Working on this book has got me reading again. First I picked up Colin Wilson's "The Outsider". I had heard him share on Jeffrey Mishlove's program "Thinking Allowed" https://youtu.be/8WWeE1GnZjA He is well known as the founder of a new school of Existentialism. I am a scientist more than a philosopher, but I have always struggled with understanding life and have constantly sought answers wherever I could find them. What Wilson talks about is how we live a low-level existence. We live in the mind of habit and routine, and also fear and inner worry.
I love the section of the talk linked above where he describes catching his adrenaline. In the moment when he found himself going into a fearful state he could suddenly let it go and become rebalanced. With me it is more like chasing after the adrenaline in a slow moving truck, eventually catching up with it to find it has exhausted itself and left a wake of emotional and relationship damage. I find using art helps. His primary idea, though, is not about escaping fear as much as it is about living a fully alive life. He calls us onto a path of waking up from the slumber of routine and the incessant chatter of the monkey mind. He asks us to look at life through a new lens, that of present fully aware consciousness. He makes note that we can become the observer and director of our own lives whe we awaken to the senses and our own consciousness. I find it interesting that there is such a growing movement towards mindfulness today. You hear it everywhere, even in our public schools. And no wonder, as we have become less and less present. We are completely busy and crazy, driving ourselves harder to achieve, and never having a quiet moment as we obsess over social media and other incessant distractions. We have taken ourselves out of the present moment and live in a world of planning and memory and distraction from the here and now. When we are truly engaging in art, creative play, and free expression, we are not planning. These types of artistic activities can bring us back into the present and even beyond it. Through creative expression we can move into the states of heightened awareness. During creative expression it seems we can be catapulted beyond time and beyond self. It is like the state of Flow described by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. We have often heard of the Existential Crisis--that is when we question everything and struggle with understanding the meaning of life, but isn't the real crisis when we don't question at all and live a robotic life?
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Abigail LarrisonEducator, Scientist and Art Maker. The purpose of all life is to spread joy. What brings more joy than making art? Archives
November 2023
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