Creating is a skill that develops over time. Like any skill, you build mastery with many experiences over weeks, months, and years. For this reason, this, or any book, can only be an opening. But openings can be profound, if they lead to real and lasting change. Experiment with the principles in this book. Apply the ideas in your own life. Begin to work with the creative process in various areas of your life. (Location 154)

Introduction

Creators are an enigma to many people, because creators seem to tolerate apparent contradictions quite easily. To creators, however, these are not contradictions but opposites that need to be balanced continually, as a bicyclist continually shifts weight from left to right to maintain balance with the least amount of effort. (Location 185)

Creators live simultaneously in many universes. Each universe has its own set of governing principles. When a creator performs a creative act, many separate and distinct universes suddenly converge in perfect alignment. (Location 188)

Creating, I have concluded, is the best window to the universe I know. (Location 203)

If anything could truly change the face of our civilization, it is the creative process. (Location 271)

Once someone has mastered his or her own creative process, permanent change is the norm. Once you know how to read, you do not lose that ability, and once you know how to create what most matters to you, you do not lose that ability. (Location 272)

We all recognize the major structural principle that governs the laws of movement in nature, yet only a few apply it consciously. This principle is that energy always moves along the path of least resistance and that any change you attempt to make in your life will not work if the path of least resistance does not lead in that direction. Throughout this book you will learn to form new structures in your life that will enable you to direct the path of least resistance to where you truly want to go. (Location 281)

Part One: Fundamental Principles

Chapter 1: The Path of Least Resistance

Forming the Path

People who come to my native Boston often ask me, “How did they ever design the layout of the roads?” There appears to be no recognizable city planning in Boston. The Boston roads were actually formed by utilizing existing cow paths. (Location 290)

Thus, the structure of the land gave rise to the cows’ consistent pattern of behavior in moving from place to place. As a result, city planning in Boston gravitates around the mentality of the seventeenth-century cow. (Location 301)

Moving Along the Path

Once a structure exists, energy moves through that structure by the path of least resistance. In other words, energy moves where it is easiest for it to go. (Location 304)

You got to where you are in your life right now by moving along the path of least resistance. (Location 318)

Three Insights

You are like a river. You go through life taking the path of least resistance. You may try to change the direction of your own flow in certain areas of your life—your eating habits, the way you work, the way you relate to others, the way you treat yourself, the attitudes you have about life. And you may even succeed for a time. But eventually you will find you return to your original behavior and attitudes. This is because your life is determined, insofar as it is a law of nature for you to take the path of least resistance. (Location 322)

The underlying structure of your life determines the path of least resistance. If a riverbed remains unchanged, the water will continue to flow along the path it always has, since that is the most natural route for it to take. If the underlying structures of your life remain unchanged, the greatest tendency is for you to follow the same direction your life has always taken. (Location 330)

You can change the fundamental underlying structures of your life. Just as engineers can change the path of a river by changing the structure of the terrain so that the river flows where they want it to go, you can change the very basic structure of your life so that you can create the life you want. In fact, with an appropriate change in the underlying structure of your life, the path of least resistance cannot lead anywhere except in the direction you really want to go. (Location 348)

The guiding principle that emanates from these three insights is this: You can learn to recognize the structures at play in your life and change them so that you can create what you really want to create. (Location 357)

What Is Structure?

The structure of anything refers to its fundamental parts and how those individual elements function in relation to each other and in relation to the whole. (Location 361)

Everything has an underlying unifying structure. Some structures are physical, such as bridges, buildings, tunnels, stadiums. Some structures are nonphysical, such as the plot of a novel, the form of a symphony, the dramatic movement of a film, or the structure of a sonnet. Whether physical or non-physical, any structure is made up of parts that relate to one another. When these parts interact, they set up tendencies—inclinations toward movement. (Location 384)

All Structures Contain Movement

Every structure contains within it the inclination toward movement, that is, a tendency to change from one state into another state. But some structures tend to move, whereas others tend to remain stationary. A wheel has a greater tendency toward movement than a brick. What determines the tendency to move? The underlying structure. (Location 389)

Structure Determines Behavior

The next time you are in a building, notice how the structure of the building determines your path through it. Similarly, there are fundamental structures in your life that determine the path of least resistance. The structures that have the most influence on your life are composed of your desires, beliefs, assumptions, aspirations, and objective reality itself. (Location 400)

The study of structure is independent of and different from the study of psychology. But when we begin to understand how structure works and to apply structural principles to human behavior, two extraordinary principles become obvious. One is that human beings act in accordance with the underlying structures in their lives. The second principle is: Some structures are more useful than others in leading to desired results. (Location 416)

People commonly believe that if they change their behavior, they can change the structures in their lives. In fact, just the opposite is true. You can’t fool Mother Structure. Some structures lead to oscillation and some structures lead to final destinations. (Location 439)

A Life of Oscillation

The structures in some people’s lives lead to oscillation. These people have a general experience of moving forward and then backward, and then forward and then backward again. This pattern may repeat endlessly. Because of the structure in play, their attempts to change their life may work at first, and then not work, and then work again and then not work again. This is the experience of coming full circle. The feeling of being in a rut. Of winding up back at square one. (Location 448)

This phenomenon is often inadequately explained by many psychotherapists. Words such as sabotage, self-destructive, and failure complex are proposed to give a plausible insight into chronic oscillation. (Location 460)

The popular notion is that inner states of being—emotions, needs, fears, inhibitions, drives, instincts, and so on—generate your dysfunctional actions. Perhaps an “unresolved” relationship with your mother causes you to avoid romantic relationships. Perhaps a traumatic experience you had as a child causes you to fear authority figures. (Location 469)

If you are in a structure that leads to oscillation, no solution will help. This is because these psychological solutions do not address the structure, but rather the behavior that comes from the structure. (Location 479)

To attempt a psychological solution to what is really a structural phenomenon does nothing to change the underlying structure. (Location 485)

Structure and the Creative Process

When you are solving a problem, you are taking action to have something go away: the problem. When you are creating, you are taking action to have something come into being: the creation. Notice that the intentions of these actions are opposite. (Location 495)

When you think structurally, you ask better and more useful questions. Rather than asking, “How do I get this unwanted situation to go away?” you might ask, “What structures should I adopt to create the results I want to create?” (Location 497)

The importance of structural thinking

The most important developments in civilization have come through the creative process, but ironically, most people have not been taught to create. The creative process itself has a very different structure from the one most people have learned by default from our traditional educational systems and social upbringing. Creators come from a tradition entirely different from the one in which most of us have been raised. (Location 504)

Artists Don’t Know What They Know

As you begin to understand how the path of least resistance works in your life, you will be able to share in one of the richest and most important traditions known to civilization. Your involvement in this tradition will not be limited to the arts, but can encompass all of your life, from the mundane to the profound. (Location 539)

Chapter 2: The Reactive-Responsive Orientation

Your Childhood

One of the messages you are given from infancy is that there is a particular way of doing things. As your own interests grew, you relied less and less on those who were taking care of you, and more and more on yourself and other people your own age. From several experiences you discovered that the big people didn’t know all there was to know about how it is. Over time you developed some of your own ideas. You changed your view of how life is, but you retained the assumption that life is constructed of concrete rules in operation. This opinion was central in developing your own ideas about how to live your life. Once you formed your opinion about the world, the next step was to design a policy to use in relating to it. (Location 545)

What You Learn Growing Up

The majority of the behavioral rules you were taught as a child were based on avoidance or prevention of situations that may have been harmful to you or to the people around you. “Don’t play in the street.” “Don’t bother your father.” “Don’t play with matches.” “Don’t be late.” (Location 619)

But the strategy of avoiding trouble is taught and reinforced until it can become an automatic lifetime habit. Your tendency toward avoidance can live long after you know how to cross the street or light a match. What you really learned as a child is that circumstances are the dominant force in life. (Location 623)

One way or another, most people believe circumstances are the driving force in their life. When circumstances are central to your life, you may feel you have only two types of choices: either to respond to the circumstances or to react against the circumstances. (Location 632)

I call this the reactive-responsive orientation. In this orientation you take action based on the circumstances in which you find yourself, or might find yourself in the future. Unfortunately, most education systems reinforce this reactive-responsive orientation. (Location 641)

Many students “adapt well” and learn how to respond “appropriately.” Their actions, however, are not motivated by a love of learning or a thirst for knowledge, but by a desire to fit in and avoid trouble. (Location 647)

Responsive Behavior

What at first seems to free participants ultimately binds them. Such approaches—releasing repressed areas of consciousness, positive thinking, transformational experiences, accepting things exactly the way they are, “creative” problem solving, situational management, behavior modification, stress reduction, “new” styles of thinking, and even certain forms of meditation—all attempt to teach people to respond to life or to the universe as if the circumstances were dominant. (Location 664)

The Reactive Orientation

If you are reactive, you also believe that circumstances are the driving force of life. But you believe that circumstances are not necessarily the way society presents them. Reactive behavior may take the form of cynicism, or you may have a chronic chip on your shoulder. You may be suspicious of others or simply have a “short fuse.” You may hold conspiracy theories about people in power or subscribe to a political or religious philosophy that reacts against injustice or evil. (Location 676)

The Reactive-Responsive Orientation: “Nice” People and “Difficult” People

Even “nice,” responsive people build up resentment over time because of their chronic position of powerlessness. When they amass enough resentment, they turn into difficult, reactive people. But because that change does nothing to enhance their power and, in fact, feels disorienting, they soon return to being nice, responsive people. (Location 713)

On the other hand, “difficult,” reactive people create so much commotion that, over a period of time, they build up guilt as well as resentment because of their chronic destructiveness and powerlessness. When they build up enough conflict, they repent and turn into nice, responsive people. (Location 717)

For many, life is an endless loop, moving back and forth between reactiveness and responsiveness. Oscillation begets more oscillation. Throughout these shifts, the oscillating structure remains in place. Although people may change their behaviors, actions, policies, and even philosophies, their pattern of either responding or reacting to circumstances is still in play. (Location 722)

The Premise of Powerlessness

The reactive-responsive orientation contains the basic presumption that you are powerless. If you habitually react or respond to circumstances, where does the power lie in these situations? It clearly lies outside you, in the circumstances. Therefore, because the power does not reside in you, you are powerless and the circumstances are all-powerful. (Location 728)

Looking to the Externa

Some people believe that if we change outer circumstances so that we have adequate housing, adequate health care, a shorter work week, inexpensive rapid transportation, smaller families, and so on, individuals would be happier, healthier, more balanced, and psychologically secure. The fact is that many people do have adequate housing, adequate health care, and the rest, yet they are still unhappy, unhealthy, unstable, and psychologically insecure. (Location 764)

Looking to the Internal-External

In the reactive-responsive orientation, there are certain internal circumstances, such as fear, anger, illness, or parts of the personality, that people treat just as if they were external circumstances. That is, people react or respond to these internal circumstances as if they were beyond their reach or control. They are seen as internally external: “I had so much anger, I had to leave the room”; or “My fear got in the way during my job interview”; (Location 789)

While these circumstances are primarily inner and self-referential, they function for the reactive-responsive person as if they originated somewhere beyond the personal sphere of influence, beyond their direct control. (Location 796)

Circumstantial Stimuli

One way to describe the reactive-responsive orientation is as a way of living in which you predominantly react or respond to circumstantial stimuli that are beyond your direct control. When things change in your circumstances, you perceive a need to react or respond to what just changed. (Location 802)

Avoiding the Circumstances

Chronic worrying is an avoidance strategy designed to prevent or avoid the negative consequences about which you are worrying. (Location 850)

For some, the decision to stay in a relationship or to leave it depends on which is the greater discomfort to avoid—the uncertainty of a new life or the resentment building up in the present one. No matter what they decide, they make their choice based on the assumption that all they can do is react or respond to the circumstances. (Location 861)

The Preemptive Strike

In the reactive-responsive orientation, even more common than the strategy designed to avoid immediate unwanted circumstances is a longer-range strategy designed to prevent unwanted circumstances from happening in the first place. This latter strategy is called a preemptive strike. (Location 865)

The preemptive strike takes many forms. Some people act arrogant and unfriendly as a preemptive strike to prevent closeness and intimacy. Some get upset and hurt easily as a preemptive strike to prevent being confronted by anyone. Some put themselves in situations in which they appear to be victimized as a preemptive strike to prevent being taken advantage of. A subtle preemptive strike may turn out to be a lifelong strategy. You may have learned, early on, the kinds of situations that could be threatening to you and gradually developed strategies to prevent them from recurring in your life. (Location 868)

On the Defensive

A Closed and Circular System

If your orientation is primarily in a responsive mode, the path of least resistance is to move to the reactive. But once there, the path of least resistance leads you back to the responsive. If your orientation is primarily in a reactive mode, the path of least resistance is to move to the responsive. But once there, the path of least resistance leads you back to the reactive. If it seems to you that this is a closed and circular system, you are right. If you attempt to solve, change, break through, transform, accept, reject, or avoid this structure, all you will do is reinforce it. As long as you try to make changes from within the reactive-responsive orientation, you will remain within that orientation. (Location 931)

Chapter 3: Creating Is No Problem— Problem Solving Is Not Creating

The problem solvers propose elaborate schemes to define the problem, generate alternative solutions, and put the best solution into practice. If this process is successful, you might eliminate the problem. Then what you have is the absence of the problem you are solving. But what you do not have is the presence of a result you want to create. (Location 952)

The greatest leaders and statesmen in history have not been problem solvers. They have been builders. They have been creators. (Location 974)

Problems, Problems

The path of least resistance in problem solving is to move from worse to better and then from better to worse again. This is because the actions taken are generated by the problem. If the intensity of the problem is lessened by the actions you took, there is less motivation to take further actions. The structure is this: The problem leads to actions designed to reduce the problem. The problem is reduced. This leads to less need for other actions. This leads to fewer future actions. This leads to the problem remaining or intensifying anew. (Location 1001)

Life in the Problem Track

What drives the action is the intensity of the problem. Once the intensity of the problem is lessened, people have less motivation to act. Thus problem solving as a way of life becomes self-defeating. Problem solving mostly leads to less and less action as the actions work to solve the problem! (Location 1028)

The Business of Problems

Problem solving provides an almost automatic way of organizing your focus, actions, time, and thought process. In a sense, when you have a nice juicy problem to work on, you do not have to think. You can obsess instead. You can dwell on what is wrong. You can go over it in your mind. You can worry and fret. (Location 1041)

Problem solving can be very distracting while at the same time giving you the illusion that you are doing something important and needed. (Location 1045)

“Creative” Problem Solving

When people talk about problem solving and creativity in the same breath, what they usually mean is finding some unusual way out of difficulties. The use of the word creative here is strictly about style and not substance. It has nothing to do with the real creative process as practiced for centuries in the arts and sciences. An artist could not paint a painting using the “creative” problem-solving approach. Artists do not paint to solve problems but to bring into reality a work of art. (Location 1048)

An example of a typical “creative” problem-solving technique is brainstorming. Brainstorming is a process in which you attempt to blitzkrieg through your preconceived “mind-set” by fanciful free association. The idea is to generate alternative solutions by overcoming your usual manner of thinking. You are encouraged to suspend your critical judgment so that you can be more inventive. (Location 1054)

“Freeing the Wonders of Your Mind”

But creators not only can imagine or envision, they also have the ability to bring what they imagine into reality. Once a creation exists, an evolutionary process can take place. Each past creation builds a foundation for the next creation. (Location 1090)

Is This Problem Relevant?

After years of dedicated work on the subject, psychologist Carl Jung made this astute observation: All the greatest and most important problems of life are fundamentally insoluble. . . . They can never be solved, but only outgrown. This “outgrowth” proved on further investigation to require a new level of consciousness. Some higher or wider interest appeared on the patient’s horizon, and through this broadening of his or her outlook the insoluble problem lost its urgency. It was not solved logically in its own terms but faded when confronted with a new and stronger life urge. (Location 1135)

Sigmund Freud Was a Doctor

Many of the developments in psychotherapy and psychoanalysis in the last one hundred years have been influenced by the father of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud. While many of the innovators in these fields may not directly subscribe to Freud’s theories, they nonetheless use the same medical model. (Location 1152)

But medical science is not a method for creating health. Rather it is a discipline dedicated to eradicating disease. Newer trends in the field may consider health a goal of medical science, but so far most doctors do not make the profound distinction between alleviating disease and creating health. (Location 1160)

A Clear Distinction

No matter what your problems are, for the most part, solving them won’t solve them. You will always have a new problem if you do not know how to create what you want. And creating is no problem. (Location 1249)

Chapter 4: Creating

A Lesson from the Ghetto

We have been led to believe that the circumstances of our life determine our ability to express ourselves. That for us to explore new dimensions of our being, our conditions need to be favorable. If that were true, how could such creativity, originality, and vitality come from such humble and adverse beginnings as the ghetto? (Location 1295)

Creating Is Not a Product of the Circumstances

Creating is completely different from reacting or responding to the circumstances you are in. The process of creating is not generated by the circumstances in which you find yourself, but by the creation itself. (Location 1301)

It is popular to think of creativity as a product of your environment, culture, or other circumstances that foster the creative process. But a quick survey of the history of creativity will make it obvious that people have created in a wide range of circumstances, from convenient ones to difficult ones. (Location 1303)

Even though the most obvious expression of the creative process is found in the arts, it is in no way limited to the arts. Almost all of your life’s desires can be the subject of the creative process. (Location 1314)

It is wise to learn about the creative process from those practitioners who know the most about it and who have used it to bring the highest fruits of the creative process into being. This is a different skill from what you have learned in school, at home, or at work, and yet it is one of the most important skills to develop in your life. (Location 1318)

And psychologist Carl Rogers has written: The action of the child inventing a new game with his playmates; Einstein formulating a theory of relativity; the housewife devising a new sauce for the meat; a young author writing his first novel; all of these are, in terms of our definition, creative, and there is no attempt to set them in some order of more or less creative. (Location 1325)

When one does not consciously know the skill of creating, it is common to suppose the creative process a product of the unconscious or subconscious, or of mysticism. Then the creative process becomes a search for the formula that will tap your hidden powers. Because your “normal” self seems not to be the possessor of such powers, you might assume they must lie somewhere else. (Location 1330)

It is our inexperience and ignorance that can make the creative process seem as if it is an outcome of magical operations, the same kind of inexperience and ignorance a jungle tribe may have about modern aviation. But, in fact, creating is a skill that can be learned and developed. Like any skill, you learn by practice and hands-on experience. You can learn to create by creating. (Location 1344)

The Steps

The steps in the creative process are simple to describe, but they do not constitute a formula. Instead, each step represents certain types of actions. (Location 1350)

While your ability will develop over time with experience, every new creation has its own individual process. (Location 1353)

Chapter 5 The Orientation of the Creative

The Structure of the Creative Process

The creative process has a structure different from that of reacting or responding to circumstances, one that resolves rather than oscillates. (Location 1446)

The shift from the reactive-responsive orientation to the orientation of the creative is both simple and complex. It is easy to live in the realm of the creative, but it is so unusual that many people find it hard to leave their past learnings behind. (Location 1456)

The Orientation

The orientation of the creative is not simply a different context, as it sometimes has been inadequately described by people not in that orientation. It is living in a different universe. (Location 1464)

A person in the reactive-responsive orientation is in a kind of maze. The circumstances are the walls. The person’s life consists of negotiating through the maze. Some people have found safety in traveling the same route, and some are consistently surprised when confronted with a new dead end, but either way there is always a limitation of choice, often between the lesser of two evils. (Location 1466)

The Spirit of Creating

What motivates a creator? The desire for the creation to exist. A creator creates in order to bring the creation into being. People in the reactive-responsive orientation often have trouble understanding this sensibility: to create for the sake of the creation itself. Not for the praise, not for the “return on investment,” not for what it may say about you, but for its own sake. (Location 1496)

You are not what you create. Even though your creations come from and through you, your creations are separate from you. When you separate yourself from your creations, you can experience one of the most profound understandings of creativity—love. The reason you would create anything is because you love it enough to see it exist. (Location 1511)

If, like most of us, you have been raised in the reactive-responsive orientation, you probably have had little experience in doing what you do out of love of the thing being done. Most people do not spend their lives doing what they love. To them, doing what they love is a luxury, not a usual way of life. And often they confuse distraction with love. Hobbies, entertainment, and vacations can be such distractions. Yes, you can love your hobby, but is your hobby your life’s work or just a respite from what you do not like? For too many, life is filled with unpleasant necessities that do not feed the human spirit, even though they may feed the human body. (Location 1550)

If you advised such a person to find something to love, he or she would not be able to take your advice. It is only when you begin to create for the sake of the creation itself that you can begin to understand the orientation of the creative. There are no tricks, no right responses, no ulterior motives. Just the love of the thing. (Location 1565)

Obligation

In the orientation of the creative you have no obligation to create what you love enough to create. You do not need the creations you create. Artists truly understand this point, because there is no real need for art. (Location 1569)

People often translate what they want into what they think they need. Partly this translation is designed to justify what they want. If they can make their desires seem like needs, they believe they have “no choice” except to work to fulfill them. (Location 1575)

Reactive-responsive people suspect that doing what they want would be selfish. This suspicion comes from a lack of self-knowledge. (Location 1583)

Those who spend their lives destructively are not in touch with their power to create. Instead, the manifestation of evil throughout history has come in reaction to the inability, not the ability, to create. Power-wielding, manipulation, terrorism, militarism, and lust for power do not come from having power, but from not having power, (Location 1598)

Creation Expressing Itself

Two hundred years ago the fields of sociology, anthropology, biochemistry, paleontology, and nuclear physics did not exist. Today they do. During this last decade a technological revolution has changed the world in ways that were unimaginable twenty years ago. When composers create, they begin with a blank sheet of music manuscript paper. When artists paint, they begin with an empty canvas. It is sometimes difficult for us to think that something new can actually be created, something that did not exist before. (Location 1648)

The Secret of the Creative Process

A common mistake people make when first entering the orientation of the creative is to seek to “find out” what they want as if it were a deeply hidden treasure to be discovered and revealed. They are looking in the wrong direction. Creating what you want is not a revelatory process, nor is what you want something to be discovered. (Location 1675)

If not by need, and not by the demands of the circumstances, and not by revelation, then how do you conceive of what you want? Simply by “making up” the results. (Location 1689)

Making Things Up

Creative people know they make up what they create. But there is a strange prejudice in society about the notion of people making things up. One reason is that making things up is not characteristic of the reactive-responsive orientation upon which so much of our society is based. Since the reactive-responsive orientation relies so heavily on rationale and justification, to simply say “I made it up” seems almost heretical. (Location 1695)

But the fact is that Albert Einstein made up the theory of relativity, Marie Curie made up the theory of radiation, Thomas Edison made up the light bulb, Mary Cassatt made up the painting The Bath, Anton Webern made up the Six Bagatelles for String Quartet, Emily Dickinson made up the poem “Because I Could Not Stop for Death,” Ilya Prigogine made up the theory of dissipative structures, Joni Mitchell made up the song “Court and Spark,” Harriet Tubman made up the “underground railway,” and the founders of the nation made up the United States of America. (Location 1702)

The creative process can look many different ways. Some of your best creations may come from the most normal experiences, and some of your worst may be the product of what seemed to be “divine inspiration.” There seems to be no relationship between the final worth of a result and the experiences the creator has while in the process of creating. (Location 1722)

Focus on the Result

If you ask the “how” question before the “what” question, all you can ever hope to create are variations of what you already have. (Location 1763)

When the process comes first, the process itself will limit the actions you will be able to take and thereby limit the possibilities of what you can create. As the artist Chuck Close has said, “You can give the same recipe to ten cooks, and some make it come alive, and some make a flat soufflé. A system doesn’t guarantee anything.” (Location 1770)

The Premature Process

Premature focus on the process will limit and inhibit your effectiveness. Our educational system does not focus on the results you as a student want in your life. Instead it promotes the notion that what you should learn is process. You should learn how to do mathematics and construct grammatical sentences. You should learn how to write research papers and do laboratory experiments in biology. You should learn how to draw, to speak in public, to read musical notation, perhaps even to write a poem or two. The assumption is that as you become fluent in these processes, the results you want in your life will take care of themselves. Consequently few educators ask students the question, “What do you want in your life?” (Location 1784)

Organically Formed Processes

In the creative orientation, when you answer the question “What do I want to create?” it is not clear whether what you want is possible. Yet throughout the history of the world many results have been created that seemed impossible at the time they were conceived. (Location 1809)

Once a vision is clear, processes organically form that lead to the accomplishment of that vision. This means that, in the creative orientation, process is invented along the way. (Location 1826)

What Is the Formula?

From the orientation of the creative, on the other hand, the only rule of thumb about process is not to have a rule of thumb. The process should always serve the result. And because a new result might require a completely original process, limiting yourself to preconceived notions of what processes are available can be fatal to spontaneity. (Location 1833)

Process, Process Everywhere, but Not a Vision in Sight

Learning processes has become the socially acceptable response. There is an abundance of processes for losing weight, growing hair, building muscles, vitalizing energy, having successful romantic relationships, quitting smoking, dressing successfully (and with the right colors!), reducing stress, overcoming psychological barriers, finding enlightenment, becoming self-actualized, learning to love yourself, contacting “higher intelligence,” finding peace of mind, enhancing your sexual prowess, analyzing your dreams, integrating your mind, body, and soul, opening your heart, closing your past, being more “left” brain, being more “right” brain, becoming more affluent, etc., etc., etc., etc. (Location 1872)

This is a wonderful age we live in. So much is available. But often the criteria people use to determine which direction they should take are dictated by notions about process rather than concepts about results. (Location 1877)

When you create, process is functional. There is no dogma to adopt, no romance to maintain, no philosophy to uphold. Process is invented and designed to serve the result you desire. This is its only purpose. It is best to allow processes to form organically from within the vision of the result. It is unwise to limit the way a result can happen by any given process. At the time you conceive the result you want, the actual way you will bring it about is always unknown to you, even if you have a hunch about it. (Location 1882)

Chapter 6 Tension Seeks Resolution

The path of least resistance oscillates in some structures and resolves in others. If you are in an oscillating structure, you will experience a recurring pattern. This is a pattern that moves toward what you want, and then away from what you want, and then toward what you want, and then away from what you want, and so on. If you are in a structure that resolves, the path of least resistance moves toward final resolution of the structure. One major skill of the creative process is forming structures that resolve in favor of the creation. These structures are the most useful because they support movement in the direction of your final result. (Location 1889)

Tension-Resolution Systems

One basic principle found throughout nature is this: Tension seeks resolution. From the spider web to the human body, from the formation of galaxies to the shifts of continents, from the swing of pendulums to the movement of wind-up toys, tension-resolution systems are in play. (Location 1900)

The simplest tension-resolution system is a structure that contains a single tension. The tendency of the structure is to resolve the tension. If you stretch a rubber band, the tendency of the rubber band is to pull back to resolve the tension in the structure. (Location 1907)

In tonal music, because of the acoustical phenomenon of the overtone series, certain harmonic structures tend to move to other very specific harmonic structures. In tonality, the dominant seventh chord has a structural tendency to resolve to the tonic chord. (Location 1911)

Tension-resolution systems are found throughout ordinary conversation. If I ask you a question such as, “How are you?” the structural tendency is to answer the question. This is because the question sets up a tension, and the answer to the question resolves that tension. This is known as an antecedent-consequential phrase; it is the most natural phrasing found in language and thought processes that depend on language. (Location 1917)

A simple tension-resolution system is in play in your own life when you are hungry. Hunger creates a tension. That tension is resolved when you eat. Similarly, thirst creates a tension. That tension is resolved when you drink. (Location 1933)

Conflict of Tendencies

When tension-resolution systems are connected to other tension-resolution systems, they may compete with each other. In that kind of structure you have a conflict of tendencies. As one tension-resolution system moves toward resolution, the other tension-resolution system moves toward even more tension. Once the tension in the second system is higher than the tension in the first, the structure moves toward resolving the second system. But this will increase the tension in the first system. This structure will lead to oscillation because of the competing tension-resolution systems. Since this conflict is created by the structure, I call it structural conflict. (Location 1938)

Structural Conflict

Structural conflict comes from two simple tension-resolution systems that compete. If you were hungry (tension), you would naturally tend to resolve this tension by eating (resolution). However, if you are sufficiently overweight, you may choose to go on a diet designed to bring you to a desirable weight. This sets up a separate system of tension resolution. (Location 1945)

Appearance

In this structure there is a shift from one tension-resolution system dictating the action to the other tension-resolution system dictating the action. This may be called a shift of dominance. These shifts of dominance form the behavior of oscillation. The forces in play may not be obvious. In fact, (Location 1992)

The structure in play leads to oscillation. This is all it can do. Someone who takes actions to resolve a structural conflict often bases those actions on the appearance of the behavior—for example, the failure to diet successfully. That person is unaware that he or she is in an oscillating structure and that any actions he or she takes can only reinforce the underlying structure, ultimately leading to an experience of powerlessness. (Location 2001)

One reason dieting is often unsuccessful is that the actions themselves are merely a strategy designed to overpower the structural tendencies in place. What happens, however, is that as one part of the structure is manipulated or stretched by the strategy of dieting, the other system (the desire to eat because of hunger) compensates by increasing its dominance. As you put pressure on one part of a structure, the rest of the structure pushes back. In system dynamics this is called compensating feedback. (Location 2005)

A Classic Conflict Structure

The structural conflict most common in everyone’s life is formed by two competing tension-resolution systems. One is based on your desire. The other is based on an incompatible dominant belief that you are not able to fulfill your desires. (Location 2011)

People both want to create what most deeply matters to them and simultaneously believe deep down that they cannot have what they want. This very human dilemma is actually a structural conflict. (Location 2038)

Desire creates a tension, which is resolved by having what you want: The belief that you are unable to have what you want creates a tension that is resolved by not having what you want: Together these two tension-resolution systems create structural conflict, since the two points of resolution are mutually exclusive: (Location 2040)

Here is an analogy of how this structure plays itself out over time. Imagine yourself in a room. Imagine yourself midway between the front and back wall of the room. Imagine that the result you desire is written on the wall in front of you. Imagine as you move toward that wall that you are moving toward what you want. Imagine the belief “I cannot have what I want” written on the wall behind you. As you move toward the back wall, you are moving away from what you want. Imagine that around your waist are two gigantic rubber bands. One rubber band stretches from your waist to the wall in front of you. This represents the “desire” tension-resolution system. The second rubber band stretches from your waist to the wall behind you. This represents the “inability to have what you want” belief tension-resolution system. (Location 2048)

Over time you will tend to continue to move back and forth, back and forth, first toward one wall and then toward the other as the path of least resistance changes. These shifts may take minutes or years. Most often the oscillation occurs over a longer period of time, and the phenomenon can be difficult to observe at first. Though the specific actions taken might differ, anyone in this structure would behave in fundamentally the same way no matter what his or her desire. Any desire can be substituted for any other desire, and yet you will still see oscillation. (Location 2074)

Structural Conflict Is Not Resolvable

People often attempt to circumvent the effects of structural conflict with great hope and optimism, which is usually followed by great disillusionment. It is inherent in this structure that any actions you take to solve structural conflict only reinforce the experience of limitation and hence the structure itself. (Location 2118)

Since the nature of this conflict is structural, it is only by changing the underlying structure of your life that you can make any real and lasting change. However, any attempt you make to change the structure from within this structure will not work. Because of the structure in play, the path of least resistance will lead you to futile actions, actions designed to relieve the conflict, but that ironically will only entrench the conflict further. (Location 2121)

Chapter 7: Compensating Strategies

If you try to change your behavior without first changing the underlying structure causing that behavior, you will not succeed. This is because structure determines behavior, not the other way around. (Location 2148)

Much of the advice people give each other will not work, because it is designed to change compensating strategies without any notion of the underlying structures that are causing them. (Location 2155)

There are three major strategies designed to compensate for the fundamental unresolvability of structural conflict.

1. Staying within an area of tolerable conflict
2. Conflict manipulation
3. Willpower manipulation. (Location 2163)

Area of Tolerable Conflict

In fact, the goal of the structure has nothing to do with you. This goal is purely one that arises out of the makeup of the structure itself. The goal is equilibrium. Using our analogy of rubber bands and walls from the previous chapter, the goal of the structure is to have both rubber bands contain the same amount of tension. (Location 2179)

The more difference in one tension-resolution system over the other, the wider the oscillation. If you could limit the oscillation, it would not be as pronounced or uncomfortable. (Location 2187)

With wide oscillation you can experience an emotional roller coaster. Many people do not like being on an emotional seesaw, so they adopt a strategy of minimizing the oscillation. This is done by remaining within an area in which they can easily tolerate the feelings generated by the system. Within this area of tolerable conflict, the pattern of oscillation continues to occur, but with decreased amplitude. (Location 2190)

All of us know people who seem to continually “keep the lid on.” Others try to “maintain an even level.” An entire generation in the fifties grew up with the message, “Don’t rock the boat.” A person in this strategy avoids change. When confronted with a challenge, such a person attempts to minimize change by moving away from any potential experience of conflict. (Location 2196)

Conflict Manipulation

Given the fundamental unresolvability of structural conflict, people often gravitate toward taking less and less action in favor of what they actually want. (Location 2218)

Conflict manipulation always has these two steps: (Location 2223)

The person originally used pressure to mobilize himself or herself into action, then took actions to reduce the pressure. The more this action is successful, the less pressure there is. Less pressure creates less motivation toward action. Over time, the extreme movement in the oscillation is reduced. The actions are neutralized. Movement returns to the area of tolerable conflict. (Location 2251)

If you worry chronically, you use conflict manipulation. If you are driven by your concerns, you use conflict manipulation. If you react to your negative emotions, you use conflict manipulation. (Location 2259)

Negative Visions: Fear, Guilt, and Pity

Conflict manipulation has become a popular strategy in promoting and fundraising for a number of community causes— social, health, political, religious and so on. At one time or another many of them employ the same formula, though some manipulate through fear while others use guilt and pity. (Location 2355)

The great irony is that each one of these groups, by using conflict manipulation, promotes a vision that is, in most cases, the opposite of what they really want to see created on the planet. One tragedy of our times is that well-meaning people often lend enormous amounts of energy to visions they really do not want to see happen. (Location 2375)

Breaking Habits Through Conflict Manipulation

Step one of conflict manipulation is to intensify or exacerbate the conflict. When you attempt to break bad habits, this step is usually carried out by envisioning the terrible negative consequences of your bad habit, the one you are trying to break. Step two is to take action designed to relieve the emotional conflict that was set up in step one. When you’re trying to break a habit, the action you’ll take at this point is to stop or reduce the unwanted habit. Stop drinking, stop excessive eating, stop taking drugs. (Location 2382)

Conflict Manipulation and Powerlessness

As you begin to work with the concept of structure, notice the degree of conflict manipulation in your own life, both that coming to you and that coming from you. When you begin to look, it becomes obvious that many of the interactions people have with each other are products of conflict manipulation. (Location 2447)

Willpower Manipulation

Subliminal message tapes, affirmations, self-hypnosis, positive reinforcements, motivational meetings, slogans and mottoes taped to the bathroom mirror, and cheerleading of all kinds are attempts to overpower structural conflict through exaggerated determination and the “power of positive thinking.” (Location 2463)

If you assume that you can influence and direct your subconscious, what messages do you give it by using many of these programming techniques? It is very hard to communicate with the subconscious. It takes special and extraordinary means. Old “programs” have enormous power. The subconscious is stupid and unruly. It must be treated like a child. If you thought that programming the subconscious was the key to your life, why would you want to influence it with that kind of message? When you try to force-feed the subconscious with positive thoughts, the actions of manipulation speak louder than the propagandistic positive words. (Location 2465)

The Disempowerment of Positive Thinking

What is wrong with positive thinking? In a word—truth. (Location 2562)

If you wake up in the morning and you feel sick, tired, and headachy, one school of positive thinking would have you force yourself to think something like, “Boy, I feel great today. Isn’t it fabulous to be alive?” A second school of positive thinking would have you say to yourself something like, “I really feel sick. I think it’s just wonderful that I feel sick, because good things always come from these kinds of situations. What a wonderful learning opportunity.” Positive thinking is a willpower strategy designed to help people exert their will over themselves as a kind of self-manipulation. (Location 2568)

There are two assumptions, generally unexpressed and unexamined, at the roots of both schools of positive thinking. The first is that you need to control yourself by overpowering your habitual negativity. The second is that the objective truth about reality is somehow dangerous to you and that you must therefore impose upon the truth a beneficent interpretation. (Location 2574)

Let’s examine what happens schematically when you try to overpower structural conflict through willpower. At first, your exaggerated determination may drive you in the direction of what you desire and out of the area of tolerable conflict. In the short run, you may achieve a successful “breakthrough.” Willpower manipulation, like conflict manipulation, often does work in the short run, but it has detrimental long-term consequences. Once again, even if you reach the front wall, the structure compensates for the exaggeration in the oscillation and you move backward. The structure does not support your willful determination. “Holding it together” and “getting yourself up” for each new event and each new day becomes exhausting. (Location 2591)

Like conflict manipulation, willpower manipulation will reinforce your experience of powerlessness over time. (Location 2605)

Some Words of Advice

You may feel frustrated when you realize that structural conflict is nonresolvable, that any action you take from within this structure only reinforces it. Because of the nature of this structural conflict, people often feel a sense of hopelessness and doom. The more you understand this structure, the more frustration you might feel. (Location 2614)

As you learn more and more about your own creative process and about the skill of creating, you will be able to form structures that will lead you to real and lasting success. This change will not be in reaction to anything. The creative process is not a “solution” to your problems in life. It is just the best method of creating the results you want to create in your life. (Location 2624)

Chapter 8: Structural Tension

A Change of Structure

It is possible to change the structures in our lives, but as we have seen, most attempts at change are strategies that operate within structural conflict. Since structural conflict is not solvable or resolvable, actions taken within that structure can lead only to compensation and oscillation. When this structure is dominant, we waste energy trying to change our patterns of behavior. To change this structure there must be another structure in play, and this structure must take precedence over the old structure, so that the path of least resistance will change and energy may move easily along that new path. (Location 2633)

Structural Tension

Structural tension is formed by two major components:

1. A vision of the result you want to create.
2. A clear view of the reality you now have. (Location 2659)

The discrepancy between what you want and what you have increases or decreases during the creative process. As you move closer to final completion of the creation, there will be less discrepancy. (Location 2667)

When you create, you become a player of forces such as contrasts, opposites, similarities, differences, time, balance, and so on. When you create, one of the important forces you can use is discrepancy. Those who do not understand discrepancy often feel discouraged when there is more discrepancy between what they want and what they have and encouraged when there is less. But to the creator, all of the forces in play are useful. If there is more discrepancy, there is more force to work with. If there is less discrepancy, there is more momentum as you move toward the final creation of the result. (Location 2671)

Creators not only tolerate discrepancy, they appreciate and encourage it. Discrepancy contains the energy that enables you to create. (Location 2680)

The Armature and the Engine

Structural tension is the armature of the creative process. It is the bones. It is also the engine of the creative process and the energy source for that engine. The way you form structural tension is by first conceiving of a result you want to create and then by observing the relevant current state of the reality you have in relation to that result. (Location 2684)

If you have an intolerance for discrepancy, you will tend to quickly resolve the tension in favor of continuing your present circumstances rather than working toward your vision. (Location 2695)

“I Don’t See What I See”

Do not confuse a creator with a dreamer. Dreamers only dream, but creators bring their dreams into reality. (Location 2725)

Holding structural tension is not the same as evoking a magical incantation, but rather organizing forces in play. The energy generated by the discrepancy you establish is directly useful in the actions you take on behalf of the vision. Movement leads to more movement. Even if you are moving in the wrong direction, it will be easier to change course and move toward your final result than not to move at all. If you are moving away from your vision, you increase structural tension. This leads to more energy and more pull in the direction you want to go. If you move toward what you want, you build momentum, and it becomes even easier to move toward your vision. (Location 2729)

At first you may have only moments of structural tension. These are focused times when you are clear about what you want and where you presently are. As you work with your own creative process, these moments will become extended. Eventually you will live in a state of structural tension. You will consistently and automatically have an awareness of where you are and what you want to create. (Location 2739)

Chapter 9: Vision

Learning how to do anything before you have any notion of what you will use this knowledge for can give you a false sense of purposelessness. (Location 2791)

Start with Nothing

When you first set out to conceive of a result you want, start with a clean sheet, a blank canvas, a fresh beginning. When you are conceiving of a new creation, it is best to begin without considering what you have thought before, or done before, or even what others have done before. With each new creation, begin anew in your mind. This technique can make quite a difference in your effectiveness. (Location 2794)

Form It in Pictures

Being able to picture what you want to create has great benefits. First, as you envision your creation, you are able to assimilate an enormous amount of data at once. A visual image gives you information that is not available in words. Relationships among the different elements of the structure become clear. (Location 2811)

Look at your result from many angles in your imagination. Try adding new elements. Try taking out elements. Look at the image from inside, outside, above, below, close, and distant. As you practice changing frames of reference, you will get to know more and more about what you want to create. (Location 2821)

How Clear Must the Concept Be?

How clear do you need to be about the result you want? Clear enough that you would recognize the result if you had it. (Location 2827)

As you begin your own creative process, realize that there is no “right” way of doing it. There is no “right” way of painting a painting, no “right” way of composing music, and no “right” way of creating your life. Much of what you will do will be based on personal style, preference, values, and desires. As you experiment with your own path, you will become an expert on your own creative process, and that is the only one that is directly relevant in your life. (Location 2881)

From Concept to Vision

There is a difference between a concept and a vision. Concept comes before vision. Concept is general, vision is specific. (Location 2886)

In the conceptual period you are experimenting with ideas. You are mentally trying out various possibilities. This is a formative period. You may meditate, think, walk, look at the sky, watch television, take a warm bath (one of my favorites), sleep, dream, talk with friends, and so on. In a way the conception period has the feel of play to it. (Location 2886)

Once you have formed the concept, the next step is to crystallize it. This is an act of focusing. The vision need only be clear enough that you would recognize it if you created it. But what is the essential difference between conception and vision? The difference is in focus, and focus is made possible by limitation. When you focus a concept into a vision, you are limiting many ways into a single way. All vision is concept, but not all concepts are vision. (Location 2891)

It is a common beginner’s mistake, to attempt to match what already exists with what you might want instead of forming the concept from scratch. (Location 2924)

A Transition Period

As you form your vision, you simultaneously teach it to yourself. (Location 2933)

The greatest creators know just what to include and what to leave out. (Location 2940)

The Vision Becomes an Entity

When your vision becomes an entity on its own, you can develop a complex relationship with it. You are the parent and it is your child. You are its champion and also its critic. You are both passionate and dispassionate about it. (Location 2968)

Your Life as a Creation

It is not common for people to think of their own lives as creations. You are not encouraged to have with your own life the kind of relationship a creator has with his or her vision. But your life can be a creation. What a difference that is from reacting or responding to the circumstances. Your own life can become a separate entity, and when it does, you can form it, mold it, and change it the way you want. (Location 2971)

The Vision Is About What You Want

Knowing What You Want

1. Ask yourself the question, What do I want? Practice asking yourself this question in many types of situations. Knowing what you want has two important advantages. You are able to focus your attention quickly, and you are accurately describing the truth to yourself. (Location 3018)
2. Consider what you want independently of considerations of process. Those who attempt to make results dependent on process are severely limiting themselves. You will need to consider process when you create. But this should happen only after you know what result you want. (Location 3040)
3. Separate what you want from questions of possibility. In order to conceive of what you truly want to create, you must separate what you want from what you think is possible. If you don’t admit to yourself what you want simply because it does not seem possible for you to have it, you are actually misrepresenting the truth to yourself. Lying to yourself always breaks down your relationship with yourself, creates stress, and represents the truth as potentially dangerous and threatening. (Location 3054)

The Vision Is an Organizing Principle

Vision has power, for through vision you can easily reach beyond the ordinary to the extraordinary. Vision can help you organize your actions, focus your values, and clearly see what is relevant in current reality. (Location 3127)

Chapter 10: Current Reality

Give Me a Good Reason

Not describing reality accurately often becomes self-propaganda. (Location 3233)

Avoiding describing reality accurately is often a strategy to overcome the negative consequences of your actions. Our society puts a high premium on reasons and excuses. Most people learn that if they have a good reason for not succeeding, they can sometimes avoid negative consequences. Many people misrepresent reality though a smoke screen of plausible-sounding reasons that are designed to distract themselves and others from the truth. (Location 3235)

Reasons

Until he or she accepts all of reality, the grieving person is not able to move on fully in life. That person can become fixated on the past, trying to hold on to the time when his or her loved one was still alive. (Location 3286)

When my father died, my mother was not able to accept the reality that he was gone. She tried to keep my father alive in her mind, and by doing so she rejected a part of reality in her life. Becoming fixated on the past and not accepting the present reality does not diminish suffering, it prolongs it. (Location 3288)

Those who learn to know reality, without holding on to the past, are in the best position to truly live their lives. This is anything but amnesia. This is not forgetting the past, but remembering that the past is over. (Location 3306)

Two Tendencies

There is a difference between passively learning reality because life forces you to and actively teaching yourself reality. When you seek to know reality and learn what there is to learn, you can best create what really matters to you. (Location 3311)

If the avoidance of pain is a higher value than the creation of what you want, your actions will be to avoid the parts of reality that seem problematic. If your creation is a higher value, you will pursue an accurate representation of reality and let your emotional chips fall where they may. (Location 3333)

Your Concept of Reality May Not Be Reality

Artists learn the skill of seeing what they are looking at rather than seeing a concept of what they are looking at. (Location 3347)

Reality Is Not a Concept

When it comes to observing reality, people often do not see what is before their eyes. Instead, people see their concept of what reality should be. (Location 3360)

We have learned to rely on our concepts of reality more than on our observations of reality. We do this for convenience. It is more convenient to assume that reality is similar to our preconceived ideas than to freshly observe what we have before our eyes. We have the marvelous ability to generalize. This is helpful in many ways. Learning patterns of behavior, knowing trends, knowing the tendencies of actions, make simple what would otherwise be complex. But just as art students need to learn to see what is there, creators need to learn to see reality without the filter of concepts of reality. (Location 3364)

Similarities and Differences

Most of the time, classifying our perceptions of reality into types based on similarities helps us to quickly understand our current circumstances. Once we establish the classification, we can note the differences between the general characteristics and the uniqueness of any object in question. But sometimes this system doesn’t work well. We may observe our reality with the presumption of knowing what to expect. This presumption can give us a biased view of reality. When a preconceived concept of reality is imposed on reality, observation ends and stereotyping begins. (Location 3397)

People who have strong beliefs in a conceptual framework of reality often interpret reality to fit their biases. Those who have strong political views often interpret reality to reinforce their political explanation of the world. (Location 3401)

When you begin to observe reality, begin freshly with the notion that you know nothing. Separate the ideas you have from your observations. You might find this hard to do. But if you truly want to know how reality is, your observations must not be burdened by your own biases. It takes practice to put preconceived concepts aside and observe what is truly going on. When you master this practice, you will have a powerful tool you can use to create what matters most to you in life. (Location 3435)

Part Two: The Creative Process

Chapter 11: The Creative Cycle

Three Stages of Creation

There are three major stages in the growth and life-building process: germination, assimilation, and completion. Every complete creative process moves through this cycle and always in the same sequence. (Location 3444)

Germination

In creating the results you want, germination has a very special energy—the energy characteristic of any beginning. You tend to feel this burst of energy when you initiate projects: (Location 3453)

Unfortunately, most approaches to human growth and potential focus exclusively on germination. While this stage is an important and powerful one in the creative process, by itself it is not sufficient to produce real and lasting results, for it is only the first step. (Location 3470)

Assimilation

Germinational energy occurs when you are conceiving your vision. During the assimilation stage, you are teaching this vision to yourself. You are internalizing the vision, making it part of yourself. Your vision is no longer a new acquaintance but an old friend. In a sense the vision becomes one with you. Your creation begins to grow and develop both consciously and nonconsciously. Much of this development is not at all obvious. Assimilation has a hidden quality to it. You begin to have insights, ideas, connections, and added momentum. Your creation begins to take shape. It becomes more and more tangible. You begin to experience your creation as a concrete entity. The creation begins to take on a life of its own. (Location 3501)

Completion

The third distinct stage of creation is completion, which includes bringing to fruition, manifesting the whole, finishing, following through, and learning to live with your creation. (Location 3554)

Some people feel uncomfortable having what they want. Receiving, or learning to live with your creation, is an essential phase of completion and hence of the creative process. It is the ability to receive the fruits of your endeavors. (Location 3567)

Moving Forward

In each of the three stages of the creative cycle, you generate a certain unique energy. That energy helps you move from the stage you are in to the next stage. The energy of germination helps you move to assimilation, the energy of assimilation helps you move to completion, and the energy of completion helps you move to a new germination. (Location 3587)

Chapter 12: Germination and Choice

Making Choices

Germination does not consist merely of conceiving what you want and establishing a direction in which you want to go, but most importantly in activating the seeds of your creation. The way you activate the seeds of your creation is by making choices about results you want to create. (Location 3604)

Learning to Choose

When you attempt to avoid missing some possibility that might be a good one, you learn to be indecisive. (Location 3629)

Making the Right Choices

As you practice making choices, you begin to develop an instinct for making the right choices, the ones that lead to the most successful realization of what you want to create. (Location 3643)

Choice takes practice. It is a developed ability. The more you choose, the better you will choose. (Location 3647)

Choice and Creating What You Want

Making choices is a vital part of the creative process. Not only do you choose what you want to create, but you also make a series of strategic choices along the way, choices about actions, experiments, values, priorities, hierarchies, and how further to support all your efforts. (Location 3663)

Even if you have spent your life randomly making choices, you can learn now to orchestrate your choices strategically. After all, you make choices anyway, and it’s hard to make a good argument in favor of being less effective than you can be. (Location 3679)

Avoiding Effective Choice

In the reactive-responsive orientation, there are eight common ways in which people avoid or undermine effective choice and by which they lose the potential power of choice. (Location 3683)

1. Choice by limitation—choosing only what seems possible or reasonable. (Location 3685)
2. Choice by indirectness—choosing the process instead of the result. (Location 3699)
3. Choice by elimination—eliminating all other possibilities so that only one choice remains. (Location 3721)
4. Choice by default—the “choice” not to make a choice, so that whatever results happen seem to occur without choice. (Location 3743)
5. Conditional choice—imposing preconditions on choices. (Location 3750)
6. Choice by reaction—choices designed to overcome a conflict. (Location 3761)
7. Choice by consensus—choosing by finding out what everyone else is willing to recommend and following the results of that poll. (Location 3774)
8. Choice by adverse possession—choice based on a hazy metaphysical notion about the nature of the universe. (Location 3791)

Choice and Power

In each of the foregoing eight ineffective ways of choosing characteristic of the reactive-responsive orientation, the power in the situation is abdicated or handed over to something or someone outside the person. When you create, power is not situational. That is to say, your power to create does not come from the circumstances, but from yourself. (Location 3805)

Choosing Negative Results

Instead of choosing to create what they want, some people choose to avoid what they don’t want. Instead of choosing health, some people choose the absence of sickness. When you choose merely to avoid what you do not want, you do not establish structural tension. Instead, what you set up is a conflict structure. (Location 3833)

The actions they take, such as eating organically grown foods and exercising, are not focused toward health, but are actually designed to restore the experience of emotional comfort—to reduce the fear and worry they have generated in themselves. (Location 3848)

When you try to impose processes on yourself, you may lose touch with your own natural life rhythms, which may call for you to be engaged in very different types of activities as these rhythms change. For example, you may have a policy of eating a fixed diet each day; however, your life rhythm may call for more protein on one day than on another. Because of your imposed diet, you might disregard your life rhythm and miss the foods or nutrition your body requires on a particular day to enhance your state of health. (Location 3859)

What You Don’t Want

In the creative process you do not make choices about what you do not want. You make choices about what you do want. (Location 3868)

When you focus large amounts of energy on the problems in your life, it is easy to remain fixated on those problems. At certain times the only thing that seems important to you is to get the problem to stop being a problem or to have it go away. (Location 3877)

When choices about what you do not want hold the dominant power, what you do want is lost in the shuffle. (Location 3888)

Formally Choosing

When you make a choice, take two steps: First, conceive of the results you want, that is, have a clear vision of what you want to create. Second, formalize the choice by actually saying the words, “I choose to have . . .” (Location 3891)

Saying the words of your choice is not the same as muttering an incantation with mysterious magical powers, nor is it a type of repeated affirmation. Rather, you are simply concretizing the choice into a verbal form to give your vision a bit more focus. When you make a formal choice, you activate the seeds of germination. You align all the energies at your disposal and set them in motion toward your choice. You initiate the first stage of the creative cycle. (Location 3896)

Chapter 13: Primary, Secondary, and Fundamental Choice

Primary Choice

If you have doubts about whether what you want is a result unto itself or part of a process aimed at attaining some other result, ask yourself, “What is this choice designed to do?” If it is designed to help achieve something beyond itself, it is part of a process. It is, therefore, not a primary choice but at best a secondary one. If it is not designed to bring you some further result, it is a result in and of itself and therefore is a primary choice. (Location 3935)

An Exercise in Primary Choice

When you formally make a primary choice, you generate germinational energy, and new strategic secondary choices—choices that support a primary choice—become clear and apparent. (Location 3985)

1. Make a list of everything you want, from now through the rest of your life. Include both personal and professional wants. Also include what you want for the world in general.
2. Reread your list to make sure it includes all of the major components you want in your life. Add anything you may have forgotten in your original list and cross off any item you do not really want.
3. Test each item on your list with this question: “If I could have that, would I take it?” If the answer is no, then either cross the item off your list or adjust it so that it is something you want. Sometimes you may discover that you really don’t want a result you thought you really cared about. If the answer to the test question is yes, formally choose the item by saying to yourself: “I choose this result: (fill in what you want).”
4. Continue the process until you have chosen every item you truly want on your list. (Location 3989)

Secondary Choice

A choice that helps you take a step toward your primary result is called a secondary choice. Thus you might choose to go shopping (secondary choice) in order to have the ingredients for the meal you want to serve (primary choice). Or you might purchase a word processing program that alphabetizes bibliographical references (secondary choice) in order to complete a reference book you want to write (primary choice). (Location 4016)

Each of the secondary choices I made—to get up, to go to the gym, to complete the exercises—was made easily and without hesitation because each directly supported my primary choice. (Location 4052)

Secondary choices are always subordinate to a primary choice. Often there is no reason to make such choices outside the context of the primary choice that calls for them. (Location 4059)

Leaders Making Primary and Secondary Choices

In organizations, the leader as creator understands the relationship between choices that are primary—such as results, objectives, and goals—and choices that are secondary—those strategic choices of employee teams, hours of work, timing, training, scheduling, researching, meeting, and so on. (Location 4069)

A simple primary choice might be to develop a certain product. Secondary choices may include engaging in various types of research and development, making managerial time available, committing financial resources, and organizing engineers in a project team. (Location 4078)

Mutually Exclusive Wants

If you wake up tired one workday morning and want to stay in bed but your job requires you to be at work at a particular time, how do you make the choice of staying in bed or getting up and going to work? In such a situation you want two things, but having one of them prohibits having the other. You cannot both remain in bed and be at work on time. Once you know what your primary choice is, you will easily know what to do. If your job is your primary choice, then the secondary choice will be the choice that supports the primary one, which is to get out of bed, get dressed, and go to work. Some people are confused when two things they want are mutually exclusive. They may feel stuck, unable to choose. As a consequence they often do not make a real choice. Instead they may get up and go to work as automatons or out of guilt, fear of punishment, or loss. (Location 4081)

In choosing one or the other, reactive-responsive people always experience loss and a degree of powerlessness. In their view, circumstances are forcing them to give up something they want. In the orientation of the creative, you as creator determine the hierarchy of importance among results. Then you choose what is primary. This enables you always to be in the powerful position of inventing along the way the course of action that most effectively supports the result you value more (your primary choice). Instead of experiencing a sense of loss and powerlessness about the things you want but can’t have, you are always choosing the things you want most. (Location 4096)

In making such secondary choices, it never seems as though you are giving up anything. When you make secondary choices—when you actually make the choice supporting what is primary—the experience you have is of doing what you truly want. Making strategic secondary choices is very empowering. (Location 4108)

Long-Term Goals and Short-Term Demands

Short-term demands will always seek action. The action they seek most often is relief. These actions are usually designed to help people feel better. They eat. They drink. They take drugs. They go on shopping sprees. They watch television for hours. They look for distractions. (Location 4121)

Such actions, however, do not help them feel better for very long, not only because most of these actions do not help them create their long-term goals but also because the conflict causing the short-term demand does not go away. (Location 4124)

As you define your primary choices and form secondary choices that support your primary choices, you will be able to develop the ability to distinguish between your long-term goal and the short-term demands that can distract you from them, (Location 4130)

Fundamental Choice as a Foundation

It seems that ultimate success is not directly related to early success. Many of the most successful people in history did not give clear evidence of such promise in their youth. (Location 4141)

A fundamental choice is a choice in which you commit yourself to a basic life orientation or a basic state of being. (Location 4169)

A fundamental choice is a foundation upon which primary and secondary choices rest. (Location 4174)

If you have never made the fundamental choice to be a nonsmoker, then no matter what system you try to help you quit smoking, it will not succeed. You may try hypnosis, aversion therapy, smoke-ending programs, gradual elimination, or cold turkey. None of these processes will help you become a nonsmoker if you have not fundamentally chosen to be a nonsmoker. On the other hand, if you have made the fundamental choice to be a nonsmoker, just about any system to stop smoking will work for you. Furthermore, after making the fundamental choice, you will tend to be particularly attracted to those systems that will work best for you, because by using them you will most easily get the job done. Being a nonsmoker is a basic state of being, very different from the state of being of a smoker who is trying to quit smoking. (Location 4176)

When people make a fundamental choice to be true to what is highest in them, or when they make a choice to fulfill a purpose in their life, they can easily accomplish many changes that seemed impossible or improbable in the past. (Location 4210)

Qualities of a Fundamental Choice

Fundamental choices are not subject to changes in internal or external circumstances. If you make the fundamental choice to be true to yourself, then you will act in ways that are true to yourself whether you feel inspired or depressed, whether you feel fulfilled or frustrated, whether you are at home, at work, with your friends, or with your enemies. (Location 4233)

When you make a fundamental choice, convenience and comfort are not ever at issue, for you always take action based on what is consistent with your fundamental choice. Once you make a fundamental choice, an entirely new basis for dealing with reality becomes available. The meaning of circumstances often shifts because of a fundamental choice. You begin to see how circumstances, no matter what they may be, can work toward the fulfillment of your fundamental choice. (Location 4239)

In the reactive-responsive orientation, people look to the circumstances to provide them with satisfaction. They are inevitably disappointed, because circumstances themselves do not provide satisfaction. In the orientation of the creative, you create your own satisfaction, independent of the circumstances. Then you bring satisfaction to those circumstances in which you are involved. (Location 4254)

Once you have made any fundamental choice, say, to be true to yourself, you create a new structure in your life, and the path of least resistance in that structure leads toward the fulfillment of your fundamental choice. In this new structure you might find yourself suddenly easily able to give up unwanted compromises. You might suddenly stop old habits, such as gossiping, being petty, complaining, blaming others, or looking for sympathy. These old habits would cease based on the strength and power of your commitment to your fundamental choice and not because you tried to manipulate yourself into giving them up. (Location 4263)

Primary Choice and Fundamental Choice

A primary choice is about concrete results, whereas a fundamental choice is about life orientation or a state of being. ... There are many people who have chosen the religious path (primary choice), without making the fundamental choice to live in accordance with their highest spiritual truths. (Location 4274)

Fundamental Choice and the Reactive-Responsive Orientation

It is important to note that a fundamental life choice does not have to be formally made. Some people are true to themselves even though they have never made a formal choice to be so. But by the way they live their lives they have made, in essence, a de facto fundamental choice to be true to themselves. By formalizing that choice, however, they can expand the power of that choice. (Location 4287)

A fundamental choice can provide the crucial difference in successfully making the shift from the reactive-responsive orientation to the orientation of the creative. Without making the fundamental choice to be the predominant creative force in your life, no matter what you do to attempt to benefit yourself or enhance your life, you will merely be finding more sophisticated ways of responding to circumstances. This will, in turn, reinforce your reactive-responsive orientation. (Location 4290)

The Predominant Creative Force in Your Own Life

This one fundamental choice—to be the predominant creative force in your life—is a foundation for the entire orientation of the creative. Once you have made this choice, the meaning of current reality changes for you, from one of circumstances externally imposed to a view of life in which you see current reality as relevant and necessary feedback in the creative process. (Location 4301)

It comes from a desire to be the predominant creative force in your own life, not out of need, or out of conflict, nor even out of the circumstances, but because that is what you want. (Location 4305)

Emotions, Attitudes, and Behavior

When you make a fundamental choice, you bring into play the qualities of your character, so that they can become more fully expressed in your life. Each of them becomes an element in your current reality and thus part of your creative process. Furthermore, this shift in orientation is not primarily about behavior but about the underlying structure now in play. Your behavior will, of course, change. But it will change as a natural outcome of a change in structure, for the path of least resistance in the creative orientation leads toward behavior consistent with creating what you want to create. (Location 4343)

How to Make This Fundamental Choice

First of all, you must truly want whatever it is you are choosing. This step is essential. If you do not really want to be the predominant creative force in your life, you cannot make that fundamental choice. If you do not clearly desire it for its own sake, the choice you make does not qualify as a fundamental choice. (Location 4354)

Step 1 is to know what you want. To do this, consider whether you want each of the following items. Do not assume that you automatically want them. In fact, make no assumptions. Start without any preconceived notions. My suggestion is that you spend at least two minutes, but no more than five, considering each item: Do you want . . . 1. To be the predominant creative force in your life? 2. To be true to yourself? 3. Health (physical, emotional, mental, spiritual)? 4. Freedom? (Location 4368)

Step 2 is to choose what you want. If you want freedom, health, to be true to yourself, and to be the predominant creative force in your life, then inwardly formally choose each of them in turn. Say to yourself: 1. I choose to be the predominant creative force in my life. 2. I choose to be true to myself. 3. I choose to be healthy. 4. I choose to be free. (Location 4377)

The Effects of Fundamental Choices

Chapter 14: Assimilation

A Natural and Normal Stage

A common experience during the early steps of assimilation is for no change whatever to take place. (Location 4420)

At the point when the first excitement of the germinational stage is over and the creation’s new development is not yet obvious, people often give up the pursuit of their desired result. ... The emotional experiences common to this crucial stage in the creative cycle are discomfort, frustration, and disappointment. ... In the reactive-responsive orientation, the path of least resistance at this stage leads you to give up. Giving up is an attempt to avoid emotional frustration, disappointment, and wasting time. (Location 4422)

Losing your balance and falling off the bicycle or sailboard is not a failure, but a moment of learning. You absorb and internalize such learning into yourself as part of what will become your automatic knowledge and ability. (Location 4441)

Assimilation is a step beyond mere learning, for in assimilation you incorporate the learning into yourself. (Location 4443)

Whenever you assimilate a learning, you deepen your base of experience of assimilation. You can internalize future learnings. ... Musicians become more facile at performing difficult passages. Cab drivers learn new routes more easily. (Location 4448)

Assimilation and Structural Tension

Even if it seems to you as though nothing has changed or you have made no real progress toward achieving your desired result, that very observation becomes part of the description of your current reality. As such, you may use it to reinforce structural tension by highlighting the discrepancy between what you now have and the result you want. (Location 4454)

Deepening Assimilation

One powerful way to assimilate your present step is to move on to your next step, even if you feel inadequately prepared for it. When you move to your next step, you are somehow able to incorporate more than you now know about your present step. (Location 4474)

Assimilation as an Inner Process

When you begin to assimilate your vision, the inner part of the creative process forms internal shifts, alignments, connections, and relationships. Your entire being becomes an automatic process of focus. You begin to breathe with your vision, move with your vision, and live in alignment with your vision. (Location 4478)

As a newly planted seed begins to establish itself in the soil by sending out roots, so the vision you have germinated is also taking root within the structural tension you form. Once the plant’s basic root system is established, the path of least resistance in that structure is for the plant to sprout through the ground and become visible. The growth then is both more deeply inward and more expressly outward. As your vision becomes rooted during the assimilation stage, the movement is progressively deeper and more and more obvious as the creation unfolds. (Location 4499)

Assimilation as Organic

As an organic process, assimilation generates actions, some of which naturally build new and useful structures and some of which naturally discard outmoded and less useful structures. (Location 4513)

We have the human trait of holding on, past the seasons and cycles of our lives. We can miss the preciousness of the beauty of the moment and hold on, often when it is too late to hold on. We fear endings. We resent change. We ignore the seasons and cycles of our lives. These cycles do not disappear simply because they are ignored. The forces in play follow the path of least resistance. (Location 4525)

There are times when things come together, and there are times when things fall apart. This is an organic process. If you attempt synthetic manipulations of organic process, not only will you fail, but you will develop an insensitivity to the organic nature of life. (Location 4532)

We hope for permanence in a universe that can only change and then change again. (Location 4584)

Embodiment: The Key to Assimilation

What you embody tends to be created. This principle provides the key to assimilation. (Location 4616)

Embodiment is distinct from behavior. To embody love is not the same as behaving in a loving style. ... Those who “fight for peace” do not embody peace, but rather embody fighting. Those who worry about their health do not embody health, but rather fear. (Location 4618)

If you embody the creative process, life, as it moves and changes, becomes your ally. ... This embodiment is not simply adopting the right behaviors or finding a new response. It is an embodiment of structural tension. The embodiment of your vision and the embodiment of your current reality. (Location 4648)

Furthermore, you assimilate what you embody. As you internalize what you embody, inner development occurs that is consistent with what you embody. All aspects of your consciousness realign themselves in accordance with what you embody. (Location 4659)

Two Phases of Assimilation

During the assimilation process, you mobilize inner and outer actions. This energy builds on itself, so that the path of least resistance leads from internal to external expression. (Location 4665)

Using Assimilation in Your Life

What you assimilate internally tends to be manifested externally. Internal changes often tend to be manifested outwardly. ... You do not have to wait for outside resources to empower you. As you begin to gain experience in your own creative process, you can assimilate each new creation, and this makes each future creation more and more probable. You can create momentum by embodying your own creative process. (Location 4676)

Chapter 15: Momentum

How Assimilation Builds Momentum

Assimilation is a graduated process. Its steps build upon one another. As they build organically, the process generates energy. This energy builds on itself, and the process gains momentum. (Location 4684)

It is easier to learn a new foreign language if you already speak a foreign language. By learning a foreign language, not only do you assimilate that language, but you also assimilate your ability to learn other languages. If you speak two foreign languages, it is even easier to learn a third. (Location 4691)

Assimilation may yield exponential growth: assimilating one thing makes it easier to assimilate more and more things. In fact, in the orientation of the creative, once you have assimilated your own creative process, your life mastery in general increases, so that you are enabled more naturally and easily to create what most matters to you. (Location 4694)

Mastering your life-building process in the orientation of the creative is not an instantaneous transformation either, because one inextricable part of the creative process is assimilation, which can occur only over a period of time. (Location 4721)

If you do not experiment, learn from the experiment, apply the learning, and assimilate the entire process, what else can you do except spend your life banging your head against the imaginary barriers of your own incompetence? (Location 4732)

Creators seem to be intuitively aligned with what life is at its roots: a creation. (Location 4762)

Occasionally I talk to people who think that life is a form of prison—that we have “heavy karma” to pay, and that when we learn our lessons and undo the great wrongs we have unleashed on the world, we can finally leave. After all, is it not all suffering and struggle? This sad view too often permeates notions of the “spiritual” life. Teachers come and teachers go who promise the way out. Nirvana itself becomes spiritual retirement. (Location 4766)

The tradition of creating is not the tradition of instant enlightenment, but of steady progress; not of finding relief from life, but living life; not of desperate hopelessness, but of living a life filled with the purpose of bringing new creations into being. (Location 4780)

Learning the creative process is not the most difficult skill to learn. It is easier than mastering the cello, carpentry, or even sushi making. This is because creating is more natural to human beings than these more complicated skills. But it still takes time and experience. Each creation adds to each future creation, and new levels of mastery become next logical steps. (Location 4794)

To a creator the time we have in life is precious. Not only as a place to create but as a place to appreciate and experience. (Location 4804)

Each life event can build momentum in your creative process. (Location 4808)

Assimilation as Generative

The steps by which you move from where you are in your life to where you want to be cannot be put into a formula. The steps of that process develop organically, and what you are creating is unique, at least to your life. (Location 4811)

Assimilation and the Reactive-Responsive Orientation

If you try to control synthetically the process by which you will move from where you are to where you want to be, you will inhibit true assimilation. Trying to control the process limits the possibilities of what can happen in your life. (Location 4827)

If you are in the reactive-responsive orientation, you tend to inhibit the process of assimilation for a number of reasons. First, in this orientation, the actions you take do not generate further actions; each step you take toward your goal will be taken by itself, without benefit of the momentum that comes from learning and assimilating what you have learned. Second, each new step you take will remain at the same level of potential difficulty as previous steps, since the previous steps do not add to your learning, experience, and increasing capacity. Third, many of the steps that would be crucial to creating the result you want will not even occur to you if they represent a departure from preconceived processes. (Location 4830)

Because the creative process includes many events that are unpredictable, unforeseen, unusual, and sometimes illogical from a linear point of view, preparing yourself with more theory and facts doesn’t help you and may even hinder you. (Location 4851)

When you utilize assimilation, each step you take teaches you about the next steps. The energy you apply toward what you are creating regenerates and builds. The resources you need somehow begin to gather themselves. The organic process of assimilation may include unusual “coincidences” that lead you directly to where you want to be. (Location 4885)

Momentum and the Reactive-Responsive Orientation

For people in the reactive-responsive orientation, momentum is one of the most difficult and elusive properties of growth and development to understand and use. When you are in that orientation, you do not build momentum toward achieving the results you want. You experience only shifts of conflict that create momentary bursts of energy as you take action designed to avoid or reduce the discomfort associated with the conflict. Furthermore, each step taken remains a single isolated action—like a reflex knee-jerk reaction—unrelated to any other actions and designed only to resolve the specific conflict at hand. For every conflict there is a reaction. In the reactive-responsive orientation, each action-reaction situation is an isolated event, leading nowhere in particular and certainly not beyond the confines of the conflict. (Location 4889)

In the orientation of the creative, you are naturally and easily able to build momentum. Every action you take, whether it is directly successful or not, adds additional energy to your path. Because of this, everything you do works toward creating eventual success, including those things that are not immediately successful. Over a period of time, creating the results you want will get easier and easier. (Location 4897)

Learning to Build Momentum

One way is to create a pattern of success by deliberately structuring a series of small successes on the way to your final goal. Each success adds to momentum, is easily assimilated, and helps build credibility and mastery. (Location 4905)

When you assimilate the actions that you take, you build energy toward new actions. What the entrepreneur was able to do was to let each action he took become a part of him. With all of these steps incorporated as part of his development, every step he took was both a step toward his goal and, even more importantly, a step in learning to use such movement to build momentum toward attaining any future goals. (Location 4925)

How to Use Momentum

First of all, he was building momentum rather than problem solving. Each step of the way he was able to use whatever happened as a learning experience that taught him how to build momentum more effectively. Second, he looked for new ways to build momentum. He experimented and sought out challenges. (Location 4935)

The Place of Standard Formulas

The creative process is a matter of invention, not mindless convention. (Location 4960)

Even if you find a book or a course that provides you with helpful information, you still need to assimilate this information by making it your own and applying it to your particular situation to create momentum. In the creative orientation, when you are able to assimilate the steps along the way, the underlying structure reorganizes itself, so that the path of least resistance leads directly toward what you want to create. And the increasing momentum helps move you along that path more and more effectively. (Location 4972)

Assimilating Structural Tension

When you first begin to use structural tension in creating a specific result, you must consciously hold in mind both your vision (the result you want to create) and current reality (your present circumstances). As you consciously practice simultaneously focusing on your vision and observing current reality, you will begin to be able to assimilate this action, and eventually it will become an automatic habit. You will also naturally incorporate structural tension itself as a major force in your underlying structural makeup. (Location 4986)

When you first begin to work with structural tension, you will have a tendency only to “visit” it. It will not be part of your normal way of life. But as you work with structural tension more and more, it will become assimilated into your life. You will find that it becomes part of your reality. When that happens, you will automatically be aware at any moment of what you want to create and what truly matters to you and you will observe the prevailing circumstances of your current reality. (Location 4996)

Chapter 16: Strategic Moments

Apparent Lack of Progress

In the creative process there are certain strategic moments in which it seems as if you are either standing still or even going backward. These moments of apparent lack of progress are strategic because the actions you take at such moments will largely determine whether or not you are ultimately successful. (Location 5007)

When you attempt to move in the direction of results you want, there are times when you discover that the route to those results is more involved or longer than you originally thought. (Location 5025)

Time Delay

When you first begin to make changes in your life, there is often a delay between the time you initiate the change and the time you begin to see the results of the change. (Location 5030)

The meaning you give to the actions you take can contribute either to building or to reducing momentum. Considering the factor of time delay can help you describe current reality more accurately. (Location 5050)

Action produces a result; a result gives rise to a definition or meaning. How you define the relation between the action you take and the result you observe affects your future action. It also affects your momentum. (Location 5054)

Resenting Current Reality

One of the more difficult lessons in the creative process is to learn to recognize current reality as it now is, which is often different from what you think it is supposed to be or how you want it to be. If you find yourself continually resenting the fact that your present circumstances are not what you expected, you hinder your ability to use the power of current reality fully in creating structural tension. (Location 5063)

If you are on a white-water rafting trip, you need to be able to recognize current reality as it presently exists. (Location 5068)

An important ability in the creative process is the ability to recognize changes in reality as they occur. (Location 5075)

Unwanted Situations

Because current reality often includes unwanted or unplanned for situations, you may have a tendency to avoid accepting reality as it is. This nonacceptance disempowers you, for you cannot create the result you want based on a misrepresentation of current circumstances. (Location 5084)

Analyzing Current Reality

If you find yourself repeatedly reviewing how you got to be where you are in your life, you are obscuring a clear view of current reality. (Location 5102)

In the creative process, as you become more proficient in immediately recognizing shifts in current reality, you become better able to reorganize your approach spontaneously in ways consistent with the change in circumstances. You come to recognize even sudden and unexpected changes not as detrimental but rather as valuable and necessary feedback in the creative process. Current reality is always your new starting point. (Location 5124)

The Truth About How Things Are

The attempt to shelter people from the truth assumes that people cannot handle the full truth of reality. The fact is that almost everyone—including you—is much stronger, more resilient, and more powerful than he or she is usually given credit for. When you habitually misrepresent reality, the truth can seem dangerous to you. The truth is not dangerous, it sets you free to create. It is only through your recognition of the facts of reality that you can engage the senior force of structural tension and move toward creating what really matters to you. (Location 5157)

The Pivotal Technique

However wanted or unwanted your present circumstances may be, they function as needed feedback so that you can know the current status of the result you are creating. (Location 5168)

Furthermore, times in which the situation or circumstances are not the way you want them to be are strategic moments, because in those moments you are able to redefine what you want (your vision) and where you are (current reality) in such a way that both become clearer and you strengthen structural tension. (Location 5170)

Step 1. Describe where you are. In other words, know exactly what the current reality is. If you are lost on your way to the Grand Canyon, report your circumstances to yourself factually, avoiding interpretation, analysis, or editorial comment. (Location 5176)

Step 2. Describe where you want to be. Spell out the result that you want to create. “I want to be at the Grand Canyon.” Remember to separate what you want from what you think is possible, so that you are clearly in touch with what you want. Do not limit yourself to only that which you think is possible under the circumstances. (Location 5181)

Step 3. Once again, formally choose the result you want. Inwardly say the words, “I choose . . . ,” adding the result you want (“I choose to be at the Grand Canyon”). (Location 5185)

Step 4. Move on. Once you have observed where you are (current reality) and where you want to be (vision) and have formally chosen the result you want to create (reestablished structural tension), change the focus of your conscious attention from being in an unwanted situation. Shift gears. Change the subject. You may look at the scenery, read a book, enjoy each other’s company, or go back to what you were doing before you became focused on being lost or stuck. (Location 5189)

Applying the Pivotal Technique

Mastering Structural Tension

One of the great secrets in the art of creating is mastering the force of structural tension. If you attempt to resolve the tension you have established prematurely, you weaken your ability to create the results you want. One way you might do this is to pretend that reality is not what it actually is: “We don’t have a problem with that software. The users just don’t know how to use it.” Or you might pretend that your vision is not what it actually is: “Sure, we missed the Grand Canyon, but who wants to see a big old hole anyway!” (Location 5320)

As a creator, even in an unwanted situation you can learn to establish tension and hold that tension until it is organically resolved. (Location 5329)

The Ethics of the Creative Process

Any moment always has the potential to bring forth the highest good. This potential is not at all a matter of attitude—for example, thinking positively—but rather a matter of the highest good being evoked by an act of creation. Therefore all moments, but especially those moments that seem difficult, troublesome, problematic, or hopeless, are moments of great creative power in your life. The “difficult, problematic” moments are, in fact, strategic moments that can help you bring the creative process to completion. (Location 5342)

Chapter 17: Completion

The Experience of Completion

An example of depression after completion is reflected in the “postpartum blues” women sometimes experience after completing the process of childbirth. (Location 5372)

Since many people associate uncomfortable emotional experiences with completion, and they have a tendency to avoid such emotional discomfort, they also often have a tendency to avoid successful completion itself. (Location 5382)

The Ability to Receive

One of the major abilities of creating is the ability to receive the full fruits of your labor. (Location 5387)

If you are unable to receive what you are creating, you are stopping short of completion. Until you fully accept the results into your life, the results are not fully created. (Location 5404)

Completion and Acknowledgment

In the creative process, acknowledging the steps you have taken toward your goal is an important act of completion. (Location 5440)

Acknowledging What You Have Created

Acknowledging the results you have created is a different act from receiving those results into your life. Receiving is an incoming action: You accept into your life what you have created. Acknowledging is an outgoing action: You bestow your judgment upon the results. You judge the results as being complete. (Location 5443)

When you are in the reactive-responsive orientation, you may often neglect the step of acknowledgment. Your recognition that a desired result has been achieved means little, since you consider the result existing more from the good graces of the circumstances (good luck) than by your own creative process. You can hardly sign your name to something created by lucky circumstances. When you are creating, you are the only one who is able to declare a result complete, for it is you alone who can determine when reality satisfies your vision. (Location 5454)

If you are creating a painting, at what point is the painting complete? This is an important question, since it is always possible to add more details or to change the painting in other ways. You determine that it is finished by your recognition that it satisfies your vision. In other words, current reality matches your vision of the result. (Location 5465)

In the creative orientation, making judgments is essential, and the ability to make significant distinctions is one of the prerequisites of the creative process. (Location 5486)

The Judgment on Judgment

Good judgment takes practice. Judgment should be encouraged, not discouraged. (Location 5547)

When you are creating, you need to make judgments about the current status of the creative process. How close are you to the result you are creating? Are the actions you are taking working or not working? Is the current state of your creation good or bad? (Location 5553)

It is difficult to know where you stand in life, what matters to you, and what you live for when you do not make distinctions. When you avoid distinctions, everything takes on a glow of arbitrariness. Nothing seems to matter when everything has equal value. (Location 5555)

Judgement as a tool

We decide what values in our lives will be more prominent or less prominent. We create the hierarchy. We determine how we will and will not direct our life energy. Those who have adopted a policy of avoiding critical judgment, however, will find it hard to forge what they want into a specific direction. It’s not that these people don’t deeply care about what they want in their lives. It is only that they will have enormous trouble creating it. (Location 5562)

When you practice and master critical judgment, you become more open to many viewpoints. In fact, when you have a firm foundation in forming your own opinions, it is useful to know how others consider an issue. Some people attempt to reject forming judgments with the misguided intention of being open to different points of view. But rather than openness, these people often impose a strict anti-judgment dogma on others. (Location 5574)

Seeking “Acknowledgment”

In the creative orientation what matters is not how you are doing but rather how close your vision—what you want to create—is to its final completion. A thousand people could praise a result you had created, but if the result did not satisfy your vision, you would not be ready to acknowledge it as complete. On the other hand, a thousand people might condemn a result you had created, yet if you saw that it satisfied your vision, you would be fully ready to say, “It is done and complete.” Only you have the authority to recognize and confirm that a creation of yours is complete. (Location 5584)

Our Natural Instincts

But by watching TV news you can get a distorted view of reality. Mostly the news consists of reports about reactions, responses, and circumstances. For the newscaster’s purpose, the more dramatic, the better. (Location 5611)

Human Destiny and Purpose

No matter how difficult you may claim your circumstances are, there are individuals who have been in even more difficult circumstances and yet have created their lives in accordance with what truly mattered to them. (Location 5624)

Christy Brown, a quadriplegic who could only move a few of his toes and his mouth, became a good painter and a great writer. Beethoven, perhaps the greatest composer, composed even after he was deaf. Leonardo da Vinci suffered all his life from dyslexia. Stephen Hawking, one of the twentieth century’s foremost theoretical physicists, has had Lou Gehrig’s disease for over twenty years. He weighs less than a hundred pounds, can barely move, and has lost the use of his vocal chords. Yet he is still doing some of the most important work ever done in his field. Earlier in this century, right-handed painter Daniel Urrabieta, known professionally as “La Vierge,” suffered from severe cerebral apoplexy. He switched to painting with his left hand. He achieved such a high level of competence that he became a renowned illustrator of important French periodicals. (Location 5626)

You are never the victim of your circumstances. These circumstances are simply part of the raw material of the creative process. (Location 5633)

In the orientation of the creative, the physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual dimensions of your being realign themselves and work in harmony. Based on their realignment, the path of least resistance in your life will lead you toward fulfilling your deepest and most profound individual life purpose on this planet. (Location 5646)

Part Three: Transcendence

Chapter 18: Signs of the Future, Signs of the Times

Two Streams

There are two direct streams in history. One is the story of a reactive-responsive world. Events that shaped the lives of people and civilization emanated from the existing circumstances. The other story is that of the builder, the explorer, and the creator. (Location 5672)

But perhaps, in spite of all our building, we are still in the Dark Ages. ... After all, the people in the Dark Ages didn’t know they were in the Dark Ages. They didn’t say, “These are the Dark Ages. We will then have the Middle Ages, and then the Renaissance, and then the age of Enlightenment, and then the romantic period, and then the industrial age, and then the atomic age, the nuclear age, and the computer age.” Instead they said to each other, “These are modern times. This is high tech!” (Location 5682)

A Civilization of Creators

When you consider how inexperienced the world is in the creative process, it is amazing that we have done as well as we have. Five hundred years ago, most people on this planet were illiterate. Today if you go on a job interview, it is assumed that you can read and write. Someday it will be just as common for people to be literate in the creative process. When you go on a job interview, you will not be asked, “Do you know how to create?” It will be assumed that you do. Creating can become as common as literacy, or fluency in using a computer. (Location 5912)

Chapter 19: The Power of Transcendence

The Determining Factor

Many people feel trapped by their past. They think they are doomed by events that took place in the earliest stages of their childhood. Some people imagine that the birth experience was so traumatic that it completely determined the course of their life; for them, the biggest problem they have is that they were born. Some believe they are victims of their conditioning or how their parents treated them; they see this as the predominant determining factor in the life they now lead. There are those who believe they are extensions of their genes and that what primarily determines their life experiences is their genetic code. Others assign the determining factor of their lives to their astrological makeup or to their numerology. Still others attribute the determining factor of their lives to their social,ethnic, or racial background. Some say it is their gender that mostly determines their fate. There are many theories, built primarily on the assumptions of the reactive-responsive orientation, that promote the idea that you are for the most part fixed in your life pattern and that you can only make changes—if changes are at all possible—by somehow dealing with the predetermined nature you carry within you. (Location 5936)

Those in the reactive-responsive orientation find this notion of “determining factors” appealing, because it attributes causality to circumstances beyond their direct control. When you shift to the orientation of the creative, you begin to move along the path of mastering causality. You become the predominant causal force in your life, which is a natural and desirable situation. (Location 5956)

This shift is made by evoking senior forces, such as fundamental choice, primary and secondary choices, structural tension, aspiration to your true values, and being true to yourself. These senior forces always take priority over lesser forces, such as willpower manipulation, conflict manipulation, and structural conflict. There is another force inherent in the orientation of the creative that is senior even to mastering causality. This senior force I call transcendence. (Location 5961)

Transcendence

Transcendence is the power to be born anew, to make a fresh start, to turn over a new leaf, to begin with a clean slate, to enter into a state of grace, to have a second chance. Transcendence makes no reference to the past, whether your past has been overflowing with victories or filled with defeats. When you enter a state of transcendence, you are able to create a new life, unburdened by both the victories and the defeats of the past. Transcendence is more than just the accurate realization that the past is over. It is also a realignment of all dimensions of yourself with the very source of your life. (Location 5969)

Not all changes of orientation, even desirable ones, contain the power of transcendence. It is possible for you to have a change of orientation and still continue to exist in a linear, cause-and-effect system. Transcendence operates outside such a system. Transcendence evokes the power to start from scratch, outside the realm where previous causal actions are in play. Because transcendence is an ever-new state of being, once you enter into it, each new moment is alive with fresh possibilities—possibilities that may never have seemed possible before. (Location 6003)

Transcendence and the Creative Act

Through the creative act you reach beyond yourself, beyond your identity, and beyond your own life, because you are working with two kinds of laws: the law of cause and effect and the law of transcendence. (Location 6008)

First, when you create, you increase your ability to use causes to produce effects. (Cause and effect is sometimes called the “law of karma.”) But this law is not the senior force in the creative process. Second, beyond the time-space continuum and beyond its causal aspects, when you create, you are experiencing the law of transcendence. In this realm past causal factors are not in play. (Location 6011)

As a creator, past cause and effect are no longer dominant factors. You are in a state of transcendence, for in that moment anything can happen. You are not trapped by previous actions you have taken. You are not forced to extricate yourself from unwanted situations. (Location 6018)

To talk about transcendence by saying, “I am nothing but a channel” or “I am nothing but a tool of God’s will,” is a misunderstanding of the relationship between you and that special moment focused through you as creator. The notion that human action is inessential in the creative process distorts the power, beauty, and unique preciousness of the individuality of the human spirit. (Location 6032)

Being Perfect

Viktor Frankl points out in Man’s Search for Meaning that the saints did not reach sainthood by trying to be perfect. (Location 6121)

When you come home to yourself without expectations, demands, ulterior motives, or one-way bargains, a fundamental change in the underlying structure of your life takes place. Its path of least resistance now leads you into a state of transcendence, in which total integration of your life cannot but occur. (Location 6129)

The Power of the Source, the Power of the Primal Self

Nothing is more powerful than the very source of life itself. Your life source strives for expression through you. This is analogous to the great power of the unconditional love that the father had for both the prodigal son and the good son. The natural tendency of this power is to be fully expressed, so the longing of the father in the parable is the longing of unconditional love for its fullest expression. Since this love is unconditional, it demands nothing in return. At the same time your primal self has the longing to be reunited with its source, as the prodigal longed to return home. “Primal,” as I use the word, refers not to the needy, selfish, pained, angry, sexual, or infantile characteristics that are ascribed to it in some psychological systems; I use the word, rather, as the Kabbalists use it, to describe the “primal will to good.” Primal, in this context, refers to the deepest longings of human nature to reunite with its life source. (Location 6138)

Sometimes this longing is called the soul urge, because it exists at a level deeper than your psychological makeup, deeper than your conscious thoughts, deeper than your intuitive perceptions, and deeper even than the structures that are predominantly in play in your life. (Location 6147)

Transcendent Structure

The relationship of attraction between these two forces—the source and the primal self—is itself structural in nature and generates a path of least resistance that leads these two forces to reunite. Since neither of these forces is time-dependent, their integration can happen at any moment, even at moments that, logically, would seem incongruous. (Location 6151)