The Fertile Unknown

The Big Glow

From Brian Peirgrossi's book, The Big Glow: Insights, Inspirations, Peace and Passion
(Thanks, Kate Jones, for sending it over!):

On the surface of the world right now there is war and violence
and things seem dark
But calmly and quietly, at the same time,
something else is happening underground
An inner revolution is taking place
and certain individuals are being called to a higher light
It is a silent revolution From the inside out
From the ground up

Most of us work anonymously
We are quietly working behind the scenes
in every country and culture of the world
Cities big and small, mountains and valleys,
in farms and villages, tribes and remote islands

Occasionally we spot each other in the street
We give a quiet nod and continue on our way so no one will notice
During the day many of us pretend we have normal jobs
But behind the false storefront at night is where the real work takes a place

Some call us the 'Conscious Army'
We are slowly creating a new world with the power of our minds and hearts
We follow, with passion and joy
Our orders from the Central Command
The Spiritual Intelligence Agency

We are dropping soft, secret love bombs when no one is looking
Poems
Hugs
Music
Photography
Movies
Kind words
Smiles
Meditation and prayer
Dance
Social activism
Websites
Blogs
Random acts of kindness

We each express ourselves in our own unique ways with our own unique gifts and talents

'Be the change you want to see in the world'
That is the motto that fills our hearts
We know it is the only way real transformation takes place
We know that quietly and humbly we have the power of all the oceans combined

Our work is slow and meticulous
Like the formation of mountains
It is not even visible at first glance
And yet with it entire tectonic plates shall be moved in the centuries to come

Love is the new religion of the 21st century
You don't have to be a highly educated person
Or have any exceptional knowledge to understand it
It comes from the intelligence of the heart
Embedded in the timeless evolutionary pulse of all human beings

Be the change you want to see in the world
Nobody else can do it for you
We are now recruiting
Perhaps you will join us
Or already have....
All are welcome...
The door is open

~  Brian Piergrossi, from his book, The Big Glow

Zen of Business Administration

With self-knowledge comes clarity of your mission. With a clear mission comes purposeful creativity - creativity that is aligned with the your mission and purpose in the world - and the good of the whole.

Marc Lesser, the founder and president of ZBA Associates, wrote a book called the Z.B.A. Zen of Business Administration: How Zen Practice Can Transform Your Work And Your Life. It's for the business person who seeks self-knowledge, and comes highly recommended. I have not read it yet so I can't speak for the book itself from direct experience, but I did peruse his website can came across his manifesto with which I resonate. I have copied here:

The ZBA Manifesto

1. It’s okay not to know. It’s okay to be vulnerable. No one has all the answers. We value and learn from the questions and the asking. We are learning to appreciate the mystery and sacredness of our lives and the mystery and sacredness of life.

2. Life is short. There is no escape from old age, sickness, and death. Death is a great teacher. Recognizing the shortness of our lives provides motivation to live fully in each day and in each moment.

3. We understand the importance of taking regular quiet time for ourselves. Through reflection and by slowing down we develop an appreciation for life and we increase our capacity for understanding.
4. We are learning to trust our inner wisdom. Our bodies and minds are amazing, unexplainable, and unfathomable.
5. It’s okay to be uneasy, to be uncomfortable, to grieve, to feel pain. Recognizing when something is off, feeling the depth of loss, experiencing pain, is the first step toward change and growth.
6. Practice active listening — listening deeply to yourself and to others. Listen to others without formulating your own ideas. Listen to yourself before speaking.
7. We all seek balance in our lives — balancing work and family, balancing our inner and outer lives, balancing what we want to do and what we must do.
8. We are learning that we can be fully ourselves in all situations — at work, as parents, as children, as friends, as lovers.
9. Being ourselves at work is vital to our health and happiness. Our time is too valuable to sell, at any price.
10. Each moment is precious. In every moment we have an opportunity to discover, to grow, to speak the truth.
11. Each moment is ordinary. In every moment we can realize we are fine, just as we are. Nothing else is needed.
12. We appreciate what is paradoxical. What may at first seem contradictory or beyond our understanding may be true. After all, who is it that is breathing? Who is it that dreams? How is it that these hands effortlessly glide along this keyboard?
13. Age is a state of mind. We have the opportunity to grow to be more like ourselves every day.
14. Developing intimate relationships is a vital part of our lives and our development. Intimacy requires openness, honesty, and vulnerability.
15. Real, honest open communication is highly valued — and takes real skill and effort.
16. When we slow down and learn to trust ourselves, joy arises naturally.
17. When we slow down and learn to trust ourselves, creativity arises naturally.
18. Self-knowledge and understanding require persistence and perseverance. Developing awareness and balance is an ongoing, unending process.
19. Self-knowledge and understanding require discipline. Whatever path we take requires structure, guidelines, and feedback.
20. Self-knowledge and understanding require courage.
21. Diversity is essential. Our differences enrich our lives. There is no “other,” just as our right hand is not a stranger to our left hand.
22. A simple rule to follow is do good, avoid harm. Of course, this is not simple or easy.
23. There are many paths and many practices toward developing awareness and personal growth.
24. Our everyday lives and activities provide fertile ground for developing growth and understanding.
25. We can learn to appreciate the gifts we’ve received from our parents and to forgive them. We understand on a deep level all we have received from the generations that have come before us.
26. We feel a deep responsibility for our children and for the generations that will come after us.
27. We can all act as change agents. We can choose to take action in improving and healing our environment and our society. There is no shortage of issues to address, of healing to take place.
28. We are all change agents on a personal level — we either create healing amongst those we live and work with or we create stress.
29. We can choose to act as change agents in relation to our communities.
30. We can choose to act as change agents in relation to our society or on a global level.
31. Everything we hold as dear will one day change and disappear. Every business that now exists will one day cease. Every person now alive will one day die.
32. At a deep level, we realize that we are neither in control nor not in control. Our task is to paddle the boat, with awareness and integrity. The flow of the river is outside our doing.
33. We all have the power to find peace and happiness in the midst of change and impermanence.
34. We have the power to heal ourselves, our communities, and our planet.

- From Marc Lesser's website: www.zbaassociates.com

The Answer lies not in the Box ~ The Answer lies in Paradox

The process of emergent creativity is paradoxical...and deeply practical. It contains opposites that, when working together, form intelligent, coherent, next-level outcomes:

~ Using “impractical” methods to achieve practical solutions

~ Engaging multiple dimensions of activity to achieve focused results

~ Methodically practicing spontaneous creativity

~ Going into the unfamiliar and the unknown to increase understanding of the familiar and the known

What's Mine to Do - No More, No Less?

In improv theater, there is a concept called "Serve the good of the scene." I have expanded it in my work to what I call, "Serve the good of the whole." In order to do that, you neither impose your own agenda on a scene, nor do you shy away from being a collaborative contributor to the scene. You seek to serve what is best to keep the scene supported, creative and moving forward. Sometimes that means standing back in a support role. Sometime that means taking the lead. It is about what is yours to do - no more (by not taking over) and no less (by adding something new) - that will help contribute to the good of the scene.

I have found this concept universal and applicalbe in most, if not all, situations. One of the questions that has guided my life's work over the years since first emerging my Creative Emergence focus is, "What's mine to do - no more, no less?" in any situation - from working with a client, to designing a program to navigating my personal life. 

That question - if seriously asked and truthfully answered - narrows the fertile field of all things possible into to that which is most relevant and resonant at the given time for the particular circumstance. It simultaneously prevents one from over-controlling a situation or not taking enough initiative. I use this question with my Emergence coaching clients and my role in supporting them, as well as in my own life to help guide me to creating/unfolding what's next. I find it ignites and focuses creativity, and it keeps us in a co-creative – not controlling – role with those we serve.

Two of the (seemingly opposed) prevailing thought camps are (1) the Just-Do-It thinking - set a goal and go for it and (2) the What’s-Meant-to-Be-Will-Be thinking - let go of control, get out of the way and let it happen. I see both as true and neither as complete. By asking, "What is mine to do - no more, no less" we can discover know what is ours to actively create, and what is ours to release and let unfold - an any situation, and with any person or group. The both/and (or in improv terms - the Yes And) is the interdependent dance of the emergent creative process – the "yin/yang" of both stepping up and letting go based on what is calling to emerge in the situation.

Michelle James©2008

The Creative Urge to Evolve

In his Weekly quotes, Andrew Cohen, Founder of EnlgihtenNext and
What is Enligtenment magazine, offerred this quote he entitled,
A Mysterious Urge to Evolve:

When time began, for an unknown reason, something came from nothing. Suddenly, an impulse emerged—the impulse to become, to create, to evolve. This urge to take form gradually became the whole universe, ultimately including you and me as we are right now. And as human beings we experience this evolutionary impulse on many levels. At the gross physical level, we feel it as the sexual impulse, the powerful urge to procreate. At a higher level, a cognitive level, we experience this same principle as the uniquely human desire to know, to understand, to create. And at the highest level, the level of consciousness, we experience it as the spiritual impulse, the mysterious urge to evolve as consciousness. This movement in each and every one of us is not other than the one evolutionary impulse that is driving the engine of creation. When you feel the irresistible compulsion to develop at the level of consciousness, it is the big bang that you are experiencing, stirring in the depths of your own soul. ~ Andrew Cohen

To me, this quote speaks to the urge to create, the creative urge to evolve, the evoltuionary call to create - however we look at it. The place where the "evolutionary impulse" is the emergent, creative impulse. Creation is made up cre ators creating and creators emerging.

Nassim Haramein: "The Vacuum is not Empty"

I had the pleasure of being in scientist-philosopher-mystic Nassim Haramein's session at the Institute of Noetic Sciences conference a while back. His was one of the most interesting presentations. A multi-dimensional pioneer, he is working on a unified field theory he calls the “Holofractographic Universe.” I deeply resonated with what he was saying - not through the lens of a scientist, but through my lens of the living, fertile, fractaled, integrative, shape-forming, creative universe. He has mathematically and scientifically discovered what creators and mystics have always known - that we create by feedback and change and that we are all beings of infinite creative potential - in a very literal sense: the vacuum is not empty - it is not nothing. It is actually highly organizing and always communicating - an "unknown" that is actually fertile with creative potential. He founded The Resonance Project Foundation. You can see him speak on the Crossing the Event Horizon video on YouTube.

I found this write-up of him at The Laughing Coach Newsletter:

Nassim Haramein, a world traveler, was born in Geneva, Switzerland. As early as 9 years old, Nassim was already developing the basis for a holographic hyper-dimensional theory of everything he calls the “Holofractographic Universe.”

The Holofractographic Universe theory is a unified field theory resulting from over two decades of investigation into the geometry of hyper-dimensional systems and their relation to the creation of three-dimensional reality and all of its forces—including consciousness.

The premise of The Holofractographic Unified Field Theory research is that space is not empty, it is full. It is full of an energy that, through a specific set of fractal geometry, creates atomic structures that are themselves made of 99.999% space. It is a sea of electromagnetic flux we call the zero point energy, which has been demonstrated beyond a shadow of a doubt, since its mechanical effects have now been measured in laboratories.

This is nothing new, most ancient civilizations believed in a primordial soup of energy embedded within the fabric of space and in a primary geometric pattern coordinating creation. Later many of the world's great thinkers, including such scientists as Albert Einstein, Nicolas Tesla, Buckminster Fuller, and Walter Russell, believed in an all prevailing energy at the base of the fabric of space.

Haramein's findings have resulted in theoretical and practical developments based on a specific geometric array fundamental to creation. This theory has now been presented to the standard scientific community with great success, and his papers on the Holofractographic Universe will soon be followed by a book for the layman entitled "Crossing the Event Horizon."

Nassim's investigation of the geometry of hyperspace has combined quantum physics and cosmological understandings of universal forces with other sciences such as biology and philosophy, resulting in advanced unification computations that, astonishingly, relates to ancient codes left in monuments and documents around the world—including the Bible, the I Ching, the Mayan Sacred Calendar, Pyramids, and Egyptian temples. The results of his research may bring our planet to a new dimension of understanding and existence, one which was predicted by the ancients to arrive at this time in history.

Nassim is fluent in both French and English. He conducts workshops and seminars on his theories to help bring an awareness that is greatly needed in these times. His lectures are designed around his life experiences beginning with childhood illuminations and culminating in the discovery of a technology and united view that seems to have been left encoded by ancient civilizations for us to rediscover. His work may lead to some of the most important scientific, philosophic and technological discoveries in written history.

©Copyright 2000 by Nassim Haramein
All rights reserved

Hafiz poem and the Fertile Unknown

I found this poem by Hafiz, the 14th century Persian poet, to speak beautifully of the infinite richness of the fertile unknown - the place within us filled and alive with pure creative potential, just waiting to be cultivated and enacted out into the world. We tend to busy ourselves with distractions to avoid this unknown because we fear there is nothing in the "void." Yet the "empty void" is actually not empty at all - it is the life-giving, vibrant, fertile soil of invention, innovation, creative expression, transformation, wisdom and all things visionary. I think this fertile unknown can be a fun party at which to play and create if we let it.


In a Handful of God

Poetry reveals that there is no empty space.

When your truth forsakes its shyness,
When your fears surrender to your strengths,
You will begin to experience

That all existence
Is a teeming sea of infinite life.

In a handful of ocean water
You could not count all the finely tuned
Musicians

Who are acting stoned
For very intelligent and sane reasons

And of course are becoming extremely sweet
And wild.

In a handful of the sky and earth,
In a handful of God,

We cannot count
All the ecstatic lovers who are dancing there
Behind the mysterious veil.

True art reveals there is no void
Or darkness.

There is no loneliness to the clear-eyed mystic
In this luminous, brimming
Playful world.

Spirit-erialism and the Ta-da! List

The word Spirit-erialism emerged in my consciousness today to convey the convergence of spiritual and material in work - with an abundance of each; business strategy and creative expression, personal wholeness and professional success; soul and money; play and work. That's my word of the day.

Another word of the day - several days ago - was deciding to have a Ta-Da! List instead of the dreaded To-Do List. Both are about getting things done, but one is heavy with the idea of having to do it, the other is energized with the feeling of getting to do it. And, like with any fun performance, you get to say "Ta-da!" afterward.