By Harold Boulette
“A cycle of creativity and growth doesn’t flow from one form directly to another form but from form to spaciousness, where you can experience consciousness-and-energy and re-pattern yourself appropriately. From consciousness-and-energy, it flows into action, then to form. Then the cycle continues through release and dissolution, back to spaciousness again. Think of several ideas and activities in your life. Are you resting in peaceful silence, contemplating how and when to begin? Are you in action? Have you finished materializing some result? Do you need to ‘stop and drop’ into the stillness?” ~Penney Peirce
As a writer of both blogs and books, I belong to a number of author’s and writer’s groups on Facebook. I think at least once a week I see some writer post that she is suffering from that horrid malady, “writer’s block”. This is usually followed with a request for other writers to say how they cope with it, how they get over it, how do they cure this horrid disease. Many writers respond with suggestions like, “just write down anything that pops into your head,” or “go out and do something that will inspire you to write again.” All good advice, as far as it goes. On the other side, there are those who will say that writer’s block simply doesn’t exist. That’s kind of like saying you can breath by constantly inhaling, but never exhaling. Of course it exists, but what is it, really? In most cases, it is nothing more than the natural cycles of nature and therefore nothing to get overly worried about.
As Ms. Peirce says, there are cycles of creativity, just as there are cycles of almost everything else. If you want flowers in your summer garden, you need to plant the seeds in the spring, or the previous fall (depending on the specific species). If you wait until early summer, you probably won’t see blossoms that year because you have chosen to ignore the cycles of nature.
If you are giving a talk in front of a group, you can’t talk continuously for an hour. You have to take a short break every so often and let your speech faculties rest and your mind prepare. If you constantly breath in you will become a hot-air balloon like Harry Potter’s aunt (I wonder if anyone has though to make an actual hot-air balloon in her shape). If you are a runner, you can’t run constantly, 24/7/365. You have to rest and recoup sometimes. The same for a swimmer, dancer, or any other activity. Everything has cycles.
Cycles exist on many levels and time ranges. There are cycles for individuals, groups and for the entire world. There are even cycles in the solar systems, galaxies, and universes. Cycles can last for fractions of a second, such as the pulses of an alternating current electrical circuit, to millions of years, such as the creation of a galaxy.
On a human level, cycles of creativity can be lengthy, as in the Dark Ages followed by the Renaissance, or much shorter as in the writer having writer’s block today, then writing just fine tomorrow. A painter doesn’t paint every minute of every day, a singer doesn’t sing constantly. If you have attended any live concerts, you probably know that few, if any, singers will perform for ninety minutes without a break or two. Some will stop and chat with the audience for a few minutes, others will let the band do an instrumental number while he rests his voice, and others will actually leave the stage for fifteen or twenty minutes while a backup performs.
One of the biggest reasons people have a lot of difficulties is because they don’t recognize the law of cycles and work with it, They choose instead to fight it, and almost always fail by doing so. Just as there are proper times to plant those seeds, there are proper times to start a new business, correct times to move, to change jobs, to start a new career, and so on. The biggest problem may be that people don’t want to accept the down side of the cycle and will fight it so much that when the growth side returns, they will have worn themselves out.
Cycles apply just as much to spiritual growth as to anything else in life, perhaps even more so. Throwout the ages, mystics, Gnostics, and spiritual adepts of all kinds have generally practiced their spiritual disciplines in the morning, specifically at the time of sunrise. On some specific days, or under specific circumstances, they may do them at sunset. Rarely will any but the most advanced masters do spiritual growth techniques around noon. On a larger scale, we know that there are periods in history when people have been very spiritual and opposite periods when we sink into near total materialism. We seem to be in a period when the cycle is changing directions from getting more and more material, to starting to recognize the value of the spiritual again. More significantly, we are in the later part of a much greater cycle, one in which the planets and stars that have “fallen” into matter will be reversing and becoming spiritual worlds again, worlds of Light. Some will fight this cycle change and die trying to preserve a past that is not worthy of being preserved. Others will gradually change and go with the flow, but with little active participation. Still others will work hard to move the cycle forward, to be leaders of the New Golden Age that is dawning now. So you need to decide which group you want to be part of. I hope you choose wisely in this great cycle of creativity.
This article previously appeared on the spiritual blog Solar Wind.