Studio8 - Uniting the Arts

"In Go East Young Man, William Douglas tells the story of his father, a minister in rural Pennsylvania who, for his first church service, had one person attend. "Maybe we ought to skip this," said the minister, "after all, you're the only one here." "Well, Pastor, I'm just a cowboy but if I went out in the pasture with forty bales of hay and found just one horse, I don't think I'd let it starve." So the minister gave his entire sermon, his first sermon, the one he had worked on for months, and when he was done he asked, "How did I do?" "Well, Pastor, I'm just a cowboy but if I went out in the pasture with forty bales of hay and found just one horse, I don't think I'd give it all forty bales!"

II. The first move (i.e., NO MIND) is given, a gift by virtue of birth; each successive move, however, must be taken increasingly on your own.

III. Each move, when accomplished, incorporates and implies the advantages, insights and capabilities obtained in previous moves (i.e., nothing of true value is lost as you proceed).

IV. To play is to work on the next move (i.e., to "do what is right, now" as Gandhi put it) and so, to play is also to win (greater freedom, for example); to make all five moves is to win very big indeed.

V. Finally, it is possible to stop playing at any time, and equally possible--it is important to remember--to begin playing again even though you have not played for a long time.

How do you measure progress?
Opinions vary; R. A. Wilson argues that you are progressing if, in general, things seem to be getting funnier.

Creative transformation begins with four essential steps. Each step helps us become more creative and leads eventually to the creation of the Ethical State. We can take some of the steps by ourselves, but the process can only be completed in a group of four men and four women. For the reasons given before, four men and four women are the optimal number for beginning autopoiesis at the super-metazoan level. However, we can make progress toward creative transformation in smaller or larger groups.

Couples are usually too small a group. They find it easy to accept common delusions. Still, we are better off in a couple than we are alone. Groups larger than eight soon begin to create a hierarchy whose members find it difficult to treat each other with equal respect and to communicate on a personal level, soul to soul. It becomes almost impossible for groups larger than fifteen. Larger groups should be broken down into smaller groups, preferably of eight each. Therefore, if the process is to be optimized, it should involve four men and four women who freely choose each other and agree to work together to become creatively transformed. Persons who have difficulty creating their own groups of eight may expect help in forming groups of eight from those who have already begun the process.

The four steps are as follows:

1. Deliberately choose to live by the evolutionary ethic and make every decision on the basis of what will maximize creativity for ourselves and others; make a commitment to play the Game of Life. This facilitates our making commitments to others.

2. Do our best to love others, including our enemies, by interacting with them on the basis of what, in our best judgment, will help maximize their creativity, and by opening our soul to them, while respecting their freedom of will; make an unconditional commitment of love to others, focusing on those groups of eight to which we belong. We choose to love rather than to fear.

3. Learn the nature of fear and how it manifests itself in everyone's destructive behavior, including our own. Then focus on how wecan learn to overcome fear through taking our identity from our soul instead of our ego, and by doing our best to maximize creativity, without any other considerations; we choose to reject fear as a motivator of our actions. Only humans can do this.

4. Engage in autopoiesis as best we can. This feeds back to the previous three steps and helps us better achieve them; those steps in turn further enhance the autopoiesis, which is an ongoing process.

Creative transformation is therefore a self-catalyzing process based on ethical love; its spirit is communicated in these four steps, but its practice transcends any given technique. Still, there is a technique that has been experimentally developed to help persons get started. Each group of eight can then modify the technique to suit its own particular needs and innovative inclinations.