The creative versus the machine

The great obsession of the 20th century was organization, and it continues.

Form a goal, put people together, and give them separate tasks that add up to forwarding the goal. Yes, it's a strategy as old as the hills, but in the last hundred years the drive to expand the numbers has taken over.

Corporations, governments, churches, non-profits, foundations, armies.

Consolidate. Combine. Bigger is better.

Of course, when leaders of these modern mammoths keep fine-tuning specialized jobs within their structures, the human workers come, more and more, to resemble machine parts.

If these jobs are creative, a toaster is painting Rembrandts.

But that doesn't concern the captains of their organized ships. It's all about output, products sold, performance graphs, worker loyalty and compliance.

In such environments, "creative" is just a slogan.

As society operates, more and more, by a contagion of systems, people think in those terms. Coordination. Organization.

There are experts ready, at the drop of hat, to move in and explain why society must run this way.

But the individual doesn't think so. He may comply, he may bow down, but he isn't a believer.

He doesn't worship at the altar of efficiency. He doesn't care about "the inevitable" super-organization of civilization. He's got one eye open looking for a way out.

The individual may not talk about his soul or believe he has one, but he wants freedom, even if he has no idea what he'd do with it.

The individual may convince himself that small pleasures are his only option, until the day he's lowered into the ground, but he feels something else, something more.

Of course, maturity is supposed to mean the individual gives up his impulse toward freedom, toward breaking out, but he doesn't care about that. He may pretend he cares, but he doesn't.

No amount of pressure or brainwashing is going to work. He still wants to feel alive and free.

People may tell him that power is a bad thing, that it's selfish and greedy and "unevolved," but he wants it. He wants, not the outward appearance of it, but the inner energy. The inner force.

All the overlays of society notwithstanding.

You can turn him into a Pavlovian lap dog, but when you look away he's going to chew on his strap and try to get free.

You can fill his head full of the most elevated spiritual maxims and utopian bullshit, you can convince him to paste a vapid smile on his face, you can send him to a therapist, but he's going to keep looking for a hole in the fence.

I'm sick and tired of the New Age melted-cheese people who keep forcing their desires "up on to a higher plateau." Even they know it's all nonsense. Even they know they can't get rid of the fact that they're individuals, no matter how hard they try.

They can sell their defeat like cosmic enlightenment to the millions, but they can't scratch their basic itch. It stays with them.

THEY WANT TO CREATE SOMETHING. Underneath it all, they want it badly.

There are some people who hear the word CREATE and wake up, as if a new flashing music has begun.

This lone word makes them see something majestic and untamed and astonishing.

They feel the sound of a Niagara approaching.

They suddenly know why they are alive.

The creative life is about diving in. It's about a kind of transformation that shreds programming and gets down to the energy of the Fire.

Most people don't want to travel to that grand arena because they have been trained like pets by some sector of this society to be good girls and boys.

The creative life isn't about little changes done in little penguin steps. It's about putting your arms and your mind around Deep, Big, and Wide Desire. It's about making that Desire come to life.

99% of the world has been trained like rats to adore systems. Give them a system and they're ready to cuddle up and take it all in. If they have questions, or if they want to argue, it's about how to tweak the system to make it a little better. And with every move they make, they put another blanket over the Fire Within.

They sleepwalk through life and say yes to everything.

Maybe you once saw something truly free that didn't care about consequences, and it blew you into tomorrow and turned on your soul's electricity for an hour.

Maybe you're sick and tired of bowing and scraping before a pedestal of nonsense.

CREATE is a word that should be oceanic. It should shake and blow apart the pillars of the smug boredom of the soul.

CREATE is about what the individual does when he is on fire and doesn't care about concealing it. It's about what the individual invents when he has thrown off the false front that is slowly strangling him.

CREATE is about the end of mindless postponement. It's about what happens when you burn up the pretty and petty little obsessions. It's about emerging from the empty suit and empty machine of society that goes around and around and sucks away the vital bloodstream.

CREATE isn't part of the BELONGING PROGRAM, the program that society runs on to stay away from the transforming power of imagination.