Falling in creativity
Beginnings, endings, and the things that have neither
“How long does love last”? he asked.
I took the question philosophically, energetically. “Love is infinite,” I said. “It never runs out.”
It was our second date, we were at the beach. I didn’t know then that he was asking a different question. Regardless, we felt the same. Voltage to source.
Love still exists long after a structural relationship ‘breakup’, because it is always there. It’s a state, an energy. It’s in me, you, us. We tune into its frequency and merge into its texture. It can’t be used up or run out because it has no volume or edges; we can only tune out.
Love is both noun and verb. It exists as a state, and the choosing to tune into that state and give expression to its unrealised form is itself an act of love. In this way, love is in infinite coexistence with us.
I still feel it both ways, noun and verb, the sandy equations of love.
Creative intelligence shares this structure.
The spiritualist receiving messages. The writer who says the book came through them. The scientist having a lightbulb moment while out for a walk. Every framework that has ever tried to explain where original thinking comes from points to a similar place. A source. Something that exists before you reach for it, that requires a particular quality of stillness and attunement to receive.
The raw material is all there, and our unique expression is the particular texture it takes as it moves through us, and the way we are changed by giving it form. Every act of creativity is a transmutation.
In Vedic understanding, that source has a name: Brahman. The undifferentiated ground from which everything flows — love, knowledge, matter, creativity. Creativity and love aren’t separate forces so much as different expressions of the same origin. You don’t go to one place for inspiration and another for love. You go to the one place they both come from. Maybe this is source. Maybe it's the beach.
Meditation is the practice of returning there. Not to become more creative, or more loving, though both tend to follow, but because the source is what we are when we stop generating and start receiving.
For those in Melbourne, on Wed 8 April I’m hosting an evening built around this question — where does original thinking actually come from? — and more esoterically, what does it feel like? I’m hosting it with Vedic meditation teacher Laura Poole (Mahasoma) and dinner from Catie Gett (The Staple Store) to close.
A few seats remain. Book here.
I teach a functional, creative meditation technique and coach people to build the habit of a daily practice. If you’d like to know more about the offerings, visit the Supermuse website here. I post on Insta here.
Club Med, a twice-monthly group meditation collective for inner visionaries, is now run here on Substack. Go here to join and get more info!