INTUITION, CREATIVITY, MIND & MATTER

The prospect of waking up to reality and taking full possession of our faculties has always interested many of us. We feel somehow compelled to summon our courage and try to realize what we intuitively feel to be the potential of our creative faculty. We deeply intuit that no virtual or simulated reality, or other fantasy, however vivid, can compare to the natural, holistic reality that awaits us. We intuit that just behind the veil of everyday life lie real, accessible, realizable, utopian possibilities.

Some of us, from time to time, awaken to a feeling from deep within that we are destined for something greater than the ordinary. That feeling or intuition expresses an ambition far beyond the idea of success or even exceptional achievement within existing frameworks. The very difficulty in speaking of these feelings and aspirations derives from the fact that they issue from that little-known domain in ourselves - "essence."

Our subjective sense of self is defined by the links joining thought, feeling and body-essence. What we truly are, objectively, is that unique essence that distinguishes us from one another. It equips us to reveal some special piece of cosmic truth to which the essential uniqueness of other individuals is less favorably attuned. But in our alienation from essence, what we lack is the compellingly direct experience and cognition of the astounding fact that our body, in its entirety, is intelligence - Mind.

To be truly alive, we must actively integrate what we encounter into our own thought systems - our own meanings - within the framework of a dynamic process of inner growth that weeds out contradictions and inconsistencies. Without the ability to experience ourselves and reality, directly, through the deeper layers of our essence-mind (or what is popularly called "body-mind"), the closest we can come to deciphering cosmic reality, programmed into our substance and structure, is through the judicious use of intuition which, under certain circumstances, can help us forge deep links with essence. Intuition, resonating with essence-truth, can afford us brief glimpses of the real world, glimpses which we later elaborate as best we can with the manipulative intellectual, emotional and kinesthetic skills at our disposal. We then express these discoveries as ideas, attitudes, art or technology.

The young child is totally vulnerable and without guile or defense mechanisms. As children, we experience everything with the whole of ourselves and innocently take everything at face value including the fairy tale ideology of "happily ever after." Around the age of four, the awareness of the existence of misfortune provokes questions. We are then told that "life is not a bed of roses," or its modern equivalent, "life is hard and then you die." Our collision with restrictive reality arrives with crushing force. The result is usually a pathetic compromise ranging from autistic retreat to total surrender to the forces of fate and authority. This is a paralyzing accommodation that only allows a bare minimum of utopian hope to cohabit a psyche reconciled to "death and taxes." From then on, everything we think and do is conditioned by this compromise. It defines the limits of our willingness to engage reality and thus the limits of our realizable potential. This is society's most reliable, built-in protection from non-conformist and utopian impulses.

The further removed we become from the primordial source of objective knowledge - knowledge of the world, of ourselves and of the reason we were created, deeply imprinted within our essence - the more superficial we become and the more relative and thus subjective our judgment. We tend to fall back on whatever subjective resources remain at our disposal and so for wisdom we substitute cleverness; for understanding, opinion; and for intuition, idle hunches. Falling back on abstractions, we tend to filter most vitality and wholesomeness out of experience. Having lost contact with the substance of reality, we are left with sterile concepts and theories leading us only slowly and painstakingly back to their referents in the real world. From within the morass of socially cultivated subjectivity, all that remains of objectivity is the occasional glimmer of truth filtering up through intuition from the objective knowledge hidden deeply within essence and hard-wired into the circuitry and structure of our substance.

We need and were meant to have a broader view of things. For this we need an integrated mind capable of directly perceiving relatedness in the world. Yet, thanks to certain intuitive, artistic and other subterranean channels occasionally left intact by the ravages of socialization, it is sometimes possible, for those of us who have had at least a semblance of the heroic encounter between "happily ever after" and "life is not a bed of roses," to gropingly select life goals and vocations that in some way correspond to our essence - our inner nature. These channels of precocious, pre-conscious knowledge, if any survive the brainwashings and our endless concessions to convention, are all that remain of what might permit some degree of communication between our essence and what we call our "mind" or "consciousness."

The interest generated by intuition - interest that forges connections between essence and the problem at hand - helps keep us on track and anchored in our inner self. There is little question that intense motivation is the prime ingredient fueling the beginnings of creative thought since only assiduous, concentrated self-application can enable us to lift ourselves out of the quagmire of convention and distraction. Einstein, for instance, could not have attained his vision of relativity without burning interest and sufficient self-respect to take his own counter current intuitions seriously, and the conviction necessary to follow through against all odds.

The subconscious, comprising the content of essence, is our inborn, hard-wired, coded knowledge of the world. It contains all that is knowable and is the functional complexity of our "soul" impressed by the cosmos upon the substance of our essence. It can be awakened to any significant degree only through intense, direct contact with reality and, to some extent, through the exercise of intuition that aims at the heart of essence. Instinct provides the only common ground shared by the unconscious and subconscious. Instinct is recorded in essence and rendered manifest through automatic, unconscious action. One could say that the unconscious contains "forgotten" experience while the subconscious contains innate knowledge not yet experienced.

To the extent we allow ourselves to be absorbed in the framework of ready-made meanings that we encounter in the world, we are matter and thus subject to the vagaries of fate. To the extent that we are sufficiently active to absorb and transform our environment within the orbit of our personal meaning, we are mind, and thus connected to our destiny. To the extent that the world provides us with our meanings, we are distracted and subjective. To the extent that we bestow meaning to the world, we are conscious and objective.

Creativity is inherent in the cosmos as it is in mankind. So evidence supporting the proposition that some people are vastly more creative than others, like the phenomenon of greed, is only an artifact of the distraction induced in us by the illusion that reality is substantially physical and by the concomitant phenomena of materialism, greed and suffering. Human intelligence, fundamentally, is one. That there seem to be distinct as well as higher and lower forms, including automatic skills of mind and body appearing to be autonomous and unrelated to creative vision, is distraction's way of throwing sand in our eyes. The forces of distraction inherent in matter-dominated society prevent all but the rarest of intuitive inspirations from becoming breakthroughs and from disrupting the mind-debilitating, ego-soothing reality-consensus that shields society from the change that novelty always imposes.

Accordingly, we must discover how, through creativity, information can be integrated within consciousness to become real knowledge, and how our minds can integrate with matter in a new, rectified way. For want of a better term, we call the ardent process of fusion that can make this happen, Accelerated Thought. The most perfect fusion between matter and form is to be found in the phenomenon of life. With technical progress, the marriage between form and substance grows more and more intimate and the resulting "matter" expresses more intelligence and becomes more lifelike. Likewise, as we integrate inner and outer through consciousness, we become more alive.

Accelerated Thought is a vision-driven, contemplative method that obviates long, expensive, tedious cycles of hypothesis and experimentation. It is a high-energy, mental process whereby realizations arrive second by second in rapid-fire sequence rather than once a week, once a year or once in a lifetime. Just as the Eureka experience provides brief moments of brilliant insight - the divine sparks of genius and inspiration that have fueled the sudden advances in scientific progress until now - Accelerated Thought will provide sustained creative vision. This will establish an ongoing link with higher consciousness producing a powerful, cosmic current channeled through essence from a higher dimension that we call the "unknown" or the "transcendent." This, in turn, will fuel the transformatory, abundance producing, illusion-dissolving, breakthrough-science of the future and render it holistic and comprehensive.

True creativity is the immediate, ongoing, waking vision of a unified intelligence quickly overcoming all forms of restriction. Sadly, creativity is almost universally considered to be an inherently brief condition and not the continuing state of being or accelerated thought that, potentially, it is. The abundance envisaged by Project Mind must not only answer our real, immediate, physical needs, but also must be so encompassing as to alleviate the irrational and addictive aspects of our impulse to accumulate and consume. This will be achieved only by scientifically, technologically, philosophically and psychologically relegating matter to its proper place in the cosmos as the mere crust of existence.

"Mind over matter" is more than just a phrase. It implies that matter must submit to the intelligence of a mind capable of manipulating, forming, transcending, transforming and, eventually, mastering it entirely. Truly to know something implies the ability to experience and reproduce within ourselves the pattern or quality of existence of which that "something" objectively consists. The character of each "something" is intimately and intricately connected with the forms and patterns of its immediately contiguous reality. Everything in the cosmos is interconnected. It is our inner experience of these points of correspondence that reveals the meaning of the parts by showing their functional and structural relationship to the whole.

A consciousness substantially relieved of the debilitating, subliminal psychic burden of distraction could confidently scan the world with its highly-tuned intuition seeking a correspondence in form, between what is intuitively felt could be true and whatever observation-based hypotheses that can be formulated concerning what is actually found to exist in the outside world. The chance of hitting upon hypotheses that will completely and profoundly satisfy intuition are immeasurably better when intimate contact with oneself provides enhanced access to one's own essential resources of cosmic knowledge.

Echoes of this mode of discovery can be heard in the life stories of notable scientists, artists and healers, etc., who in their more lucid moments saw such relationships with their mind's eye. Since stories such as those of Coleridge and Cayce defy belief in many people, I prefer to refer to examples such as Tesla and McClintock whose scientific and technical achievements are incontestable and yet who testify to the holistic nature of their vision in the process of making their breakthrough discoveries.

When truth touches us, we find it compelling. The price to be paid for certainty of vision is the compulsion, or sense of cosmic obligation, to translate vision into action and share it with others. This obligation is communicated to the body through feeling, even if the subjective side of our nature has no interest in altruism. Sharing - the channeling of abundance from higher and finer levels of materiality - is decreed by cosmic law through our divine human form (stamped in the image of the Creator) and realized through the manifestation of the intelligence inherent in this form - through Accelerated Thought. To the extent vision is complete and valid, it will also include a clear idea of how it must be realized. The absolute imperative that such a comprehensive vision represents means that, one way or another, we will single-mindedly seek out the means to realize the vision in its totality. Vision of truth brings with it the energy for its own actualization in the best tradition of self-fulfilling prophecy.

The true expression of intelligence is the immediate and direct perception of meaning. Meaning is that existential glue that can give us the fine, coherent, inner substance and structure capable of replacing the physical body as a receptacle of life-intelligence. Connection is the secret of immortality. When connections are made, structure appears allowing energy to flow where before there was only an inert potential. Between two parts in ourselves, where there was formerly the obscurity of opaque but living flesh, emerges Mind.

This is the vocation of Project Mind.