come into existence.
When we practice a mental exercise we typically uses a handful of seemingly familiar mental functions:
Welcome back. This begins to get thicker, now. Pay attention and suck every bit of this knowledge into your cells for ever more.
When you think, feel, observe, act or wait, these five sovereign functions are at work. Become aware of them. They are the cognitive elements that let you know you are conscious mind living in the mind's body in a chaotic, creative world. These are very ancient ideas.
If we feel well about what we're doing, we do it better. We can still make mistakes (it is chaos) but we are resilient enough to correct them without being too upset about it. If, however, we are angry or depressed, the intensity of those feelings can turn our creation against us. When our emotions cloud us with emotional smog, we cannot create masterfully. We are too busy with the smog of our feelings. They dominate our attention and distract us from our normal, habit of success.
One of the benefits of living as a creator in a big random universe is that the opportunity to create goes on for a long time for most of us. That means we can align ourselves with an ongoing effort to improve in anything we wish to do better.
Perhaps you are beginning to see that being a creator is a nest of cycles within cycles within cycles. As we move from event to response to outcome, we are present in the five aspects of creation we have studied.