Ellen and I were laying around in bed this morning engaging in our favorite activity – philosophic inquiry. Not having to get up early is one of the great things about weekends. Ellen will pose various questions and I will use muscle testing the unconscious mind to pull up interesting answers. After about an hour of this, the collection of answers will promote a synthesis of ideas that pops out a perspective I did not have before about the area in question. I call this popping out a download, because that is what it feels like. It is like downloading something new from the Internet, except here it is from outside my recognized conscious awareness. These downloads always expand my appreciation and understanding of the subject of inquiry.
I understand that this sounds terribly nerdy, and it is, but there you go. To quote the popular philosopher Popeye the sailor man – “I yam what I yam.” We both take great delight in anything that expands our consciousness to greater understanding and appreciation.
The subject under inquiry this morning was the process of harmonious co-creation. This is a cornerstone of my relationship to life, so expanding this area was really cool. It also provided a resolution to a long standing challenge with the ideal of achieving harmony while co-creating with another individual. The obvious challenge is about how to harmonize different creations from different visions. We are all different, and our individual visions of how things should look is also going to be different. Generating harmony to this point has been using fairly contrived processes like taking turns and partitioning out different areas of responsibility for creation. This has worked most of the time, but it still did not flow smoothly.
The answers I was getting were all across the board this morning concerning various areas of co-creation in our life as well as historical glitches in that harmony in our childhoods. We tossed in a couple Heartflow clearings of some of the historical stuck stuff to free up the flow of ideas. That is when the download hit… for every giver there needs to be a receiver. This may be obvious to most other folks, but both Ellen and I are very outflow oriented, very doing oriented. We both lack good quality receiving skills. As such something as simple as ‘for every giver there needs to be a receiver’ could easily escape us.
This small piece unfolded into the bigger appreciation and understanding piece. Creation is not about the forms created, it is about the connection relationship created. This made such total sense. I feel that the things of real value in this life are the things that we can take with us when we depart this veil of existence. We
can’t take the form things with us, but we can take our relationship skills and personal virtues. These are the point of being alive for me, the development of virtues, skills, and tone.
Examples that came to mind to make this simple assertion obvious were artists and lovers. When you create a piece of art of any sort, that creation is not complete until someone else sees the art and appreciates it. It is the appreciation of the art that gives it value and meaning. If you fall in love with someone and no one ever knows but you, it feels very incomplete. Love is not just a feeling, it is a participation. Even workers on a factory line need to connect what they do with how their job will have meaning to someone else. The disconnect between worker and the recipients of the product made is a great cause of worker dissatisfaction.
What we create is not as important as the connections that result from that creation.
As the importance of this perception sloshed around in my brain, I began to get a whole new appreciation of the depth of harmonious creation. The act of receiving is the harmonious counterpoint of the outflow of creation. The simple harmony of creation is to receive as much as you give. There are undoubtedly a load of skills around receiving well, most of which will probably be a whole new realm of exploration for me. Sometimes we are meant to be the giver and sometimes we are meant to be the receiver. The very act of appreciative receiving is the gift we have to offer the giver.
This gives me a deeper value for the skill of appreciation.