A pacifists guide to bounty hunting

The machine in the garden

My friend Jonathan is a writer recently back from NYC having met a round of submission deadlines. He's now in what many artists refer to as the hiatus - the anti-climactic phase which is both inevitable and necessary when a creative project, or intense phase of it, concludes. Being new to it all, he now worries that his inspiration and creative flair will never return. We met for coffee recently and he's pretty eaten up about what the future holds.

I suggested a couple of approaches that are well-worn;

He can either relax into the emptiness rather than persist with his current approach of fighting the apathy and making doom-laden interpretations of what it all may mean, such that his anxiety, born of the energy of fear and resistance, will evaporate. This in itself may eliminate the problem.

Or he can go against the grain and start laying track. Laying track is when you write yourself out of writers' block. You just start typing or scribbling and let it go wherever it will. This is difficult and requires a certain level of faith in something beyond conscious awareness. A manifest intuition. A leap into the unknown. Sometimes it throws up reams of absolute rubbish that only serves to reinforce your despair. And sometimes it works a treat and teleports you back into the flow state. Yet even the rubbish is good, as it's a track back to the quality stuff. I call it the pain road to liberty.

The sun king

"Laying track" is a term referencing the original US pioneers who became known as The Men Who Built America - when the very first railroads headed west out of Mississippi and into the unknown. In 1803 the American government bought 157,000 square miles of land from France for $15 million. The Louisiana Purchase, named after King Louis XIV and transacted by Napolean, gave the young united Federation fifteen new states overnight.

Stood facing a massive tract of open country or big area as they called it, the first railroad barons just sank iron rails into the ground in a westerly direction, because with a blank-slate box-fresh nation, as with a blank computer screen or a blank sheet of paper grinning at you from its feed tray in the typewriter, there can be no right or wrong. Anything goes. So you just do it. You just fill the empty space and see where it takes you. This is the basic principle of momentum.

Such an application of a healthy dose of devil-may-care to something so precious and important is initially counter-intuitive and takes a bit of nerve. You are submitting to your higher self without any firm evidence or guarantee that the higher self won't be found wanting. You are literally discovering your path by walking it. And the immediate truth is that you are forcing yourself to do something that you really do not want to do, which is never fun. You can't know how things will shape up. You're not even in the mood to proceed without some kind of map. And no map will ever be forthcoming. But somehow you figure that things will work out all right in the end. It's like Game Theory except you have no idea who the opponent is.

Forty-five years after the Louisiana Purchase, the US was at it again. This time buying up new-nation real estate from the Spanish. Well, seizing it by force and then paying compensation. A legacy from the British - the seizure not the compensation. The same colour of money - about $15 million. And according to my map - about the same size of land. A chunk to the west of the old new west, so to speak. Alta California and Santa Fe de Nuevo Mexico becoming the New Mexico and California we all know and love, between 1848 and 1850.

These money sums seem low. Peter Minuit would not have agreed. He bought Manhattan for the Dutch in 1626 for 60 gilders - about $1,000 today. New Holland, with the city of New Amsterdam at its heart was yet to became New York, New York. Think on this next time you fly into Newark and hail a cab through the Holland Tunnel.

Laying track to cure writer's block, by using this phrase, is a nod to the risk-invested and optimistic fool-hardiness, the stubborn, committed creative mindset that built America. The blinkered sheer craziness. To make something out of nothing, you can't always be a visionary. Sometimes you gotta just dive in and see what gives. You can only improve a city once a city in need of improvement got built. You can only edit copy once the bad copy has been written down in the first place. The best good ideas are the reworking of bad ones.

We create by sheer improvisation and big hope. Or how would anything ever get done?

Make my day. Punk!

Another friend of mine, Kevin, has created a new Kevin. He has transformed his life by etching out a new, healthy way of living. Cooking good fresh, real food every day and committing to frequent light exercise. Six months in, he's unrecognisable both inside and out. But Kevin worries. I was chatting with him in the steam room earlier - not long after coffee with Jonathan. Just as Jonathan worries that the good times of creative inspiration may have left him for good, Kevin frets that things are too good to be true and that sooner or later his new achievements will evaporate and his former self will pay an uncompromising visit. Kevin's nightmares consist of all his old gremlins of bad lifestyle and unenlightened every-man habits rising up out the dust and coming back to collect him. Like the silhouette of some Clint Eastwood out-law gliding with a casual menace through the swinging cafe doors of an Old West saloon; all Stetson, poncho and forty-five. Putting Kev the bar-fly right off his aperitif.

The problem with Jonathan and Kevin's problems - the trouble with their troubles - is a logical fallacy that sits all neat and tidy within an assumption on which their cognition is built. For they are both hell-bent on optimising their circumstances. They are trying to get somewhere.

When you take you out of the equation, ideas flourish.

We live in our experiences

We do not live in our circumstances. We live in our experiences. Therefore, much of our efforts to "get on" in life and take our lives "to the next level" are just plain silly. Promotion? To what, exactly? There are no levels. There is no other here. Just this here, now.

All your shiny better tomorrows shimmer just out of reach until they undergo a seemingly magical conversion into this here, now. By which time you're already focused on other shiny new tomorrows. You are bound, forever, to live in this here, now. Yet you are missing it.

This is why our relentless quest for more, newer and better material things and higher status and increased recognition and popularity and kudos and money wealth do not nor can ever even touch the surface of true peace, deep inner security and real happiness. If they did, don't you think they would have done so by now? How come the quest never ends? How come you are always left wanting more? Are you just really bad at this?

Material security is delusional. The story of stuff is that stuff is just a story. It is a red herring in that although it is signposted as a way of attaining your levels of inner contentment, it does not deliver on that which it promises. Sure, you'll get a short-lived, shallow sense of gratitude or pleasure which all too quickly resets itself to zero and actually reinforces the sense of lack. No happiness here. Just more need. Soon, you'll be running just to keep up.

1 Food. 2 Shelter. 3 Sex. 4 Defence.

Food. Shelter. Sex. Defence. The four things mankind always needed to survive as a species were secured long ago. They didn't cost any money. They are already here on the planet. All other animals have them, and they don't have any money. Caves and trees. Cool, refreshing rainfall. Fruit and fish. Mating as an inbuilt behavioural primer. The light and heat and energy of our sun. Ancillary support is shaped by nature. Over time we have artificially "upgraded" some of the kit. But it's important to understand that these are not genuine upgrades, for the simple reason that we have made them out of the original materials supplied by nature itself. New things are not new. They are old things reformulated. Always. There can be no exceptions. (Even chemical neogenesis lives on the back of old stock. So before we go any further, nail progress as a myth or at least bracket your pre-formed prejudices).

The additional things mankind needs to flourish and evolve and be happy and live fully are a little harder to come by; Love. Intuition. Creativity. Wisdom. Spirit. Charity. Hope. Humility. Honesty. Empathy. Compassion. Doubt. Space. Timelessness. Value. Resilience. Direction. Meaning. Authenticity. Insight. Community. Trust.

What a shame then, that as wealth is created it is invested into bigger "better" versions of the things we already have and not at all into the things that we lack. How many rooms do we need in our houses for them to shelter us? How much food do we need in our bellies before we are full? How big and fancy need our armies and missiles be before we feel safe? How sexualised does modern life have to be before we are able to mate?

It's like you arrive at the office one morning and your boss gives you two lists and says: "Here is a list of all the problems we have already solved. I'd like you to focus all your time and attention on them. And here is another list of all the unsolved problems we face. Please ignore everything on here."

Say what?!

The only species that thinks we are smart is us. Have you noticed how we proclaim to be the smartest species yet we never really asked any of the others?

It would seem that the things we are trying to create have already been created aplenty. Whilst the things that we most need to create are getting ignored.

There are clues all around us that we have acted and continue to act in ways that clash with optimal living.

How come most poor people are happy? How come many of us that have it all are unhappy? And believe me, before you get the violins out - you're reading this - you have it all. And some.

Is there a chance that the people we call poor are not impoverished, in fact, of the things that really count, but only of the things that do not?

Every second that you continue to pursue stuff and the means to acquire more stuff, you are wasting your life. Deep down, you know it. You call it stress. You call it unhappiness. You feel confused. You lose. Worst of all, you don't have any really fresh ideas on a regular basis. We could be a good team but you are letting the team down.

An idea about work

It helps if you assume aerial topography. Imagine one hundred "smart" horses in a paddock or one thousand fish in a lake. Or a million monkeys in a forest. Get distance. See them whole. The animals have enough food and shelter to go around, easily. Yet some are hungry and exposed while others have excess levels of supplies. In the long term, if this persists, you'd conclude a limited basic intelligence.

Yet, on closer inspection, they are sophisticated and clever. But they stopped having ideas and so are using an out-dated system to get the basics shared out - called work. When the horses were building a basic society from the ground up, lots of essential jobs needed doing. Each job contributed lots of positive things to the equine society at large. The production of hay. Irrigation channels to get water. Long-term utility infrastructure and real education. Work of this type was plentiful. Jobs were, by nature, utilitarian and ubiquitous. So to get them done, food and shelter were used as payment. A currency representing food and shelter called money developed. Another utilitarian act.

This created balance and harmony. All the work got done, powered on the animal incentives of reward and punishment. There was no immorality in attaching money to work because work was kind to the planet, good for communities and it meant everybody got fed.

Scroll forward in time. All the essentials got built. Consequentially, work naturally lost its utility and its ubiquity. Work was no longer a guarantee of making positive contributions to the planet and the community at large, and nor was it so plentiful. There has hardly ever been full employment - except after wars - so that's not the main thing. The main thing is that work is not work. Your venality will not set you free.

Work changed function. It became a very poor allocator of essential resources. "Workers" no longer did good in the world. Lots of activity was actually harming the planet, atomising a formerly caring society and allowing individuals to feel entitled and special. To get selfish. Not just sated. Electric gated. Richer animals even stopped learning, no longer realising it was an end in itself. They thought "having" trumped learning and being.

Without fresh ideas and vision, the animals that now acted on a daily basis counter to societal interest were still called "workers" - even though they were just storing up excessive supplies of things for themselves and helping nobody. Work was still seen as good, somehow. Cultural momentum, ego and plain old lack of creativity prevented a rethink. A bottom-up total review was required - but everyone was too busy thinking of themselves to stop and think at all. The function of work had eaten itself.

An idea about religion

Einstein. Hegel. Nietzsche. Heidegger. Locke. Bentham. Planck. Hawking. Logie-Baird. Berners-Lee. That's some library huh?

So imagine if in the year 2,500 a group of powerful people turn this lot into Gods and sons of Gods. They "deify" them and add deep layers of myth in a bid to get you to dance to their tune. Is it smart to react to their "religion" by trashing Einstein and refusing to read what he had to say? Even though you suspect that he'd have been horrified at the deification that took place centuries after his death?

But you are doing it every time you pass up the opportunity to see what wise men and women of yesteryear really had to say on issues relevant to you now.

Jesus of Nazareth. Buddha. Mohammad. Confucius. Lao Tzu. Mary Baker Eddy. Krsna. Moses. Thomas More. The Dalai Lama. That's some library huh?

By reacting against the regime, you are still submitting to it.

The life force

Lao Tzu lived from 604 until 531 BC and was a Chinese thinker and proponent of Taoism - pronounced Dow-ism. He authored a wonderful short, catchy and simple book called The Tao Te Ching - pronounced The Dow Day Ching. The Tao is the life force. Like Chi. The Higgs-Boson particle to sub-atomic scientists. The God-head to theologians. Zeus to the Greeks. Animal magnetism to the Mesmerists. The no-thing to Buddhists. Unproduced space or "emptiness" to Zen Buddhists. Krsna to the Hare Krsna. Call it what you will. The common theme running here is a wise, old and humble submission to something bigger. The higher love that grounds wise men in perpetual humility and where it is lacking leaves fools believing that they are the king of the castle. And they are. But the castle is sand. And the tide's on the turn. This is not just an abstract analogy. Most real castles are in real ruins.

Machines rust. Stuff breaks. People die. Everything always falls down. And what's more, all of this is good and inevitable and right. We call it change. The ancients called it continuous flow.

Arriving without leaving

Here's Lao Tzu, (the word Tzu translates as the old master) reaching out and imploring you to focus only on your personal agency, writing over two and a half thousand years ago, but writing for you nonetheless;

The master doesn't try to be powerful, thus he is truly powerful

The ordinary man keeps reaching for power, thus he never has enough

The master concerns himself with the depths and not the surface

With the fruit and not the flower

The master arrives without leaving, sees the light without looking and achieves without doing a thing

If you read The Tao Te Ching it's all like this. Yet, every time you go back, more meaning pours forth. To demonstrate this I've underlined the words "without leaving" in the extract above as this sentence, with the emphasis here, seems, to me, to be saying that if we nurture our resilience in life, we will truly have arrived. If you have identified something within your control and you have decided to change it, then stick with it. Be persistent. Dig in. Go about your task without leaving.

To master something - to arrive at an achievement station - do not leave the room. Stay in the game. Resilience is a cornerstone quality of all good creativity. Let ideas gestate. Come back. Fail. Rip it up and bin it. Go to sleep. Wake up. Then pull it out of the bin, stick the pieces back together and look with the new day's new pair of eyes.

Continuous flow

This is what I hear from the old master. Yet next time I return, there'll be something newer still waiting for me. Nothing will change when everything changes. For me, it's like studying John Charles Dollman's Famine. Another old master. I've spent days looking at this painting. Dollman painted it in 1904 and it hangs in a local Salford art gallery on the edge of a park that LS Lowry used to sit in and make sketches. Famine is huge when you stand up close to it and it makes my hairs stand on end. I find it so beautiful it moves me to tears. There is an electric magnetic pull from deep within me and I am drawn to it. I am home. It's always new to me. Dollman wasn't expressing a food famine. His was a message about the famine of soul and spirit. Yet it took me years to finally realise something. The newness will never run out. This art will always be, for me, new. Such are the fruits of locating those things in life where the Tao flows freely.

Taoism is a refined and deeply beautiful wisdom. Loving and warm. You'll always be a small child visiting your favourite grandparent in the house of Lao Tzu.

Everything starts from nothing

All of this is profound, jail-break philosophy enamoured of sheer simplicity. It is as old as the moonlit trees and it's just waiting for all of us to stop, down tools for five goddamn minutes and do nothing.

You can't start anything until you have truly stopped. You'll often struggle with high-quality sleep until you master high quality awake. Whomever you are trying to please, even if it is you, is not worth the diversion from the truth. The performance is exhausting.

Creativity springs from clarity and peace. From the deepest stillness. Nobody ever created anything worth seeing from a slate that was not absolutely, jaw-droppingly one hundred percent blank. Everything starts from nothing.

It's not part of a process

Do you get it yet? The bounty you are hunting is not the type that can be hunted down. Creativity can never be a means to an end. It was and forever will be an end in itself. All of your "creations" in the name of something else, therefore, are doomed. Authentic creativity is not part of a process. It is instantly already whole. 

Off you go again. Bags packed. Pitch rehearsed. Plane tickets and hotel booked. All set to conquer the known world. To finally get your hands on the flowers of all your desires and the fruits of all your worth.

The thing is, you are already standing in the blooming garden.

Trove

Your creative power is not a stepping stone to wealth. It is the wealth. The original treasure trove.

Your creativity is not out there. You are out there. Your creativity is you.

Now, there's an idea.

Thanks for reading.

We are one