The Lost Art of Creativity - Manly P. Hall Lecture - Psychology / Philosophy / Metaphysics / Occult

well the first broad in educating Gentile folks today is to get them ready to make a living this covers before almost anything a grandmother was in college today she would probably be either taking the secretarial work bookkeeping you might be doing specialty in librarian work or she might be preparing to be a schoolteacher these are the types of things we are more concerned with now well probably we have to be there's no sense in denying the fact that the economic problem presses in upon gentility just as much as upon any other level of our society but out of it all we have lost something that I think we should reconsider it's no longer possible to build some of these values into our education at a formal period of training but we can build those things which have been discarded or overlooked into our mature life by intent and purpose though the gentility of grandmother could be peril ittle bit by the gentle with your grandfather where it was quite obvious that a man belonging to that period expected to live in a home under such conditions must also have a certain amount of gentility of his own so while he was in business business rested rather lightly on his shoulders he had the dignity for business if not the aptitude it is fairly well and everyone was reasonably happy about the whole thing he was able to accomplish that which was considered essential in his time namely that all his children were unable to have two years of musical education in Europe this constituted a well-balanced life this is the way people thought things through for his own creativity grandfather went in religion very heavily and became an outstanding authority in his day on st. Paul now at the time when he was running a fairly successful business he was also devoting a great deal of time to the study of Greek and Latin and the efforts to interpret early biblical history which was very close to his interest this type of family is becoming more and more rare and we may say that the life with father despair as they called it and also its drawbacks it certainly did but we did not have nearly the amount of stress and strain in our relationships at that time that we have now and while people could have difficult temperaments and there were certainly many tyrannical families at the same time most people had some creative outlet and that is the point we are particularly interested in trying to stress but in our gradual acceptance of what we might term pressure civilization we have come gradually to neglect those things which could not immediately be fitted into the survival pattern life has become very largely a matter of devoting our energies to those things which we regard as necessary to success and our definition of success is practically economic advancement thus we become a very lovely people and the more successful we become the more lonely we have to be they're apt to be instead of success giving us an opportunity to do the things that in our hearts we want to do success finds us but nothing in our arts that we want to do this takes a great deal of the edge off of success I talk to rather successful man not farmer gold as we call it today and he said I have everything that I want but I there's nothing that I really weren't there is nothing important standing out to justify the tremendous struggle that we have made to accumulate certain things in this world instead of building toward a purpose we make the actual accumulation the purpose itself instead of our various Labor's being means to some end that we desire the very processes become ends in themselves and as a result we find that more successful we become the less interesting we really are now I don't know that too many others are desperately concerned over trying to moderate success I don't think that the average person is so successful that this is bothering him but it is true but all the way along even in the most moderate situations there seems to be a lack of overtones and life is largely composed of overtones as these fade out we begin to get more and more of the starkness with which we face daily living today everything is so realistic everything is so practical and inevitable that the individual not only has very little interest in but almost nothing to think about that is anything worthwhile in the old days we got a great deal of creativeness out of labour most men particularly found their self-expression in their work and this self-expression was perhaps humble but very dramatic in itself in the old days with a man without got land began to cultivate his property he had a very big job on his hands he was building a way of life in the wilderness he had to make really everything that he needed himself maybe once the price Thierry's turned into one of these great sales companies that sent their catalogs out and the ordered what he needed for the year but for the most part II had to devise ways he had to find ways to bring water to his lab he had to find ways to get rid of the rocks and boulders that interfered with the harvest you have to find ways to build his own house these were things that people did and as a result of that they had a certain ingenuity continually operating the same was true in the older days of our small cottage industry in the small town the shoemaker was a man of ingenuity he had all kinds of problems you had not only to repair shoes but to make them you have the right like the guild masters of Nuremberg to take a great pride in the things that he did the same was true in the building crafts and trains these things represented continually individual problems today these problems are largely forgotten and more and more the whole problem of maintenance is replacement don't fix anything just throw it out and get another one there's no longer any ingenuity will effort to economize no effort to preserve the products the result on us all of the arts and trades have lost that creative value to the individual in all the challenging a they are though he is no longer challenged by the time clock it becomes part of some large industry someone else that always thinking for it and the individuality is that to be penalized even matters of religion we find this continual pressure of conformity it's not very interesting even anymore to be a really a heterodox thinker the individual simply finds little opportunity for the development of his own creativity even in religion reading has largely disappeared from our people except for a small group of really serious thinkers for the rest reading has become too difficult it is to arduous especially when you've never been taught how to spell as a result of that you turn to picture publications because everybody can spell a picture now in the old days the picture way of reading was set forth in beautiful form in mcguffey's reader and then MacGuffins reader you learn that when you were about 6 or 7 years old it was better to use pictures for ideas and it was words and gradually learned the words that were associated with the picture today for some reason that which was fashionable for the kindergarten and the first two grades of grammar school now becomes from the two a method of securing an education in other words we look at world events we don't read about them we looked at what is happening and the most successful publications we have today have a minimum of text or maximum of pictures we are finding this more and more in technical books my own field of interest for example we hear the new publication coming out on some advanced theme we'll take for example symbolism which to me is a very interesting subject so we look the book over and what do we find we have 212 pages of pictures and eight pages of text and anything that you want isn't in the text and the more you read it you more the more you realize that you'll have eight pages of text because the author didn't know what he was talking about and was able to generalize to the extremity of his knowledge in eight pages this situation again denies a certain activity we do know so we do not have the experience of the kind of thoughtfulness that we once found so intriguing Meadows the long winter evening with an old-fashioned kerosene lamp but the great classics of the world were read by thoughtful people this is too much work now we where is it it in the Digest version the more digested the better if it is entirely digested and nothing is left then this we will pay for because we simply do not want the kind of word that is implied in the almost every feel of our artistic expression we've become listeners we no longer really make any desperate effort to create something when our friends who are interested in music come in for the evening we turn on the hi-fi or produce some equipment across several thousand dollars and everyone has an enchanting evening now this has its advantages certainly for the first time perhaps great was it comes into the home of the average person but with all of this we have developed nothing but ears we have developed no actual sense of participation we do not create we simply is absorb that which is created by others this lack of the personal involvement in creativity takes everything out of fact and interfering in a philosophy and religion both have emphasized from the beginning of the only way in which man can grow is by experience well of course listening is an experience there is no question about that but listening is a different kind of experience from participating listening is not the full experience or a full joy or the full satisfaction that comes to the individual who releases something from inside himself the whole theory of philosophy is based upon release it is based upon the individual moving from his own internal out into a world of personal self-expression this road that leads from the internal out is a broad highway it is a road along which many basic ideas have to travel it is the road in which along which consciousness moves into manifestation it is the road in which integral is made possible a road by which all theory is tested by application and that which is not able to sustain itself in application is allowed to rest for the moment and not dominate our way of life around us we observe a world of untested theories a world in which even those theories that are tested are not fought through the power to think things through to they're reasonable limbs this power has been neglected it's the turn of the century in the last 50 years scientifically trained persons who developed high exactitude method and also has the power to think things through they would undoubtedly have been more cautious in launching upon the world forms of knowledge which could be so easily perverted and could so easily lead to the general destruction of human security but with their minds totally upon one idea with no perspective with no sense of the unfolding pattern of things these individuals went along like moles underground working in darkness and totally unaware that what we do must have consequences and that we must ultimately live with these consequences and any way of life which does not recognize this is immature and any system of Education which does not teach it is inadequate yet we have brought on our way and from the examples of the leaders of our way of life the average person has been over influenced until the day we simply have lost the knack of thinking things through to their consequences and planning our own living accordingly you've lost this creative skill though it is true that perhaps in many areas of activity creativity does not seem to be terribly important it wouldn't seem to be very essential to the individual but finding a piece of equipment broken down and perhaps being unable to get replacement he begins to think in terms of repairing this thing itself this will require some thoughtfulness it will require some skill also perhaps he may have to do what his ancestor did a file and cuddle entirely new part out of a piece of base metal but this type of ingenuity is constantly calling upon resource it is causing the individual to move something out from within himself it causes him to be a little better disciplined if he doesn't make this replacement properly it move this they have hazard inadequate type of work which we have developed in recent years is simply part of this pattern of the person not moving adequately from his own resources there's no doubt in the world that we are already source for people but we are neglecting this to a very sad degree as we lose the idea the basic concept of moving from within ourselves our spiritual and philosophical values are also slighted today the world is filled with groups of people following somebody these groups of people do not really know where they're going most of them they do not know the real value of the thing they are following but it is easy to follow and accept than it is to think and as a result many very unfortunate situations arise in which persons become involved in ideas which are not practical which are not useful and have no virtue perhaps except a little immediate glamour but not thinking not being able to experience through things we are gullible the more gullible we are the more we will suffer the more we will hurt ourselves and perhaps injure others in the same procedure so we like to feel very definitely the creativity is important the creativity gives us the habit of solving problems the creativity gives us the habit of self-expression we can say that perhaps self-expression as possible without creativity it is but then there is always the danger that such types of self-expression will lead to be struck tivity instead of creativity the individual has no pattern behind his action has really no way of contributing its positive value to any so it's not just enough to do something this something must have meaning it must be under some censorship and some discrimination and day by day these powers we can interfere until we become very largely victims of the pressures of conformity and thoughtlessness so in our field of interest certainly the reward goes to the person who is able to do something and do it well to do something with a philosophy of life means to discriminate we are all surrounded by ideas some of them good some of them bad they're ideas that work for other people but not for us and somewhere along the line we have to get over this idea that everyone is so much alike that patterns can be imposed upon individuals and that almost anyone can successfully follow the same pattern in the area of medicine we know this is not true we know that unless the individual is understood a lot various tests are made it is not safe to Medicaid he may not react as his neighbor does of this idea of exchanging recipes over the back fence may or may not produce anything very constructive but we know that the human being is an individual under the degree that we impose upon this individual complete conformity we destroy in himself expression and we gradually destroy in him the incentive to be a person most of our neurotics of people have lost this incentive or have had it and creativity is the greatest solution to the negative attitudes of people creativity is the one answer to self boredom it is a very powerful answer to self-pity it is a wonderful panacea for worry and worry and boredom and self-pity are the common ailments of our time we may add to this group another fear fear is of course something always difficult to work with but fear grows and enlarges where we have no adequate internal mental emotional life busy people have very little time to be afraid but you cannot be so busy doing unimportant things that you can overcome the neurotic tendencies merely by activity unless this activity is meaningful meaningful activity must be that which is supported for the psychic content in ourselves we term enjoyment the problem or the process of appreciating and gaining pleasure from what we do according to the level of our own insight this pleasure standard changes we have not necessarily pleasure seekers in the same way that our stiffest was we are not looking for pleasure merely as gratification of sensory perception or sensory appetites but pleasure must come from some internal motion or quality by which we gain satisfaction for what we do and this kind of pleasure encourages us to greater and greater personal activity we look around among people particularly those who seem to have more than their share of problems and we find that for the most part they are persons whose personal creativity is inadequate they may be busy people and maybe well-intentioned people but they have never made a conscious link with their own subjective life as a result when they become quiet when they try to relax there is no constructive mental activity to take over and to make sure that these people enjoy self-expression you in person to these problems opportunities to X themselves and they are largely bewildered today the individual on his own is bewildered he will immediately take refuge in some collective he is afraid to attempt the choir secure effort at self-expression or he becomes belligerent affirming that to express himself means meaning to differ with things as they are so we have a vast body of complainers its prayers perfectly right for an individual to recognize the weaknesses of a society around it I can understand why is not a really happy at some of the candidates for public office it's quite understandable that he is not satisfied with the policies policies of his employers it's also quite true that he may be dissatisfied within education and religion of his time that there are real reasons for dissatisfaction we know but dissatisfaction per se is no solution to a problem there are reasons why we should be too satisfied but there are even greater and more pressing reasons why we should use arms observation to lead to some constructive action of our own it's quite true that our dissatisfaction unless it becomes a mass movement may have very little political significance but it is also true that dissatisfaction must lead us to a constructive effort to correct in our own lives that with which we are dissatisfied there's simply no use of complaining complaining as such is now regarded more or less as a status symbol if we are dissatisfied we are intellectuals because it is essential that all intellectual people be thinkers and the first and only formula for thinking that we know at the moment is gentle but I disagree this is a sign that we really have done some heavy work actually it doesn't mean anything dissatisfaction however brings a certain social psychic contact we immediately move into a group with similar dissatisfaction that incorporate then we have an opportunity to spend a certain number of hours daily or weekly or monthly from that time on dissatisfied with other people we can go on and on and on with this procedure but we haven't accomplished anything the moment the individual observes that something is wrong the question is to what degree is he cooperating with this thing that is wrong to what degree is he under the same explosives the work degrees are using complain as an evasion in in the place of action in our matters of complaining presuming that we have legitimate complete presuming for example that we disagree with a certain legislation we assume at the moment that our big answer is to vote against it but what have we in the form of self creative solution to this problem it may be that we will never have an opportunity to apply any solution that we may have but an individual complaining should always have a constructive answer in his own consciousness for that against which he complains a complaint should be a stimulation to intellectual effort and not merely a continual habitual dissatisfaction if an individual says I think this is wrong we have a right to ask him then what do you think is right and we should get a straight answer and that's where we never get it very often we will get an answer probably which arises in a moment of desperation that was never thought of until we ask the question but then in order to defend self against the humiliating fact of being required to say I don't know you begin to come up with something and very often the solution we have is worse than the problem we attack actually our own solution if applied to the problem would be meaningless consequently we haven't thought it through and this is one of the great matters of of existence why do we live here why have we been taken out of some at least theologically define paradise achill abode which we were cast out of because of an unhappy addiction raffles in the midst of this situation where are we here are we really here to be the satisfied are we here to be complacent are we here to ignore the whole problem and make a few dollars if there is any reason to be here it would seem to me that it is we are here to learn something we do not learn by accepting or rejecting we do not learn by ignoring we do not learn by collapsing in a sense of total helplessness if there's something here that we need to know the only way to find out is to use the power that we have to reason through a situation and find the answer occasionally we do this but not as often as we should and we divide the problem of answer into two very broad areas crude sections by polling of the American people and reports based upon letters which are received by the White House and other centers of government will indicate the from the people have come and are still flowing many important ideas it may not be entirely fair to say that all of these ideas are ignored it is also perhaps not quite fair say that all of these ideas coming from persons unacquainted usually with the specifics of the problem can be immediately applied but there has been an observable fact namely the thousands of people have had good ideas about how things could be improved they are however a very small minority of the population but this fact does stand out but where the person is perhaps only indirectly involved where the consequences of a policy will not be felt on his own skin the person does have better ideas is less personal he has no immediate benefit to himself to consider he is not going to be instantly involved in an argument over his idea so he writes it in or Telegraph's it in and because it comes from a certain in personality within himself it is often very constructive but when he has an idea about himself about his own family about the environment in which you live about the management of personal affairs it is much harder for him to have a constructive idea this is because you must fight through this tremendous complex of his own personal opinions an attitude against his ideas will be arraigned all of his prejudices all of his opinions and conceit his traditional pressure and a large amount of mental and emotional fatigue all this centers on his effort to solve his own problem so we get actual advice to strangers and keep none of it ourselves we know that everyone else should live together and brotherly love but we can't get along with anybody we know that religion is a wonderful thing for other people and that if they would live it better we would be happier what we are going to do about it is still very dim consequently we must work more carefully and more thoughtfully in the effort to get creativity out of our own subconscious and into our own personal conscious major we have to start some ways it is not reasonable to hope that we can probe inside of ourselves and bring out immediately a Plato and Aristotle we have to work with this internal allotment bringing it into manifestation and exercising it gradually until it is strong enough to carry major decisions but we cannot get anywhere by simply ignoring it we can accomplish nothing by going along refusing and rejecting every impulse which might lead us to the investigation of our own inner life the same the inner life of man is being forced upon us by outward circumstances the only area in which man can hope for integration is in himself the only place where is ever going to find constructive answers which can sustain in an type of trouble will be it alone nature institutions and organizations can contribute something but the most the fish can contribute is a greater incentive to continue this personal investigation of self or the purpose of discovery just how much strength there is in them we know the pretty weakness on the outside and the remedy that we recommend for this is to test the strength only inside most persons who have made of a sincere and honest test of this trait have been pleasantly surprised they have discovered that the human being does possess within himself and almost inexhaustible reservoir potential power the individual is capable of solving his own problem is able to solve it in the only way that justice can be found in nature is a solution to all human problems rested with collectors or rested with isolated individuals in places of authority that could be no honesty in the universe there could be no justice if an individual's personal destiny is not in some way immediately under his own control if he is the victim of others if he is the victim of a generation in which he lives if he is the victim of the collective fear of his time then there can be no essential merit system in space it would appear that we are in this world as many of the great philosophers have pointed out to gradually discover that the world around us is merely an agent to stimulate enough the consideration of the world within us but the world around us only controls us to the degree that we do not control ourselves if we wish to drift the world is large area of potential drifting it will ease the trust our course is entirely to the currents of existence we will be batted around like a ship without a rudder if we wish to insist and affirm that the tides will in their own good side to take us where we are supposed to go then in many instances we discover that our proper density is on the rocks this we cannot permit to dominate our thinking actually we are kind of living is divided into two basic brackets the individual who is a victim of life and the individual who is a victor over life that can only be to such pattern either the person is continually troubled by the circumstances around him or he is constantly sustained by the resources within him I think everyone would prefer to be sustained but the trouble lies that a Western Way of life we have done nothing to prepare the background for the cultivation of the self-sustaining man nearly always there is a certain original relationship between a velocity of life of an individual no one can achieve tranquility of spirit for us but there are ways in which the questing can be made easier there is no way in which an individual can be ensured that you will grow to virtuous maturity but there are probabilities that he has a better chance of becoming a virtuous adult if he has had certain amount of conditioning in childhood his probabilities of being an honorable citizen higher increased he comes out of an honourable home where he had proper affection consideration and thoughts also discipline is therefore the individual of today the mature person is seeking for a certain background for orientation he is not so different from the person was able to look back upon a childhood in which certain principles were clearly fixed today man looks back upon the childhood of Western civilization and he does not find its principles clear or well faced he looks at the world around him to determine what people believe is right he finds very little that is clearly directed he looks for resources within himself which have been trained by his opportunity and which would naturally be available and he finds these resources inadequate he has not seen cooperation of his culture in anything that he needs to accomplish instead of being able to move within a pattern of acceptances it apparently requires the rule totally old now nature undoubtedly have set this pattern per tree actually the person who must move with himself until it depend upon called cooperative circumstances stands in the position of making the greatest personal achievement so they agree that he is forced to make a greater effort to the same degree he achieved a greater end but this is not always easy or optimistic so not having very much cultural stimulation he is the Western man is in a bit of a dilemma 300 years 400 years ago in China if you wanted to be a gentleman you became a point in order to be considered a great citizen became a philosopher and if you wish to be the highest type of desirable person you became a mystic these were the great armoured levels today in our Western Way of life if you want to be acceptable on the best intellectual levels you would believe that nothing so of course there should apparently the eat the best acceptability but it doesn't even do that even though the proper basis of our way of life we are not accepted for our unbelief any more than we would be for our believing reason why is there's no standard there is nothing that is regarded as a burble the only Spanish is a standard of success on a material level and this standard is too brittle too immature to have any very constructive suggestions to make relating to the personal culture of the individual therefore we do not have the cultural pattern which might cause our young people the same but I would like to be a really fine person and that means that I have to be a thoughtful constructive idealistic citizen this is not the incentive pattern under which we live liking this incentive pattern therefore we are not only left without the incentive but we also left without a pattern we are left with the average person unable to determine for himself what he should do he cannot find enough evidence in contemporary situations as to how he can live a constructive successful life we still do have available to us the great religious and the systems of the past for the great idealistic philosophical system but the average person today is not equipped to make the transposition of time that is necessary we are unable to take a to a religion like Christianity and simply apply it wholeheartedly to the 20th century we are unable to break through vivi evil traditions and we try to impose it upon the modern world in attempting to correct this we ultimately become so confused that we are unable to use the religious factor constructively little by little we see that several hundred years of declining ideology several hundred years of drifting away from ethical and cultural foundations as have resulted in a sort of derelict space we have no clear insight as to how the star a constructive pattern of self-expression we attempt we can't borrow from available resources nor can we simply go to school somewhere and learning it's a problem where each person has to think it through for himself this is again more difficult than in ancient times because remember 2,000 years ago 5% of the population alone was capable of involvement in the Mutulu problems of life as we know them today while the rest life had to remain an exceedingly simple problem some of this in prison it was extremely good some of it however was up was inadequate but with a small different people also mostly trained in Himmel a homogeneous culture the loss of the religion a far greater opportunity of exercising influence than they have today today the average person is too well-educated has too much contact with diversified cultural factors to be able to quickly differentiate that between media treaties this becomes a further matter of confusion also the problems which we face are more complicated than those which were faced thousand or 2,000 years ago our own value sensors changed in this period of time which require a different kind of solution from our ancestors but we have not clarified what kind of solution we mean so assuming that we have reached the age in which solution becomes necessary and we cannot immediately turn to any available source for this solution we have to begin to work through various plans and devices of our own in an effort to discover that which will most rapidly advance our maturity the most rapidly assists us to overcome the negative factors of our own temperaments and bring our own personality armor even keel unless we do this it was go for help to various psychological groups some of which unfortunately can do very little in the long range planning for the individual and they be able to get him over an immediate crisis but you will fall into another almost immediately because he has no remedy against crisis in himself and it is this basic remedy that we most deeply require only this emergency we are beginning to look everywhere we are looking in many places where fifty years ago we would not have turn to plan and we are removed that also of that for Spangler of Toynbee two of our great historical philosophers and come to the conclusion that we are moving do a serious philosophic era and here in which this entity is bringing or forcing a philosophy upon us and while neither of these men wished to come right out and say what this philosophy would be because for both of them the historical factor was difficult you can't take a philosophy of law of gold and simply drop it on ourselves here we have to take philosophic principles and reapply them but preserve the values and both of these men were of the opinion that ultimately Western man with drift more and more was strongly Asiatic philosophical point of view the only reason for this probably is that Asia has remained as the only area in which philosophic principles have continued to be alive and where the religious principles which most involve man are not our case our religion must be approached historically in many of the Asiatic countries what has what occurred 2,000 years ago in the West is occurring today therefore there is a contemporary possibility of analysis and consideration now it is not by any means obvious that these two nations have solved their problem or that completely have brought their own world into panic but we are dealing no not with collective not with the imposing of one political theory upon another we're not dealing with the price of rice or the scarcity of water we're dealing essentially with the problem of the individual has to get up tomorrow morning and face life now he's got to face life with the best possible equipment and we know that the only type of equipment today that will happen is that by which it is equipped to examine himself to go England on nature and find out why is what yours we say go in and look we come sharply against the boundary of Western culture Western culture has been a gay extraversion for a long time it has been very day but nobody seems to be very happy about it Western culture has been to move out into the world around us and try to shape it to our heart's desire Wesley country has become very little in the actual examination in the inner life of the human being knows that what has been done has been comparatively materialistic ever to crash through from the outside in terms of psychology and psychiatry but actually we have less than 50 years probably in the west of any systematic effort to really do anything with man's inner life and what we have accomplished is not adequate on the other hand we have a philosophy on the other side of the world it is the inner life has been so important that many other things have been miserably neglected so we come into the presence of extremes but at the moment we need something and we need something very definitely we do not need the mistakes of other people but we do need whatever they have accomplished that might be a guide to our own action we do need something at the moment of balance and extensive and over intensive materialism a materialism does not necessarily mean just the scientific or industrial or economic world materialism has cooked also very heavily into Western religion and has heavily indoctrinated Western philosophy consequently we are in trouble and in our search for summon so we have to look to the only place where we think we can find some rudiments to build up with we do not intend necessarily to follow the way of other people because actually we are a Western culture but what we need is some way in which we can get home oh that might be turned our natural culture pattern bring it out and use it and the only way we know is by calling upon people who have brought internals out and done something about it and that government is more or less called the asiatic point of view because here at least we have somebody inside and for a long time we have not been adequately trying the adaptation cannot be entirely all complete and I don't think that any need to consider the entire transfers and religious I don't think we should regard the development of man as a theological problem as been one of our mistakes we have fought that the individual who was good had certain religious penitence from being good I think it more important than that the individual is good in the sense of proper virtuous understanding is simply right and because he is right he is cooperating with the universe with life is nature in his fellow man but these things are not great religious virtues they are nothing more or less than human decency but they haven't gotten around or such a factual look at it do it necessary for us to think that we are going to follow some foreign cream what we're looking for is the instrumentation of personal culture we are looking for the implementing of our own conviction of need so that we're able to do something about it so if expression certainly is indicated and self expression has helped many people all over the world and self-expression and into the life of the individual without causing any panic without causing him to lose face with his neighbor or without requiring some stupendous expenditure which he cannot afford so if it's pressure it is perfectly possible the individual in any bracket of income it is a problem are moving the internal part of life and letting it move moving out it into action so that the person is moved for the principles within himself a lot of people try this however that is another dilemma they are unable to estimate what is moving or why they are being pressured in a certain way it is not enough to say that if we simply follow internal inclination as we know it that we're going to get anywhere if there are too many people that have a probable internal inclination to be unpleasant also most people have a very overwhelming information to be selfish this war is not the answer that we merely do what we feel like doing we'll never get anywhere that way you have to go behind this so we do learn immediately from Eastern philosophy that there are two sources our inner pressure the most common available source is just playing selfishness the deeper and more important source is the universal well complex within ourselves in which there is of the source and root of ourselves an archetypal pattern through the acceptance and application of which we are true to the plan for ourselves we have to try to figure out how to get at the real one how the substitute universal purpose for self purpose how we can achieve obedience to universe rather than obedience to our own selfishness to accomplish this there have to be a certain amount of effort but if there is no effort naturally our reward is less that which is most difficult or those rare is most highly valued and what we are searching for is the most valuable thing in the world peace of spirit therefore we cannot buy it cheaply and it will not be discounted after the first of the year we have to work with it the thoughtful person can work with it by using a simple hold of personal energy we can use the mind as it was intended to be you may weigh as a center of conduct the purpose of the mind is not to affect a part in the conspiracy of selfishness the purpose of mind is to reveal to us the constructive results of constructive action and the destructor is also destructive action the mind makes available to us the facts about the consequences of what we do with them they are really inclined to be in search of self creativity we must begin the news the mind the revealed was that involved with ourselves after now we've always used to find out what was right about ourselves and what was wrong about everyone else also emerges in the mind as an escape mechanism we try to talk ourselves in on other things we use the mind to develop explanations that explain nothing it also uses your mind for a various self justifications for things that cannot factually be just so the mind is available to us as a simple instrument by which we can think through our own conduct you can very quietly decide whether what we are doing is right or wrong this comes first because we have to clear it away the rule that leads in to these sanctuary and our own parks has been so neglected that it is practically impossible you can bring people in this road you can't travel it yourself because it has been so long neglected that it is worse than any provincial road in some Aboriginal community in fact it's one of those problems like to find an Africa sometimes where it is much easier to travel if you stay off the road this is the problem we have the road is in very bad shape to get this road back into conditions we have to begin to repair it and one of the ways that we must use to repair it is to make sure that we know when and how to demand that require and what degree we are able to get rid of the false situations which are blind alleys or roads that lead nowhere many people are sincerely earnestly and honorably follow the road that led nowhere simply because they had no discrimination they did not use the mind to help them we have allowed the mind an inverse for thousands of years but it is here because it could help us and one of the ways in which it can help us is to censor our attitude and conduct so we begin with the only way that we know how to begin we all have moral sense we all have certain inner conviction we have all to some degree religious background we know about the Sermon on the Mount and we know of the revelation of the ten commandments we know the essential codes of right that have been exercised and promoted by man from the beginning of Milton time we also recognize the fact that those who have kept these rules have become the most gracious constructive and valuable citizens consequently we're not completely without some help the problem is to bridge between this help and our own nature so we start out in the morning quite convinced that we are self motivating creatures but in the majority of cases the motivation arises in the liver or in the supernal cortex that doesn't seem to be very much true motivation so today we are hardly able to crawl along under this motivation we are tired before we start and exhausted before we finish but we do start out and we almost immediately begin to sense that our conduct is inconsistent with value it is not getting us there we know that when we become a little impatient early in the morning it isn't good but we can't help it as we go a little further through the day the impatience increases if somebody does something that says something that isn't Pleasant we're either angry or offended if we are angry we say something too unpleasant ourselves and consider that that is a solution we are trying to fight one point in with another or if we hurt we moved and brood over it and finally collapse the state of self-pity we do this then we go out and we start to do some things we regard as important our mind is graded on the things we're doing you take ten steps where one would be sufficient we haven't organized maybe each new issue of the day with a large measure of aggressiveness or belligerence nothing is moving this move nothing is done simply in a natural way because it is something to be done everything is heavy with overtones and undertones of a negative nature we will go on more than an hour in the morning before the mind will report this to us that begins to present a problem the only answer seems to be to turn to the mind as we spoke to a small child and say fish we don't want to do the news so we turn on the television to get worse news we do not want to hear the mind tell us that we're stupid after it has told us a few million times we think it's a nagger and finally the mind in general despair gives up it also becomes educated badly by our own attitudes and become so toxic with our own self pity itself is losing it can no longer fun but most thoughtful people still have some function there so when these reports come in what is the other thing to do the other thing to do is to say that here is where education begins education is not a matter of schooling it's a matter of listening it's a matter of listening to the need of self so after we have had one of these tempest in a teapot which makes up the life of most people we can pause and say just what is all this about why is this so necessary why is it that when we feel like doing a certain thing or faking a certain thought there is absolutely nothing you can do about it except to what we feel like do it what would we do if we try to bring up children the way we bring up our own thoughts and feelings we may have a group of dreamers therefore we have a group of delinquent thoughts and feelings but what we don't realize is that there is never one moment in life where these thoughts and feelings matter is possible as they babies are actually tells motivated they have no life but the light we give them they have no power except the power that we had to do that if we get a mind or emotional nature that starts and rants and raves until it finally takes over our lives we are suffering from an internal case of dictatorship and some emotion or some attitude has become our private Castro and has gradually put us into a hopeless situation of Novation every time we get mad and tear something or throw something we are just suffering from a problem of an in turtle mr. Khrushchev the moment he doesn't get what he wants he throws things we do the same thing perhaps not quite so aggressively but we are under the dictatorship of notions and opinions and have no right through anything as long as those are left uncontrolled and undirected we are under a tyranny and the interior yourself creative consciousness cannot operate but we are never in this condition because we have to be the only answer is we're in it because we want to be we're in it because there's a certain emotional satisfaction in doing what we feel like doing even though it may ultimately lead us to the electric chair or the gallows if we have this feeling we have to do it now here's where our oriental philosophy comes into this a little bit oriental philosophy says that any moment in the middle of any time from any temperature or at that time when we are most sorry for ourselves or when we are most suspicious and critical of other people we can stop instantly forwarded question is do we want we can stop it for several ways we can stop it by fighting it we can stop it by using a tremendous exertion of the will any more than we can actually control any person by force we had only at best the kind of I service the parent that make another person good by force and we cannot make ourselves goodbye for therefore the problem is that wherever a situation is out of hand we are energizing or wrong value just take the energy away from it instead of kicking the machine turn off the plug at the wall that's the end of that program I've heard people sit in front of television and complain for our shouting growling and howling because the program was terrible but not one of them thought to get up and turn it off because we know the problem is a supper with a certain satisfaction in suffering fastly and continuously when we feel that we have a cause of complaint the more complaining we could do the better we feel about and we have wasted the life that we should be using to grow it so we're in renowned inner life problems arise there is no easy door and no real solution in trying to get the verb the answer lies in turning off the energy because all of these things exist only because our own vitality sustains the moment we refuse to sustain them they evaporate they cannot survive without the energy energy that we give them by mental and emotional acceptance now how do we turn off energy actually it is a simple direct motion command today is a very experienced and simple direct anything everything must be complicated one of the simplest ways to prevent a situation from continuing to go out of hand is simply to place in this spot where it was something else if instead of continuing to energize something we don't meaning we turned and start to do something we do believe in we immediately reduce the energy allotment to the negative things the moment we do something that is constructive we use the energy which we are now allowing to tyrannize ourselves so self purpose of a constructive nature does take this energy and one way in which self purpose becomes available to us is through creativity self purpose means that the contented individual is using his energy for some constructive purpose now this constructive purpose may not be best or particularly tangible to other people the old farmer sitting with his chair backed up against the porch quietly whittling a snake was doing something that he wanted to do that wasn't very important but it was much more important than criticism much more important than self-pity perhaps he was making a new handle for some implement on the farm maybe that they had to make today we by the hand will save the time and worry with it so all we do is buy ourselves more time for the creation of negative attitudes that we don't work but wherever it may be if they comes along there is the possibility of the substitution quiet substitution of a constructive activity we have to be aware of it however we have to be sufficiently desirous in order that we make this substitution we also have to be observing as we would be with a child we have to know that when the time is right to make suggestions to self and we have to make the suggestion for area and follow it up it cannot be a generality that sometime will do better it has to be an immediate concrete thing at the time of the meeting arises in a very short time this Auto corrective ISM which we set up as a conscious process rather than as a subconscious one also gains habitual Authority we can have good habits such as we can have bad words and if we will discipline ourselves for six months against our own negations we will at the end of that time have an automatic self-discipline which will carry us through most of the minor emergencies it will only cause us to be consciously watchful in some major situation we can also to discover and observe the causes of these things you can gradually try to correct causes if certain situations that are unpleasant to us are constantly revived by a certain condition we can we're going to work also on the condition itself trying to put it in order so that it will no longer cause trouble but merely to correct condition as far as I've been able to observe as never corrected the tendency to negative habits the moment one cause is removed the mind turns and grasps on something else to makes a new cause so it cannot be merely the removal of the problem it is not only is it bad but it is also the redirecting of our own energy we don't fight with it if we don't say this thought I shouldn't have I'm just not going to allow myself this so we get all over this type of defense mechanism and simply turn to something constructive and interesting and take over this negative thought simply dies avoiding there's nothing to sustain the other person needs therefore something of a constructive nature as something active our rich he can turn his attention at these critical moments and therefore than wear yourself creativity again comes in it has to be something that calls up an energy our whirring is causing us to call up an energy it is causing negative energy we must therefore have a positive call upon addition a a positive plan or purpose which we can call upon almost immediately when a negative situation arises we get a little tired a little word a little nervous we go over to our sit down quietly at the piano and play for 15 minutes the chances are a mood will change we're not saying we won't worry we're simply saying we will play the piano but we are using energy and the energy that we're using for that purpose is no longer available to nerve some grievance we can be busy and miserable but we can have creative of instinct without this moving in upon our common patterns and causing something valuable to happen it is to evade a possible of course of the complete monotony by means of which we do not gain this mental relief we can do certain things with our hands and still worry but we cannot have great creative ideas and still worry but there are things that every person can attempt to do and the orient that showed us what some of these things are one way of course if it is possible is the garden where we can feel a little world a world of beauty that challenges us and which causes us perhaps to read about it study it maybe take lessons and finally to apply what we have learned to the ordering of our own life if our situations do not permit Gardens there are a world in a flat fish on the table this is your fun side tree theory of the ancient the sand of the rock dock the garment is only 12 inches square and which is yet a continual challenge to our own instinct to the beautiful it's not easy to work with living vanes and at the same time in people it is not easy to have beauty power your life and then think on beautifully you can do it by theory but if your hands are working with beauty if you are continually trying to do things creatively if you are trying to take a pattern and make it better it calls upon energy and this energy gives you a forward-looking emotional experience now there must be in every person's life some creative self-expression if there is nothing that we can do then it is certainly indicated that even at the expense of some time we should study something not that leads only to intellectual satisfaction but leads to action there must be something that gets the hands occupied in creating a thing which paws upon our own inner resource you can study books for a lifetime for example in trying to prepare a miniature garden I'm now thinking one of the little table garden you can read all the books and take all the courses and then you bring in the hands on the little twigs of the stones with some sand or rock or two and perhaps a little porcelain figure and the blossoms and you will never find in any book just what you have to do with these things you have brought in lay down the table on side of it you can copy as best you can but your little twigs are not the same table you have to do something yourself you have to satisfy your own taste you put these things together you think they're marvelous you take this a little separate look about five feet and you say how could I have ever done anything as badly as that and you're right back and try and do it again you may wear out two or three bones and half the rocks before you get anything that you can honestly say satisfies your own soul but when you do it happens you have had a small mystical experience the beauty in you the truth in you has had a chance to come out and do something and in the process of this alchemy all of the particular problems of the moment have disappeared for a little while at least and if we took all the time with negatively ways in worry fear doubt self-pity and things of that nature and put this time into a lump sum where it would provide us with the opportunity timewise of becoming masters of almost anything but you are going to make something happen you are trying to create you may be trying to create a beautiful point you may be trying to create a marvelous picture you may be trying to create a design for a room you're trying to create a new pattern wherever you are creating you are releasing and the thing you have created becomes the judge of your own release you look at it and it isn't what you thought it was going to be it is not nearly as beautiful as your idea so you keep on working with it you keep on releasing beauty and so finally you produce something which may not be perfect but you will say that I can endure this indicates I've accomplished something so life becomes a release of creativity you will find the course that once the boys open along this gateway or roadway of creativity comes a quite a troupe office of different values this open door the creativity also becomes more and more a way to be inner life of yourself you have opened the road you are repaired it perhaps the thing that comes across it first is mainly a sense of order or proportion or value or color but gradually through this road that you have built a whole inner life removing the because you have made this expression of your own consciousness important to you and it is this expression of self-consciousness that must be understood now you can see that the production of something protects us against the wrong level of consciousness coming through you pillar create a beautiful picture or a beautiful plant by calling upon your own negative opinion ISM you cannot say looking at some charming thing that you have Bruce you cannot say my selfishness business you cannot say that this beautiful flower range would exist because you don't like someone or that you're critical of people or that you are sorry for yourself this power is arrangement came as a result of something much deeper than that and if it did by any chance become / influenced by some negative phase of your personality the design will be wrong and your own eyes will tell you that is it wrong and your own nature will reject it because it is wrong and you will quietly create your own censorship and you will learn the same in many fields of creative expression and once this creativity is moved away from selfishness into the pure expression of its own nature you will find it available in religion you will find an available moral thinking you will find it assisting you in your physical responsibilities helping you to recognize the problems of the time and how to face them but you have to get the road open and the only way we know of releasing the internal is releasing it into action we cannot release it merely into thought because the fact that it moves into action causes it to do things the moment it does something we know whether it is true or not if it never comes into action what we thought was a bit of like here might only be a concealed form of our own selfishness but when it moves into action it either produces good action or not good action instantly we know whether the force itself is good or not good this is why a pastoral into activity and throughout all of our ways of life self creative activity has been important it is still important to the cottage industries of India it is still important in Fort Dodge from which all fine art develops it is important to advance to the rhythm of primitive people they are expressing and here we sit back with a rather sophisticated way and let machines do all our thinking for us and because they are not very good at it we live on the level of a mechanistic inspiration which is not sufficient but we can fight through these things and create laws unto ourselves whereby we can daily observe the degree of our own creative expression and because we try everything we weigh all things and cling to that which is good and for man the way is the using and by using we discover whether we were right or not we give some advice to somebody he follows it he's worse off he was before but we've moved away from the picture and we don't feel any responsibility we justify ourselves on the grounds that he probably didn't follow the advice correctly or it should have worked and we don't even stop giving the same advice to someone else what do we give this advice to ourselves and it hurts we're going to stop we're going to find some other answers through our own skin we have to test all these and that which produces for us a new or better rich or way of life richer in real value that is the way that we should will ultimately cultivate and our creativity gives us the power to break through the superficial personality and release architectural archetypal force and if we do release it in an archetypal experience of creative expression we have the great design we have the wonderful fabrics of India and Persia we have the wonderful ceramics of China and Korea we have the glorious lacquers and carved ivories of Japan we have these things because it knows BAE's the simplest problem with one of creative expression if we ever want to solve our problem we've got to get this personal creative expression back into ourselves so that everything we do is meaning and even when we buy we buy meaning not just objects we have become more careful more thoughtful more discriminating and out of this from the better life for all of us

Channel: MindPodNetwork

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Keywords: manly p hall lecture, manly p hall lectures, manly p hall, mindpod network, manly p hall talks, manly p hall videos, manly p hall youtube, esoteric, psychology, philosophy, occult, metaphysics, manly palmer hall, spirituality

Id: phzWD6RPw3w

Length: 83min 21sec (5001 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 21 2019