Being a follower of Scott Kurtz’s PVP, I’ve subscribed to the comic’s site and I view everything Kurtz posts. The motivational speaker whose video is featured on his site, now, had some interesting ideas to bring forth, in a round-about way of proposing the idea that the collective human subconscious is more responsible for creativity than any individual, which goes along with my understanding that we are all connected with everything around us in ways we refuse to acknowledge, generally speaking, as a society.
http://www.pvponline.com/2009/08/03/elizabeth-gilbert-on-nurturing-creativity/
This society of men and women who turn away from our connections to the Earth, Sun and moon, find no bond between the human individual and the human collective, and see everything around themselves in relative to its shorthand uses and hindrances is what we’ve allowed humanity to be ruled by, within our own minds. It isn’t difficult to see through the conventions that this novelist used in her speech to relay the ancient and enticing idea that I take for granted as truth: creativity is not a product of the individual alone. These conventions of “spiritual connections” and “divinity” that she alludes to is the same set of misguided conventions that invented beliefs in embodied deities, who were all once just poetic expressions of the source of life (the Sun) darkness (forces polar-ly opposing the natural occurrences that kept us alive and healthy) health (a connection and understanding of our origin from combined elements and conflicting energies) and the mind itself. She is very well onto something, but harnessing that something and cutting it free of its fatal confines within a religious perspective will benefit the human understanding, and bring it closer to the truth.
After I’d finished watching her speak, dad asked if I knew anything about what she’s written. I haven’t the slightest clue who the hell she is, let alone what she’s written, and it baffles me why any of that should impose on my desire to listen and learn from my fellow human beings. It feels like he’s so fucking deluded to the value of communication and expression. These are things that our souls thrive on! (That is an easy way of saying that without communication and expression between humans, its race is doomed to fall short of its potential rapidly. I’d love to take the Peter Joseph route on this point, and refer to a story about a king raising isolated children who died without human interaction, but I can’t remember it very well and I don’t feel like going through the trouble of finding anything more than its synopsis, which is more than enough to voice my thoughts.)
No offense to Miss Gilbert, but I really don’t care who she is, and that’s perfectly fine as long as the message she gets out is listened to. Hunter Thompson never had that kind of luck, with so many people caring more about his public image than his public message, man. This is a more substantially justified fear than not being noticed at all: being noticed for the wrong reason.
