As usual, the idiots and fools are flirting with the possibility that one day they may actually become serious.
David and Lee are feeling creative; and they undertake a conversation about these two cosmological forces and their action in being, ordinary and otherwise.
Lee:
And here we are, another episode of Idiots and Fools, for those of you who don’t know where you are or what you’re doing, like us. And we have absolutely, as usual, no idea whatsoever, none of what we will be talking about.
David:
Any feelings?
Lee:
It’s funny you should bring that word up. Are you psychic? You must be. It’s very strange that you bring that up because I was riding my bike along the Hudson this morning very early. It was probably about 6.30 a.m. And it struck me that the whole point of creation is to concentrate a force so that feeling can manifest. That’s the point of what’s going on in this cosmos. That’s somehow, I don’t know if I’d say that’s the beginning point or the end point, but it’s everything. Well, the thought was the beginning point.
David:
The action would be the end point. Perhaps. But concentrate. You’ve got my brain sort of locked onto. Concentrate.
Lee:
It’s like orange juice feeling.
David:
How powerful is our ability to create? Our ability? Our ability. I mean, we are made in the likeness of God. We have, you know, from the absolute to the absolute in us. We are creative beings, therefore. And do we really create our world in terms of perception? Certainly. I always rejected perception as reality, but I just suddenly have that was brought into, been brought into question. Supposedly, we are in heaven. But it damn sure looks like hell.
Lee:
Well, it doesn’t look like anything if we’re not here. it has an objective quality to it that we inflect, you know, that is to say that what is is true and it arrives and then we interfere with that and have an opinion of some kind, you know. Yes. So I’m always in danger of dragging biology into it. But the intriguing thing about your question about creation and creativity is that if you take a look at the way that DNA and other living molecules work, they’re incredibly creative. They are absolute improvisers. The idea that DNA has some pre-programmed plan behind what it does is absurd. It’s absolutely not true. Any biologist that’s familiar with it will tell you that. It’s an improviser. It can take one of 30 different molecules that are directly at hand to execute a task. And if one’s not there, it’ll use the other one. And when they found this out, it blew everyone’s minds because it implied a level of creativity that was contrary to the belief that the world is deterministic in the way that our machines are. The machines we build are deterministic. Life and molecular activity in the cosmos are absolutely not deterministic. They’re freestyle.
David:
Quick aside, our educational system supports us being mechanical.
Lee:
Oh, for sure. For sure. It’s designed to, in fact, most of society is designed to press us into a mold, no matter how much it hurts, you know, and if parts of us squeeze out of that mold that are lost, it’s too bad, but we have to do that and grow up and make money and have family, whatever. But we have to be, because we’re part of the cosmos and our bodies are built out of this crystal and molecule DNA, we have to be equally creative, whether, in a certain sense, whether we want to be or not. It’s, literally, it’s in our DNA, you see. So, but that’s quite peculiar that you bring that up, because it’s, we are, whether we want to be or not, we are engaged in an essentially creative act just by getting up in the morning and breathing in and out.
David:
You don’t even have to get up.
Lee:
True. And some days it’s best you had not.
David:
Yeah, you need your personal time. Anyway. But in fact, I don’t, although I think this is all true, I don’t feel I participate. And I’m encouraged by the fact that cellularly it’s taking place in me.
Lee:
Well, I would challenge that because every moment that you have a sensation of yourself, that is participation. You sense the energy in us. That is the creative force that is active in us. And I personally, I mean, I’ve never been a chair or a dog, but I think it’s active in everything. I doubt I’m that different than other creatures. And so when we’re in touch with that, we are in a way, at least at the beginning, you know, right there where that notice struck and I sense myself, we are participants. We know and we feel it. You see, it’s back to that question of healing. We can feel it in our bodies. We have the experience.
David:
But, however, it’s... I suppose what I’m seeking, pardon me, seeking, is the feeling of actually being a creator. And how is that possible?
Lee:
Well, what would that feeling be?
David:
Do we know? Well, when you create something, you create something all the time. You’re always creating things. There is, I have an idea, I perhaps are an inspiration. I begin to work with materials and combining that inspiration with the properties of the material and with some attention, I’m part of a process of shaping a product.
Lee:
And it’s that that’s interesting, the craftsmanship of it, the being engaged in the moment with that action as it takes place is what’s really interesting about it. The minute that’s over, I’m not interested anymore. So the product of that is like back there. Goodbye. You know, I rarely have ever looked back at anything in that sense, you know, but probably a good idea or the best,
David:
but the best, but now that we’re talking about this and, and, and so the word result popped into my head. It can’t be working. Dangerous. Oh yeah. However, here I am, and through sensation, I am aware of a process going on. And I don’t understand that process. I don’t have a sense of that process connected to a greater whole. Although I can have a sense of how it changes my inner attitude and feeling about things taking place.
Lee:
Well, I have an inkling, I think. And, you know, I could be wrong because I so frequently am. But when I was on the bike ride, the way that this particular impression of what the point of life and being is came in was that somehow feeling has a wish in it that is much larger than we are. It’s inside everything. It’s in all of the energy. It’s filled with this light that vibrates. And, you know, it’s in this and you and me. And it somehow has a wish to manifest a compassionate and loving attitude. That’s in the fabric of reality, that reality wants to bring awareness to that point. You know, the Buddhists would call it loving kindness. But my impression of real feeling is that it has a wish to be in the world. And that if it were with us, and it so rarely is because all of us are plagued with demons. But if it were really in the world, the attitude that we took towards everything would be radically different. Every creature would have a different attitude. And can I say for sure that the natural world, you know, the peaceable kingdom or whatever it is, doesn’t have that? I don’t know. The Western world has woven endless myths about that. You know, animals being more peaceful than we are, whatever. Paradise. somewhere out there in the in in the at the root of creation is this wish for a real feeling to manifest that has great care for other creatures that was the way it came across it was I don’t know if I’m saying that’s where I was kind.
David:
I appreciate what you just said and it prompted something and we’re talking about creatures and how whether they have this feeling of wish for compassion and when i was i guess early teens pre-teen there was a maybe it was a late night show that was on and they had footage of these two people who explored africa and they went to a place supposedly where no human being ever went and they found that lions did not consider them food and were not afraid of them they had image so our impact on the world and is because animals are very sensitive they recognize fear they recognize aggression our state our attitudes permeate the area we’re in and have this effect yeah we are creating this world through this fear and greed and all of this so perhaps the spark of creativity is is this feeling and the opportunity to recognize um how we’re shaping the world and to do what in me has that shape that is affecting what I send out to the world, I resonate with.
Lee:
Well, I think that makes a lot of sense. I’ve been scrutinizing my action in the moment in with minutiae lately, and it’s surprising. I mean, there are multiple things going on in any given moment, but there’s always someone in here that wants to be uncaring. And I mean, that word can cover so many different Hasnamousian properties. But there’s always someone that doesn’t give a shit and that is willing to be snotty or critical or upset. And as I walk through each moment, seeing those individuals. And many of them don’t really have that much authority at this point in my life. Maybe it’s age. I don’t know. Maybe it’s all these years in the work. But I get to see them. And it’s interesting to see how filled the gallery is with these little creatures that sabotage the opportunity for real feeling. Any chance they get. They don’t have minds. They don’t seem intelligent to me, but they’re automatic.
David:
They have a survival instinct.
Lee:
Yeah, they do. But it’s quite peculiar because the hobgoblins are in there. There’s a point in this work you actually begin to see them at work, and they’re nasty little things. And it is possible if we have some presence to say no to them, But, you know, the moment that we’re not here, they really are, that’s when they blossom, you know. They’re creatures that live in the night of the mind.
David:
In the darkness, in the dark corners.
Lee:
Yeah, yeah. Well, I mean, I don’t think it’s anywhere near hopeless, but it was striking to me in this question of feeling, which as we can see is deeply tied to this question of creativity. It was striking to me to understand that the whole point of sacred action was to manifest real feeling to help that to take place. Because real feeling doesn’t, in my experience, I’ve never discovered any cruelty in it. It’s not there. And I don’t understand that. I’ve got lots of cruelty in me. I don’t get it. How can there be this? It’s a question for me. How can there be this higher feeling that is somehow pure? It’s within you. Well, I don’t know what I’m not going to locate it. I’m just saying there’s a feeling quality here in this cosmos that we can come into contact with that is the Christians would say it’s without sin. What is that? I’m too small to understand that. when we talk about things we don’t understand, I can’t love like that. I don’t know how. It reminds me of that... Well, go ahead.
David:
Well, you throw around I again. You know, that... We accept something as I. And that something does not know how to... experience and allow that sense of love. And is frightened of it. Because in the face of love, I am demanded in a way to give up. all these things that I think are precious in me all the things that all my cleverness maybe not all but certainly most of the time I’m clever I do it at someone else’s expense
Lee:
yeah I can certainly have that aspect to it well it’s hard to sum up i mean of course we use the word i we don’t know who that is except that there is a conscious being here of some kind receiving impressions um the um the confusion in me arises because i see how inadequate i am and i also see that there is a force that is adequate that it’s loving there’s a force that is that way and i’m not in control of it well yeah and that’s that’s something that uh well i’m not you know i’m not sure that that disturbs me so much. I feel a great sense of anguish that I can’t, I wish I were like that. Why am I, why am I broken? I mean, that’s my question. Why am I broken? I don’t want to be broken in my heart. I don’t want to be that way. I don’t. So I’m left helpless really in the face of this. This is exactly where I keep ending up.
David:
Yeah. So, one has to recognize that, I suppose, and submit. But I can’t get over this gnawing thought that I have to do it and I’m going to submit and open myself to being seen and be found lacking because I don’t have the switch or the the secret all this negativity to something that is loving. And yet, I’m just thinking back to this morning and seeing Gretchen and feeling this, that behind it all was the sense of loving acceptance.
Lee:
Mm-hmm.
Lee:
Underneath it, above it, somewhere, but how does it, how... If I, if I... Difficult to say. If I’m empty and I don’t have a prejudicial attitude in me, there’s more room for that to find me. And, you know, the peculiar contradiction that we live in is that you can’t get rid of ordinary life and what it is in the midst of this search. You can’t discard it. One of the things that I really learned to respect about Dogen is that he continually insisted when people talked about going beyond and not thinking and everything. He said, you can’t do that. You have to be here. we have to be here and that means in a certain sense that we’re asked to inhabit the point of contradiction here that that’s what could help to be in that point rather than saying I don’t want that or that’s what I want in that point there is friction and heat packed full of a kind of energy of attention if if we’re really in that moment it’s it’s very it’s a lively place it’s interesting you know it’s got an attractive force to it if I really begin to sense it magnetic yeah well I use that phrase all the time I you know I’ve got my shtick like everyone else and it’s involves gravity and magnetism and the way I always describe it is that we root ourselves in the gravity of our body in order to come in a relationship with the planet and then we concentrate our being through the magnetic force that forms itself vertically in that column of of attention And then that’s not enough. We wait. At least that’s my experience of it, is that we do those two things as best we can. We allow the energies to find their place, but then we wait, you know. And that waiting is the place where sometimes a real feeling touches. And I don’t know why it works that way. I’ve never seen a rule or a law or an explanation, but the real feeling touches, and it’s in those moments that I actually come into alignment with a force that has to be along the lines. I won’t say it is, but it’s along the lines of what Gurdjieff called understanding something. It’s always a feeling. It’s not a thought, and it’s higher than a sensation. It’s three-centered, was what he would say. And it seems as though I lived my whole life patiently or impatiently, more patiently these days, waiting for those moments. They’re the most interesting thing that happened during a day. They’re real, you know, and everything else seems to be an ersatz situation that i’m going to have to deal with while i wait
David:
are we here to create ourselves or to experience ourselves probably both but it’s only in opposition do we experience it ourselves yeah there has to be a countervailing force. Otherwise there’s no shape of no sense of what this material is. Damn it!
Lee:
Well I was I did this video which is going to publish later next week about the movements and I was talking about the idea that there’s never any power unless there is a resistance so you couldn’t have movements if muscles weren’t and tendons weren’t bound to bone and use them as levers. We’d all just lie there on the floor. So force and power come from a kind of tension. And that’s a necessary thing in the universe. We can’t get rid of it. Relax all you want to. You will be able to get up off your chair if you relax too much or you’ll just die. So the force we need for being arises from opposition, you’re right, and we can see it from a muscular or an energetic point of view because they’re equally valid in the end. So I need the resistance of ordinary life. It’s a good thing. Every time my ordinary life presents me with something that irritates me, it helps me ask a question about what the fuck is wrong with me. Right.
David:
But as you point out earlier if one has to be there to experience it mm-hmm because most of my life I’m lost in my thoughts of, well, we age and sense ourselves there’s a
David:
little more glue here than there used to yeah I just forget what I was thinking about.
Lee:
about mmm well that’s true too I have no idea how long we’ve been going on I’m just gonna take a quick look at that. Oh my goodness. My goodness what? Oh I’m just, well no, here we are. We’ve been we’ve been on the air for a while. It’s time to wrap up? It’s always time to wrap up. Well, I don’t know that there’s a wrap up to be had here when we come up against the question of feeling and creativity. I mean, these are probably, in a certain sense, two of the greatest questions human beings have in front of them. Our entire cultural exchange and the activity that takes place in it has to do with those two things.
David:
And friction. Friction is your friend.
Lee:
Friction is your friend. Hmm. Maybe that’s why I liked science friction as a youth. It was your friend. Friction. Well, everything forms patterns. And the patterns emerge on every level, one way or the other. And on each level, they’re organized in some way. Even light organizes itself into geometric structures called skirmians. I’d never heard of them before. But they exist. What are they? Well, photons form very complex and unusual, constantly changing geometric structures in places where there’s a confluence of photons. And they produced them using very ordinary lab equipment lately. That was a big development a couple of weeks ago. Because nobody knew you could produce skirmians with photons without hundreds of billions of dollars worth of expensive, you know, particle accelerator equipment or whatever. And these guys took a laser and shot of that cardboard in the lab. And it’s kind of like that Hail Mary show, you know. Have you seen that movie? It’s very well constructed. But anyway, the lead character discovers all these things about these exotic particles using duct tape and cardboard. It’s funny. It’s very, very MacGyver. But light has a habit of forming patterns of its own that are very active and mimic crystalline structures and have spirals and radiance and gradients and what appear to be photonic skeletons. So at every level, every part of creation, as we call it, is engaged in an act of patterning. It’s attempting to form. It’s attempting to form something creative. We don’t know why. But whenever I think about that using my intellect and I sense my body, I look around me and I say, I have no idea what’s going on here. But every tree around me is engaged in an action that is so intimately engaged with light. It’s inexplicable and wonderful. And it makes me feel like I’m living in a fairyland of some kind. That’s the feeling I get from it. And this is the kind of feeling I’m interested in is what happens to us when feeling becomes creative and we actually sense wonder instead of fear. You know, what happens? There’s this crack in the universe that opens right there where there’s joy could shine in. It could. It happens. And I kind of like living there when it presents itself.
David:
Yeah, and I think I never want to leave it. Then I’m gone.
Lee:
Well, if we didn’t leave, we wouldn’t have the joy of coming back. Very true.
David:
the ability to have a sense of the life that is around us. It is truly a food. Yeah, yeah, it is for sure. And it’s a call to awakening. And just in the body itself, it’s a gathering. our call together to put together
Lee:
well on that note it is a good place to wrap up so um I’m not going to see you next week no not unless I send you a text message with my picture in it Well, I hope you have a good time up there. Thanks. I’ll see you when I get back. Yeah, yeah for sure. Anyway, thanks for coming.
Speaker 3
Take this down.
Lee:
One of the great advantages of the screens is that they weigh almost nothing.
Speaker 3
They’re bonking. Now the only other thing that needs to be done.
