COACHING OBLIQUE SHAFTS OF ILLUMINATION

You get in trouble from language, from the words.  As soon as you think you are the words, you’re stuck in subject-object time.  As soon as you start to explain anything, you’ve lost the access to the magic.  The magic is in the experience.  “I love you” is an experience.  If I tell you all the ways I love you, how I love you, why I love you, what stops me from loving you, the magic goes away, by degrees.  Life is not a linguistic event.  Life is a vibrational, body event.  It’s an experience.  The more you organize stuff, the more the experience gets forced into what’s possible from the language.  That’s a dilemma.  Often, what’s successful is when there was very little explanation based language.  It was mostly an experience of not knowing, and

I don’t really know.  I sit now for an hour or two listening to the mantra.  It makes me happy and I get empty.  Nothingness.  What’s going on at the core is a void, nothing – no thing.  If we can come to this, or at least become continuously aware that what’s at the core of this is nothingness, we can then have real thinking.  You can invent your thinking.  You can say whatever you want.  As long as you tell yourself, this is how we did it in our family, or this is how the boss likes it so that’s what I’ll do, you’re stuck.  The problem is being stuck.   .. yesterday, … One author wrote that god is Universal Consciousness without an object. That’s the most interesting thing I’ve heard – that god, everything, all meaning, all mystery, all everything is universal consciousness, awake, awareness but has no purpose.

This has a ring of truth to it. In those moments when I’ve been most creative and collaborative , in the moment before the moment, I’ve managed to somehow generate emptiness.  Nothing.  And from there you can create anything.  But from anything you already think, feel, want, do, are scared of.., you can’t.  As a pragmatic practice, there’s all kinds of things you can do to help generate it.   But without that first part – the freedom to think —it’s not going to be what it could be.

It’s like charting a space that allows for that emergence to happen.  People might attempt to change the words or language, but that still gets in the way because what really needs to shift is the thinking.   Which gives rise to possibly a new language, once you shift the thinking.  But it’s always from nothing.  I’m still grappling with whether it’s possible to sustain that magic.

The idea is not being stuck. I like working, making money.  But being stuck with it is boring. Obliqueness lets me be free and gives others an opportunity to be free, to freely choose, to be where you are generating one of the choices.  Almost everything that’s called a choice isn’t – it’s somebody else’s idea.  You have to generate the nature of a choice in order for it to be a free choice.  And that can only come from nothing.  Not a thing.  Not an element of history.

In Collaborative Innovation, It really is about choosing freedom and collaboration, because collaboration doesn’t always seem natural. Milton, the poet, captured my experience in “Paradise Lost.”  In (1667), he mentions “Cold Estotiland”: