In his book The Heart Aroused David Whyte argued for a work place where our soul felt at home enough to release the creative energy residing in the dark depths of our beings. This was The Intuitive Self which I had found to be identical to my soul. Added emphasis appears in red, and my reactions are enclosed in a box: (Note 162)

The field of human creativity has long been a constant battleground between the upper world we inhabit every day and the deeper untrammeled energies alive in every element of life. . . . This is now changing. Continually calling on its managers and line workers for more creativity, dedication, and adaptability, the American corporate world is tiptoeing for the first time in its very short history into the very place from whence that dedication, creativity, and adaptability must come: the turbulent place where the soul of an individual is formed and finds expression. . . .

The cauldron of being was the source of my existence and creativity because it was my identity with the larger being of all that is. In my explorations, I came to know this center as The Intuitive Self. Without connection with my soul, The Intuitive Self, there could be no creativity in my life, personally or professionally.

It is everything we were afraid could be true about existence, and astonishingly, and despite everything we would wish to the contrary, it seems to be an energy without which we cannot appreciate the gift of the light filled, ordered world; remove it, and our soul life becomes puzzlingly empty and impoverished. Yet the sound and the fury of an individual's creative life are the elemental waters missing from the dehydrated workday. The frightening emptiness of existence also contains a place of nourishment and repose. . . .

Confronting the fountain of bounty at the center aroused fear and trepidation since that source was equally filled with beauty and ugliness. Some of my most creative outpourings came from retaliations toward those I believed had betrayed me. The creative soul energy of The Intuitive Self cared not for the object of its outpourings, it simply delighted at being released.

Adaptability and native creativity on the part of the workforce come through the door only with their passions. Their passions come only with their souls. Their souls love the hidden springs boiling and welling at the center of existence more than they love the company. . . .

Once released, the outpourings of creative energy could only be described as passionate. Others reactions to that passion depended on whether they were objects of love or retaliation. The first received full bodied lusty love poems, the latter, never ending verbal diatribes attesting to their wrongdoing. The source of the magnificient energy was the same in both. In one case, they rushed to embrace; in the other, they ran away in fear.

But what is soul, and what is meant by the preservation of the soul! By definition, soul evades the cage of definition. It is the indefinable essence of a person's spirit and being. It can never be touched and yet the merest hint of its absence causes immediate distress. In a work situation, its lack can be sensed intuitively, though a person may, at the same moment, be powerless to know what has caused the loss. . . .

To find out for the first time who I really was, was to know the source of infinite knowing at the center. This was the place where the flame of spirit hid for protection least it was snuffed out by rationalized, constricted life actions. It lay under protective cover waiting for release so that it could burst forth in the blazing glory of the sun mandala displayed in the Author introduction section of the site.

Many trainers and consultants maintain that the soul belongs at home or in church. But with little understanding of the essential link between the soul life and the creative gifts of their employees, hardheaded businesses listening so carefully to their hardheaded consultants may go the way of the incredibly hardheaded dinosaurs. For all their emphasis on the bottom line, they are adrift from the very engine at the center of a person's creative application to work, they cultivate a workforce unable to respond with personal artistry to the confusion of global market change. . . .

I found the greatest gift I could offer another person or organization was the passion of my calling. But to realize that gift, I had to find my calling. This memoir traces the labyrinth I tread in that search to rediscover, articulate and share The Intuitive Self. Stumbling along the way, the passionate energy of that search sometimes spilled out in painful ways for those who were dearest to me.

Work helps us to feel safe. The soul is safe already. Safe in its own experience of the world. Work is bounded by time. The soul of a person lies outside of time and belongs to the unknown, it is the sacred otherness of existence. Work belongs to the personality, but the soul is owned by no one, not even by the personality formed around it. The personality will, we are continually amazed, kiss any required part of a the anatomy to rise in the world; the soul refuses to kiss anything but life itself. . . .

My soul invited me over and over to attend to the moment. It continues to this day calling me to a discipline that easily slips away in a torrent of mental chatter ruminating over the past or fantasizing about the future. Soul wanted me to "make love to life" instead, in the eloquent words of Fritz Perls, of "mind fucking."

Preserving the soul means that we come out of hiding at last and bring more of ourselves into the workplace. Especially the parts that do not "belong" to the company. In a sense, the very part of us that doesn't have the least interest in the organization is our greatest offering to it. It is the part that opens the window of the imagination and allows fresh air into the meeting room. . . .

Coming out of hiding to share the deepest truth I knew was slow and laborious as my fearful and desiring parts did battle about what I was or was not doing. The first time I demonstrated the I Ching was scary and titillating. A part of me feared the repercussions, another part desired the attention something so unusual would draw. And so it was with each step of laying bare what I knew of The Intuitive Self.

Men and women have the timeless human capacity for a religious soul experience of life that an organization cannot. Human beings have an intuitive capacity and knowledge that somewhere at the center of life is something ineffably and unalterably right and good, and that this "rightness" can be discovered through artistic and spiritual explorations that have been honored by all the great perennial religious traditions.

I had to learn there was nothing inherently "wrong" with the energy from the source even though it occasionally spilled over and pained others. My challenge was to sufficiently master self knowledge to aniticiapte and avoid misdirections of creative soul energy. Contrary to popular religious doctrine, I learned God's energy did not know right from wrong - it simply was! I made the choice about how my measure of that energy was expressed.

The perennial traditions tell us that despite the impermanent aspect of existence, there is nothing wrong with the world or the things that make it up. They tell us that we are not the center of the universe except in those exquisite moments when the universe in its wisdom chooses to have us be so. Discovering we are not the center of creation becomes a blessed release and a marvelous unburdening. It allows us to meet creation on its own terms, to see it as a continuing form of revelation rather than a source of disappointment when it does not make our career a numberone priority. . . .

The flow from the source was continuous. Creative action defined the universe. The implicate order unfolded as the explicate order and refolded into the implicate from and into eternity. I had to connect with this source and cooperate with its drive to manifest which expressed itself as the will toward self actualization.

The soul of the world makes its revelations felt not by lecturing us that there is something wrong with our endless wanting, but by giving us glimpses of a numinous experience of life that stops our wanting in its tracks, because in that state we simply do not require anything else to complete ourselves, except, perhaps, the one continuing desire of all desires, to bring that vital celebration of experience into the center of our existence. . . .

Time and again brief glimpses had come watching a sunset or listening to the surf. On other occasions, I experienced them as ineffable synchronicities with a loved one such as saying or thinking the same thing at the same time. Given food, shelter and clothing, what did anything I owned matter in those moments of connection with the transcendent part of being? Those things were irrelevant!

The rich flow of creativity, innovation, and almost musical complexity we are looking for in a fulfilled work life cannot be reached through trying or working harder. The medium, for the soul, it seems, must be the message. The river down which we raft is made up of the same substance as the great sea of our destination. An ever moving first hand creative engagement with life and with others that completes itself simply by being itself.

Soul, creativity, intuition in the large and The Intuitive Self were ephemeral labels for the same essence - Tat tvam asi - That art thou. When I allowed the essence which those labels inferred to be itself, I was complete. In a fleeting moment now and then, that happened.


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