In a comment on one of Zay’s posts I referenced an article by David Steindl-Rast titled The Mystical Core of Organized Religion. While the essay itself focuses around the relationship between Mysticism and Religion, it is directly applicable to the issue of attempting to describe creative consciousness. Here is an excerpt.
What happens with ritual? At first, as we have seen, it is a true celebration. We celebrate by remembering gratefully (everything else is optional). The particular event that we celebrate merely triggers that grateful remembrance, a remembrance of those moments in which we are most deeply aware of limitless belongings. As a reminder and renewal of our ultimate connectedness, every celebration has religious overtones, echoes of mystical communion. It is also the reason why, when we celebrate, we want all those who belong to us in a special way to be present. Repetition also is a part of celebration. Every time we celebrate a birthday, for example, that day is enriched by memory upon memory of all previous ones. But repetition has its danger, especially for the celebration of religious rituals. Because they are so important, we want to give them the perfect form. And before we know it, we are more concerned with form than with content. When form becomes formalized and content is forgotten, ritual turns into ritualism.
I remember a teacher of mine once saying that the purpose of training is not to teach you form, but rather to hold you up when inspiration fails (and opening night is a week away). Working in a performative medium necessitate working under a deadline. At some point the work is presented before an audience, finished or not. One does not have the luxury of waiting for inspiration to strike. Rather we must hunt inspiration ruthlessly as though we were starved and it is all that might give us sustenance.
I have had my work delayed by storms and technical difficulties and all manner of things. Yet the audience arrived faithfully at the opening night expecting a whole and complete work. And we were not afforded the luxury of delaying that night. The moment of creation must be funneled through the training and indeed the training might cause one to work with greater depth and alacrity, but without the inspiration it is all just noise.
That moment of creative union with the universe is a strong and powerful and indeed personal moment. One can attempt to reverse engineer the process, to teach a method, or study a technique but this is not the moment. The moment is inside. It is a process. It is an orientation of the entirety of ones being towards the work. Vision changes, hearing changes, time and space change. An inversion occurs, and for a moment they are contained by you and you are limitless, bringing worlds and universes into being. It is the orgasmic moment of the sexual poetics of consciousness.
And for you it is different. And for them it is different. And for each of us, that moment is wholly unique and highly personal. The world becomes us. And both transform. Attempts may be made at descriptions, but that can only go so deep. Descriptions can only follow the barest outline of the shell. The container. It might be able to touch some part of the form, but not the content of experience. And that is the trick, to stay truly in touch with the source of our creative energy and not lose it in the formalism of training or ritual. To return to the essay I began this post with, “before we know it, we are more concerned with form than with content. When form becomes formalized and content is forgotten, ritual turns into ritualism.”
