A Releasing Your Unlimited Creativity discussion topic

Copyright 2009 by K. Ferlic,   All Rights Reserved

The following is a copyrighted text. It is provided here for educational purposes. In particular, to bring the reader’s awareness how we scatter and fragment our creative ability and creative power.

There are numerous ways we fragment ourselves, consciously and nonconsciously. Although pain is the most common way, the following stories demonstrate how this fragmenting occurs in a different way.

The first comes from a story in the Washington Post about Peggy Saligner, the daughter of J.D. Saligner author of Catcher in the Rye. J.D. Salinger was as famous for his silences and control of his world as he was an author. Living with him required his daughter to consciously fragment herself. To find herself in the way that she needed to do (by telling her story publically), she suffered such criticism that many who follow the ancient recommendation, "keep your prayers [your deepest desires and longing] secret," may have thought perhaps she should have kept her prayers for healing secret. For example, of her book, Dream Catcher, a reviewer wrote in the Washington Post, September 1, 2000:

"He loved his daughter while she was young, and perhaps in his fashion he still does, but as she grew older he became ever more demanding and critical. Just as her mother 'felt as though she were trapped in a fairy tale,' so Peggy believed that ‘my father was ...dealing in dreams, rather than real children.' He wanted his daughter to ‘be a sweet girl, a good soldier,' an expectation she attempted to meet but at considerable cost. ‘Being a good girl with extremely sensitive antennae, I managed to keep in his good graces most of the time, to be the sweet girl.... In so doing, I dwelt in his magical world of stories and wild mushrooms and hotel breakfasts where no grown-ups, with their phony rules and conceits, were allowed. But the price of admission was steep. To enter his world, a girl had to become, in effect, fictional and split off from the depth, complexity and imperfection of a real, three-dimensional person....My mind didn't bend; it split in such a way that I became almost two people--the part of me that played with my friends and thought my own secret thoughts and the part of me that was his voice in my head and enabled me to be a person he loved.' No doubt this is true. No doubt, too, writing this book had therapeutic effects for its author. But it is one thing to set down one's memories and reflections on paper, quite another to publish them for all the world to see. It may seem a bold gesture for Peggy Salinger to say that she meant 'to defy his cult of secrecy by writing this book,' but it remains that her father is entitled to his secrecy, or privacy, and that this book is a willful violation of it. That being the case, Dream Catcher must be seen not as an attempt at self-exploration and self-understanding but as an act of revenge and betrayal, a blow beneath the belt."

A second story is about a Washington D.C. Mountain Music singer Hazel Dickens. Although Hazel Dickens live in a completely different world than Peggy Salinger, the effects are essentially the same and the process is not too different. From the "The Washington Post Magazine" June 24, 2001 about Hazel Dickens:

"HAZEL JANE DICKENS was born the eighth of 11 children in central Appalachia, about 350 miles and a galaxy away from Washington. Montcalm, W.Va., was a place where "if you didn’t work, you didn’t eat," she says, where they had fistfights for fun, but "you also knew they’d die for you." Her brothers went to work under-ground each morning wondering if they’d live to see daylight again, and came home each night "with clothes so black you couldn’t tell the cloth they were made from."

H.N. was domineering and quick-tempered. "He cried at the drop of a hat," she says, but could hurl an open razor across the room if he cut himself shaving. Until he got religion in his mid-twenties, he rode a horse, carried a gun, made moonshine and played the banjo. He had a poetical way of talking. "I hope I've strewn flowers in your path," he would say to his flock.

He also was a fierce disciplinarian, meting out punishment the way it had been handed to him by his own father. Transgressions were met with strappings or the ominous command: 'Go cut yourself a switch." The physical effects of the whippings were sometimes severe enough to linger for days. The emotional effects lasted longer. Dickens was well into adulthood, she says, before she learned to control her own temper. The years of stifling her own thoughts and feelings in order to avoid antagonizing her father had left her a kind of cripple, with no skills for the give and take of normal social life.

"I was years trying to figure out just how to get along with people," she says. "I didn't know how to control my temper because my father, he never had. I never knew how to talk things out. I would just sort of keep everything in, and of course that didn’t work. I had big feelings, but no place to put them."

Her mother, Sarah Aldora Dickens, was worn out early by a high-maintenance husband and the dawn-to-dusk demands of raising ii children in rural poverty. In a culture that cloistered its women, she rarely ventured out of the house. Hazel describes her as a soft-spoken saint who loved to hear a woman sing and"never had the taking-care-of that she needed."

Big Coal's arrival in Appalachia in the early 1900's had delivered the local people from the rigors of subsistence farming in the mountains, but it was a devil's bargain. Mining work was brutal and dangerous. Men worked on their hands and knees in coal seams that often were no higher than three or four feet. Above ground, they lived in coal-company housing and bought food at company stores that si-phoned off what little money they had. Death could be as quick as a tunnel collapse or as slow as black lung disease, but either way early death was an occupational hazard.

The third story comes from a book by Muktananda entitled I Have Become Alive. When the author first read the story it only registered as a story until he had realized he had personally "lived" this story and saw how doubt causes fragmentation - the loss of our creative ability, in this manner. In the realization that we create from within Creation, the author understood that we enter the lives of others to help them fulfill deep longings and desires of which they are totally unaware because they lie at deep nonconscious levels. We enter the lives of others like the boy in the following story and we suffer pain of rejection when we experience the doubt and lack of trust of those we serve because they fail to realize the reality they see before them is the reality they, themselves, created and we are only the vehicle of Creation manifesting their desire. Whether we realize it or not, we each enter the lives of others to fulfill their deepest desires. Rather than awakening to how they create the reality they experience and fully trust that they get what they ask for, they focus on particular desires and wants and deny the rest, causing pain and suffering. The story is as follows;

"In the Bhagavad Gita, there is a verse in which the Lord says, "When someone is devoted to Me, I take care of what he already has and secure what he does not possess. There was a great sage who used to read the Gita every day. He had full trust in the Lord. At one point his financial affairs became so bad that he had trouble getting even a single chapati [unleavened Indian bread]. One day his wife cried, "What are we going to do? There's no flour or oil in the house!" The sage comforted her as best he could and then left the house as usual. He went to the bank of the Ganges and began to read the Gita. He was reading the chapter in which this verse appears. When he saw the verse, he stopped reading and began to think about whether it was true. After all, writers make mistakes, publishers make mistakes, editors make mistakes. This is what has happened to all the scriptures; the editors have put in their own things, and therefore you can no longer find the original scriptures. The sage thought about this verse for a long time; then he underlined it with a pen to remind himself to think about it more and went on reading the Gita. In the meantime his wife was sitting at home, when she heard a knock at the door. She opened it and saw a beautiful, radiant boy standing there. His arms were full of bags of grain, vegetables, and other things. "These are for you," he said.

The wife was very surprised. "Who sent these?" she asked the boy.

"The maharaj who is reading the Gita on the bank of the Ganga," he replied.

The wife took the bags inside and offered the boy a glass of water, but then she saw that he had been stabbed and that he was bleeding. "What happened?" she asked. "Who stabbed you?"

"The same scholar, your husband, did this," the boy said. The wife was shocked and bewildered. She closed her eyes and cried, "Alas! How could he do such a thing?" When she opened her eyes, the boy had disappeared, but she felt such love, peace, and contentment that she fell to the ground, unconscious. When she regained consciousness, she saw that there were many things in the bags, so she began to prepare a meal.

The scholar always read the Gita until noon, and afterward, when he returned home, he would eat whatever was there. On this day he walked home very slowly, because in the morning his wife had told him that she did not have any food in the house. As he got closer to the house he began to smelt the fragrance of food. He went in and asked his wife, "What are you doing?"

"I have been preparing food since morning," said the wife. have already prepared the Puris, seera, and pakoras."

"Who brought all these things?" he asked.

"A beautiful boy. He brought enough to last for a long time."

"Who was the boy?" asked the scholar.

"The same boy that you stabbed. He told me that you were sitting on the bank of the Ganga and that you had stabbed him."

The sage remembered that he had underlined a verse in the Gita with a pen. He realized that it had been God Himself who had come to the house and that it had been his lack of faith in the truth of the verse that had caused the wound of His body. The sage also fell on the ground with the impact of great love.

Therefore, you should have full trust in God. God doesn't just take care of his devotees; He takes care of everything. The whole insurance company is with Him. There are innumerable souls in this world. Some live on this earth, some fly in the sky, and some live in water. These creatures have no one who is responsible for them or protects them. They don't have any insurance companies. Still, they get everything they need to eat. Why should He not take care of you?"

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