out on the edge

life is a dialogue "Daily life is a symbol of the inner you. In using your ordinary five senses to their fullest, noticing and watching the signs, it assists you in the development of a sixth sense. So, as part of a heightened awareness, start demanding that your mind notice everything. Watch, look, count, and make a mental note of everything. If, for example, you enter a large hotel ballroom, within seconds you ought to know the answers to a dozen simple questions: how many chairs, lights, and waiters are there? What color is the carpet? Where are the tables, what's on them, and so on?

Constantly demand that your mind notice even the most irrelevant information. In this way, you heighten your awareness in the five senses; and in watching your surroundings carefully, you gradually strengthen your sixth sense, picking up more of what is going on. Heightening your powers of observation in the external world assists you in becoming more aware of your internal, visionary self. The universe is constantly talking to you and showing you things.

So, if you're walking down the street and something strange happens, stop, watch, and remember. If a black cat hops across your foot, does a somersault, and pees against the pub wall, ask yourself, "What does this mean?" The fact that you are coincidentally there at that precise moment in eternity to witness the cat's antics means that the symbol is yours. It's the external world talking to you. It is showing you things about yourself.

Thus, by internalizing the God Force - and by understanding that your Infinite Self and its inherent spirituality develops and grows only when you quiet the mind - you begin to see how the universal law of the God Force is trying to take you by the hand, show you things, and lead you on.

Life is a prayer; it's a dialogue. You are projecting energy and receiving energy: that is the interaction between you and the God Force. Watch that ebb and flow; watch your inner dialogue and the language of life's symbols, and offer up your simple human activities, your moments of silence, in a symbiotic exchange of energy and information, of asking and gratitude. The external/internal dialogue comes from silence, and it develops and strengthens through serenity.

In the ancient legend of Camelot, King Arthur took the sword, Excalibur, from the Lady of the Lake. That Excalibur is silent power; it's not the ego's power. It came from the placid lake, meaning it came from serenity. You don't have to be perfect to be serene. Tell yourself constantly, "I am serene and balanced, whether life is perfect or not."

Accept the gift of serenity, and bit by bit your emotions calm down. As that occurs, your spiritual power flows up from within, creating even more balance. It's a power that you will want to protect and hide away. You will use it to heal your body and to show you a transcendence that is not normally available to people. Now you must learn to guard the power - to protect your energy - and be vigilant so that you don't allow your ego to trash it.

It's a paradox of life that sees the ego, on the one hand, babbling away, trying to build itself up - hoping to generate gratifying experiences, exerting itself to get attention and to sustain its importance - and, on the other hand, generating negativity to trash itself and its dreams. Only the ego would believe that in moaning and groaning things might get better. Essentially, its the small child calling for its mother to help it. I'll cry. I'll moan. I'll demonstrate the unjustice of it all. Save me, help me. If I bitch a lot, will you give me something for nothing?

Expanding your awareness comes from understanding that everything is a feeling, and from asking yourself constantly how things feel. It's like a muscle that perhaps you haven't used for years; as you begin to ask, it will strengthen quite quickly. Try this: ask the God Force to show you something in the next 24 hours, something you have never seen before - a perception, an intuition, a different way of looking at things that you've seen a hundred times before. Then, watch carefully. Something unusual will pop up - and you'll see that the seeming external world is, in fact, internal - and it's talking to you. It loves you in its detached way."
- Stuart Wilde



"Every morning we awaken from sleep and from our dreams and enter the state we call wakefulness. A continuous stream of thoughts, most of them repetitive, characterizes the normal wakeful state. So what is it that we awaken from when spiritual awakening occurs? We awaken from identification with our thoughts. Everybody who is not awake spiritually is totally identified with and run by their thinking mind – the incessant voice in the head. Thinking is compulsive: you can’t stop, or so it seems. It is also addictive: you don’t even want to stop, at least not until the suffering generated by the continuous mental noise becomes unbearable. In the unawakened state you don’t use thought, but thought uses you. You are, one could almost say, possessed by thought, which is the collective conditioning of the human mind that goes back many thousands of years. You don’t see anything as it is, but distorted and reduced by mental labels, concepts, judgments, opinions and reactive patterns. Your sense of identity, of self, is reduced to a story you keep telling yourself in your head. "Me and my story": this what your life is reduced to in the unawakened state. And when your life is thus reduced, you can never be happy for long, because you are not yourself."
- Eckhart Tolle



less preoccupying thoughts "Usually our minds are an enormously complex stew of thoughts, feelings, sensations, wants, snatches of songs, pains, drives, daydreams and, of course, consciousness itself more or less aware of it all. To understand consciousness in itself, the obvious thing would be to clear away as much of this internal detritus and noise as possible. It turns out that mystics seem to be doing precisely that. The technique that most mystics use is some form of meditation or contemplation. These are procedures that systematically reduce mental activity. During meditation, one begins to slow down the thinking process, and have fewer or less intense thoughts. One's thoughts become as if more distant, vague, or less preoccupying; one stops paying as much attention to bodily sensations; one has fewer or less intense fantasies and daydreams. Thus by reducing the intensity or compelling quality of outward perception and inward thoughts, one may come to a greater stillness. Ultimately one may become utterly silent inside, as though in a gap between thoughts, where one becomes completely perception- and thought-free. One neither thinks nor perceives any mental or sensory content. Yet, despite this suspension of content, one emerges from such events confident that one had remained awake inside, fully conscious. The pure consciousness may be defined as a wakeful but contentless consciousness."
- Robert Forman
What Does Mysticism Have To Teach Us About Consciousness?



every heart that beats [physicist Alain Aspect and his team discovered that under certain circumstances subatomic particles such as electrons are able to instantaneously communicate with each other regardless of the distance separating them. It doesn't matter whether they are 10 feet or 10 billion miles apart.]

[physicist David Bohm believes Aspect's findings imply that objective reality does not exist, that despite its apparent solidity the universe is at heart a phantasm, a gigantic and splendidly detailed hologram.]

the universe as a hologram
"Imagine an aquarium containing a fish. Imagine also that you are unable to see the aquarium directly and your knowledge about it and what it contains comes from two television cameras, one directed at the aquarium's front and the other directed at its side.

As you stare at the two television monitors, you might assume that the fish on each of the screens are separate entities. After all, because the cameras are set at different angles, each of the images will be slightly different. But as you continue to watch the two fish, you will eventually become aware that there is a certain relationship between them.

When one turns, the other also makes a slightly different but corresponding turn; when one faces the front, the other always faces toward the side. If you remain unaware of the full scope of the situation, you might even conclude that the fish must be instantaneously communicating with one another, but this is clearly not the case.

This, says Bohm, is precisely what is going on between the subatomic particles in Aspect's experiment.

According to Bohm, the apparent faster-than-light connection between subatomic particles is really telling us that there is a deeper level of reality we are not privy to, a more complex dimension beyond our own that is analogous to the aquarium. And, he adds, we view objects such as subatomic particles as separate from one another because we are seeing only a portion of their reality.

In addition to its phantomlike nature, such a universe would possess other rather startling features. If the apparent separateness of subatomic particles is illusory, it means that at a deeper level of reality all things in the universe are infinitely interconnected.

The electrons in a carbon atom in the human brain are connected to the subatomic particles that comprise every salmon that swims, every heart that beats, and every star that shimmers in the sky."
- Michael Talbot

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

"People often say that this or that person has not yet found him or herself. But the self is not something that one finds. It is something one creates."
- Thomas Szasz


automatic living "Few of us would deny that the universe is a stranger place than the generally accepted natural laws can account for.

Everyone is familiar with the phenomenon of feeling more or less alive on different days. Everyone knows on any given day that there are energies slumbering in him which the incitements of that day do not call forth, but which he might display if these were greater. Most of us feel as if a sort of cloud weighs upon us, keeping us below our highest notch of clearness in discernment or sureness in reasoning. Compared with what we ought to be we are only half awake. We are making use of only a small part of our possible mental and physical resources.

The human individual lives unusually far within his limits. He possesses powers of various sorts which he habitually fails to use. He energizes below his maximum. He behaves below his optimum.

In other words, for everyday purposes human beings have a certain predetermined limit. It is like the thermostat on a central heating system. When the temperature rises above a certain point it automatically switches off the heating. When our tiredness reaches a certain limit, we also switch off automatically, and allow ourselves to sink into a passive state. But if some crisis arises, we refuse to allow ourselves to switch off. Our thermostat readjusts itself. The implication seems to be that each of us contains a vast reservoir of energy. We live subject to arrest by degrees of fatigue which we have come only from habit to obey.

There is nothing mystical or occult about this. We all have within us a robot, akin to the automatic pilot in an airplane, whose task is to simplify our lives by handling a series of routines. Learning to do something new requires considerable effort and concentration, but once we have mastered it, our robot takes over and does it far more quickly and efficiently than we could do it consciously. The trouble is, the robot can become so efficient that it takes over most of our life. We begin to live like a robot. We do things automatically. It takes some sudden crisis to jar us out of this automatic living.

Like our bodies, our feelings are also controlled by the robot, running on automatic pilot. We seldom experience new feelings. For the most part, we play the same old feelings over and over again. Our minds contain a vast unused library of thoughts and ideas. The world around us is full of an infinite number of interesting things that the robot is trained to ignore. We accept the universe around us as stable and normal, when there is immense mystery and complexity and reality hidden from us by ignorance and habit."
Colin Wilson
Christopher Evans
The Book of Great Mysteries


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"When I looked fully, I could see hundreds of souls stretching as far as I could see. Some were looking directly at us, but most appeared to be focused in another direction. I looked to see where they were staring, following their gaze to several large swirls of energy far in the distance.

"What are those places?" I asked.

"Mental constructions set up by souls who in life lived very restrictive control dramas and could not wake up after death. Many thousand of them exist out there. That's how it works; if we die and we have been so immersed in our control drama and routine as a way to repress the mystery and insecurity of life, to such a degree that we can't even wake up after death, then we create these illusions or trances so we can continue the same way of feeling safe, even after we enter the afterlife. It's all a reaction to fear. The people there would be paralyzed with fear if they didn't find some way to ward it off, to repress it below consciousness. What they're doing is repeating the same dramas, the same coping devices, they practiced in life, and they can't stop."

"So these illusional realities are just severe control dramas?"

"Yes, they fall within the general styles of the control dramas, except that they are more intense and nonreflective. For example, take a person who was no doubt an intimidator in the way that they stole energy from others - they rationalize this behavior by assuming that the world is out to get them, and of course, in their life on earth these expectations draw just those kinds of people into their life, so their mental vision is fulfilled. Here, they just create imaginary people to be after them so they can reproduce the same situation.

If they were to run out of people to intimidate and their energy were to fall, anxiety would begin to seep into consciousness again. So they have to keep up the intimidator role constantly. They have to keep this particular kind of action going, the action they learned long ago, the only action they know, that will preoccupy their mind sufficiently to kill the fear. It is the action itself - the compulsive, dramatic, high-adrenaline nature of the action - that pushes the anxiety so far into the background that they can forget about it, repress it, and feel half at ease in their existence, at least for a little while.

Passivity, the 'poor me' control drama, taken to the extreme, projects nothing but despair and cruelty on the entire world, rationalizing a need to escape. But all these illusions always play out and blow up in the end. It works the same way in the physical dimension: a compulsive control drama always fails, sooner or later. Usually it happens during the trials and challenges of life; routines break down and the anxiety rushes in. It is what's called hitting bottom. This is the time to wake up and handle the fear in another way, but if a person can't, then he or she goes right back into the trance. And if one doesn't wake up in the physical dimension, one might have difficulty waking up in the other as well.

These compulsive trances account for all horrible behavior in the physical dimension. This is the psychology of all truly evil acts, the motivation behind the inconceivable behavior of child molesters, sadists, and serial monsters of all kinds. They're simply repeating the only behavior they know that will numb the mind and keep away the anxiety that comes from the lostness they feel.

There is no organized, conspiratorial evil in the world, there is only human fear and the bizarre ways that humans try to ward it off. The references in sacred texts and scriptures to Satan is a metaphor, a symbolic way of warning people to look to the divine for security, not to their sometimes tragic ego urges and habits. Blaming our behavior on forces outside ourselves is a way of avoiding responsibility. We project that some people are inherently evil so we can dehumanize the ones we disagree with and write them off. Fearful people want to control others. That's why certain groups try to pull you in and convince you to follow them, and ask you to submit to their authority, or fight you if you try to leave. You are drawn in because you make the mistake of giving yourself over to them, as if they automatically have all the answers, without checking to see whether their motivation is fear or love. Unlike souls who are divinely motivated, souls motivated by fear just pull you into their world, the same way some crazy group or cult might do in the physical dimension if you don't discriminate.

Communication between the two dimensions is increasing, people are having more encounters with souls in the afterlife, and we must discern between those souls who are awake and connected with the spirit of love and those who are fearful and stuck in an obsessive trance of some kind. But we have to be able to do so without invalidating and dehumanizing those caught in such fear dramas by thinking they are demons or devils. They are souls in a growth process, just like us. In fact, in the earth dimension those who are now caught up in dramas from which they can't escape are often the very souls who were the most optimistic in their birth visions. That is why they chose to be born into such drastic, fearful situations that necessitate such intense, crazy coping devices.

Abusive and dysfunctional families, intense control dramas of all kinds, whether they are violent or just perverse and strange addictions, come from environments where life is so abusive and dysfunctional and constrictive, and the level of fear is so great, that they spawn this same rage and anger or perversion over and over, generation after generation. The individuals who are born into these situations choose to do so on purpose, with clarity, because they are sure they have enough strength to break out, to end the cycle, to heal the family system in which they will be born. They are confident that they can awaken and work through the resentment and anger at finding themselves in these deprived circumstances, and see it all as a preparation for a mission - usually one of helping others out of similar situations. Even if they are violent, we have to see them as having the potential to break free of the drama. No matter how undesirable the behavior of others is, we have to grasp that they are just souls attempting to wake up, like us.

Everyone is born with a positive intention, trying to bring more of the knowledge contained in the afterlife into the physical. All of us. History has been a long process of awakening. When we are born into the physical, of course, we run into this problem of going unconscious and having to be socialized and trained in the cultural reality of the day. All we can remember are these gut feelings, these intuitions, to do certain things. But we constantly have to fight the fear. Often the fear is so great we fail to follow through with what we intended, or we distort it somehow. But everyone, everyone, comes in with the best of intentions.

All killing is a rage and lashing out that is a way of overcoming an inner sense of fear and helplessness. People are not inherently bad, they just go crazy in the fear and make horrible mistakes. And, ultimately, they must bear the full responsibility of these mistakes.

But horrible acts are caused, in part, by our very tendency to assume that some people are naturally evil. That's the mistaken view that fuels the polarization. Both sides can't believe humans can act the way they do without being intrinsically no good, and so they increasingly dehumanize and alienate each other, which increases the fear and brings out the worst in everyone."
- James Redfield
excerpts from An Inner Hell and A History of Awakening
The Tenth Insight



"Here's a terrific exercise that has to do with both geography and point of view: draw a map of where you live, your turf. You know where your house is, where the gas station is, where the mall is, and - if you're virtuous - where the church is. If you're the adventurous type, you know where the vacant lot is where you once set that fire. But soon - past the freeway, or by the railroad tracks - your knowledge stops. Drawing where you are in the world is marvelously helpful in showing you where you are in the world."
- Carolyn See
Making a Literary Life
Advice for Writers
And Other Dreamers



"Spirituality begins with a vision, but reality doesn't fit that vision. The path is what brings them together. Most people who want to experience inner growth begin by reading in the vast spiritual literature. They become discontented with the distance between their own lives and the enlightened existence they discover in their reading; they start to make a break. Yet after the break nothing seems to really change. The haunting insecurity and loneliness, the sense of confusion and conflict, are still there.
But instead of feeling let down by this 'failure', you need to realize that all spiritual work is done by yourself, with yourself, and for yourself. No one 'out there' can take responsibility. It is all right to be aware of a distance between vision and reality, because that is what it feels like to be on the path. If you had no gaps to close, you wouldn't need a path."
- Deepak Chopra



"Remember this, you don't have to be important or special or glamorous; all you actually need is success and pleasure from whatever it is that you choose to do with your life. You don't have to become something in the eyes of others, you only have to become something in your own reality. From this humble attitude flows a sweet serenity which comes naturally from personal healing and spiritual reconciliation."
- Stuart Wilde
Whispering Winds of Change


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"If the world were merely seductive, that would be easy.
If it were merely challenging, that would be no problem.
But I arise in the morning torn
between a desire to change the world
and a desire to enjoy the world.
This makes it hard to plan the day."
- E.B. White



"This reclusion, I believe, has profoundly benefited my work. Shadow, silence and solitude, by laying their heavy cloak over me, have obliged me to re-create within myself all the lights and music and thrills of nature and society. My spiritual being no longer assails itself against the barriers of the invisible and nothing impedes its freedom [...] When it happens that a slender ray of sunlight manages to insinuate itself in here, like the ancient statue of Memnon which produces harmonious sounds when it is struck by the rays of the rising star, my whole being bursts with joy and I find myself transported into worlds of splendour... I have profound luxuries within my imprisonment."
- Marcel Proust
Interview with André Arnyvelde (André Lévy)
Ephemera Site



"Let us fix our attention out of ourselves as much as possible; let us chase our imaginations to the heavens, or to the ultimate limits of the universe; we never really advance a step beyond ourselves, nor can we conceive of any kind of existence, but the perceptions which have appeared in that narrow compass. This is the universe of the imagination, nor have we any idea but what is here produced."
- David Hume



"There are some who believe that to live the life that leads to heaven, which is called the spiritual life, is difficult, because they have heard that a person must renounce the world, must divest himself of the lusts called the lusts of the body and the flesh, and must live spiritually. They understand this to mean that they must discard worldly things which consist chiefly in riches and honors; that they must walk continually in pious meditation concerning God, salvation, and eternal life; and must spend their life in prayers and in reading the Word and pious books. Such is their idea of renouncing the world, and living in the spirit and not in the flesh . . . . Those who renounce the world and live in the spirit in this manner acquire a sorrowful life that is not receptive of heavenly joy; for everyone's life remains with him. But to receive the life of heaven a person must wholly live in the world and engage in business and employments, and then, by means of a moral and civil life there, receive the spiritual life. In no other way can the spiritual life be formed in a person, or his spirit prepared for heaven."
- Emanuel Swedenborg



"I wouldn't worry too much about the little white lies of life that crop up in social situations; it's more important to ensure that your main actions and your words emanate from spirit, not ego. If you develop an honor code and an equitable relationship with yourself and others, it pulls you out of the ego's evolution and eventually into a sacred place. Sure, it may deny you some quick profits, but in the end you have to look back at your life and you will own every moment of it. Did you create light or mayhem? Did you contribute to your enlightenment and the consciousness of others, or did you manipulate and imprison people for your own ends? Did you offer joy and positive hope or did you destroy people and cause more misery? These are impacting questions. Ask them now. Change your ways. Flow along a new path. You don't want to end up on the despot's bench looking at the ugliness of your life."
- Stuart Wilde


The Secret of the Universe
"I spin, I spin, around, around,
And close my eyes,
And let the bile arise
From the sacred region of the soul’s Profound;
Then gaze upon the world; how strange! how new!
The earth and heaven are one,
The horizon-line is gone,
The sky how green! the land how fair and blue!
Perplexing items fade from my large view,
And thought which vexed me with its false and true
Is swallowed up in Intuition; this,
This is the sole true mode
Of reaching God,
And gaining the universal synthesis
Which makes All - One; while fools with peering eyes
Dissect, divide, and vainly analyse.
So round, and round, and round again!
How the whole globe swells within my brain,
The stars inside my lids appear,
The murmur of the spheres I hear
Throbbing and beating in each ear;
Right in my navel I can feel
The centre of the world’s great wheel.
Ah peace divine, bliss dear and deep,
No stay, no stop,
Like any top
Whirling with swiftest speed, I sleep.
O ye devout ones round me coming,
Listen! I think that I am humming;
No utterance of the servile mind
With poor chop-logic rules agreeing
Here shall ye find,
But inarticulate burr of man’s unsundered being.
Ah, could we but devise some plan,
Some patent jack by which a man
Might hold himself ever in harmony
With the great whole, and spin perpetually,
As all things spin
Without, within,
As Time spins off into Eternity,
And Space into the inane Immensity,
And the Finite into God’s Infinity,
Spin, spin, spin, spin."
- Edward Dowden



“The human adventure is a wandering through the vale of the world for the sake of making soul. Our life is psychological, and the purpose of life is to make psyche of it, to find connections between life and soul”
- James Hillman



the noninfringement rule "Your detachment is created on an emotional, intellectual level by nothing more complex than your decision that life is not as dramatic as your ego imagines it to be. You are happy to allow everyone their evolution through the physical plane, unfettered by your personal opinion and interference. Doing so, you observe them to be perfect in their imperfection, and you further observe them to be experiencing whatever they are experiencing, for some reason of which you have no certain knowledge. It doesn't mean you have to be callous or uninterested in people's problems. You can help them indirectly through your energy and your knowledge, but don't interfere in the lives of others, especially if they haven't approached you personally. Take the humble stance which says that you have no deeper knowledge of people's personal circumstances than they do. If they don't ask your opinion, why would you offer it? The greatest love you can offer others, in my view, is to leave them alone. This affirms that they are capable, and given time, will probably solve their situation better than you ever can."
- Stuart Wilde



"Creativity is essentially a lonely art. An even lonelier struggle. To some a blessing. To others a curse. It is in reality the ability to reach inside yourself and drag forth from your very soul an idea"
- Lou Dorfsman


perhaps a playful invitation to experience the wonder of your own discovery


self-analysis "So we come to the first stage of self analysis. It runs generally this way: I ask, "What am I?" And first it occurs to me that the idea that I am this body is a delusion, because this body is an object before my consciousness. I speak as though it were my body, I speak as though I possess it. It is therefore external to me. I am not the body.

And then we come to dealing with our vital nature, our feelings. We get into a roaring rage, we fall in love, we are delighted with the beauties of a symphony and strongly reach out toward it. Are those feelings of I? No, for I experience them. I but experience them. They are different from me. I can identify them, and that itself is enough proof that they are not I. Now, are you ready? I am very deliberately violating the rules of grammar, for the I of which I speak is never an object, never a me. You can’t write these things and be grammatically correct.

Am I this body of thoughts in my mind? No. One gets a little closer to his thoughts than to anything else, and it’s a little harder to untangle this. But if he watches and studies closely enough, the thoughts come to me. I accept or reject them. That which accepts or rejects them is different from the thought. And then I finally reach this point where I find that I must be this something, in some sense, different from other people. I’m not the mind, I’m not the feelings, I’m not the body - that I see. But I surely am, I surely am an individual, apart from others.



the ego Now what you’ve gotten a hold of is a very difficult fellow -- it’s your ego. He can sneak around and confuse you like the dickens. You can spend years trying to get behind him. And when you do, you can get into an infinite regression. You look at your ego. All right, here am I and all of a sudden it dawns upon you that which is looking at the ego is really the I. So you stick that one out in front. You look at it again, but then you realize it couldn’t be, because here is a something that is observable. At last it finally dawns that I AM THAT which is ever an object before Consciousness. And mayhap, at that moment, in your analysis - the Heavens will open."
- Franklin Merrell-Wolff
Induction


><((((º>

"You're not, and you never have been.
That means what you see, and hear, and feel, and think . . . you think that that is your mind. But the real mind is invisible; you're less aware of it, while you think, than you are of your eye while you see . . . until something goes wrong with it. Then you become aware of it, with all its dislocated pieces and its rackety functioning, the same way you become aware of your eye when you get a cinder in it. Because it hurts . . . Sure, it distorts things. But the strange thing, the thing that you can never explain to anyone, except another nut, or, if you're lucky, a doctor who has an unusual amount of sense - stranger than the hallucinations, or the voices, or the anxiety - is the way you begin to experience the edges of the mind itself . . . in a way other people just can't."
- Samuel R. Delany



"I want to stay as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can't see from the center."
- Kurt Vonnegut




"There is a great irony at the center of all writing - you write because you want to communicate, because you have ideas to express, experiences to relate, meanings to distill. In order to do all this, you gather supplies, lock yourself in a room, and get really angry with your friends if they call you from work."
- Keith Gessen



"Think of all the other writers out there in the world, taking the same detour from word processor to coffeepot, thesaurus in hand, hopes in tow. We’re all in it together, crossing over and over the elusive bridge between words and literature."
- Abby Frucht



"You think your pains and heartbreaks are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who have ever been alive."
- James Baldwin



"The child we were and are learns by exploring and experimenting, insistently snooping into every little corner that is open to us - and into the forbidden corners too! But sooner or later our wings get clipped. The real world created by grown-ups comes to bear down upon growing children, molding them into progressively more predictable members of society. This devolutionary process is reinforced throughout the life cycle, from kindergarten through university, in social and political life, and most especially in the world of work. Our newest and most powerful educational institutions, television and pop music, are even more thorough than school in inculcating mass-produced conformity. People are grown as a kind of food to be gobbled up by the system. Slowly our eyes begin to narrow. Thus the simplicity, intelligence, and power of mind at play become homogenized into complexity, conformity, and weakness.

We need to recognize that every bit of our culture is school; we are presented moment to moment with affirmation of some realities and denials of others. Education, business, media, politics, and above all family, the very institutions that might be the instruments for expanding human expressiveness, collide to induce conformism, to keep things going in a humdrum level. But so do our everyday habits of doing and seeing. Reality as we know it becomes conditioned by tacit assumptions we come to take for granted after innumerable subtle learning experiences in daily life. That is why creative perceptions seem extraordinary or special to us, when in fact creativity is usually a matter of seeing through those tacit assumptions to what is right in front of our noses."
- Stephen Nachmanovitch
Free Play: Improvisation in Life & Art