Nature Doesn’t Think; It Just Creates - Grasshopper

When nature flows into your thinking, you will create great things. Great things require less thinking.

The 25^th Verse of the Tao Te Ching gives vibrant breath to the concept of Great:

"I do not know its name, and I give it the designation of the Tao.

 Making an effort to give it another name,

 I call it The Great."

Lao Tzu, the Chinese author of the Tao Te Ching calls the Tao the mother of all things. When we search for a name to name the nameless, we come up with labels like: God, Divinity, The Universe, Spirit, The Source, The One, or Mother Nature. Lao Tzu called it the Tao (The Way).

Look out your window. There is a concert going on. Trees and flowers bud and bloom on cue. The rain and winds show up at a specific time each year, there is a predicted period of green followed by a transition to the brilliant colors of change. Then there is a resting period for all this greatness to happen again. It isn't being thought about; it's being created.

The part of you that fosters creativity isn't thinking - it's doing.

That's the mystery of intelligence (not to be confused with IQ). It orchestrates without thinking. When we think about it, we get confused. We consciously try and wrap our arms around something that is too big to hug, yet it embraces us every minute of every day.

This nourisher of creatures great and small cannot be categorized into a system of thinking. Logic can never explain the creativity that is ever present.

We try and use thinking to understand Greatness and we always come up short. Yet when Greatness shows up in our thinking, we create effortlessly.
 

The magic begins when we accept that there is something greater than ourselves. This is trading in our pseudo power for the real thing. Speaking of pseudo power, reminds me of a story . . .

When I was a teenager, I wanted to have dual exhaust tailpipes on my car. I only had a single exhaust system. The cool cars had dual exhausts. I went to the auto parts store and purchased a second tailpipe. I got some hangers from my closet and bent them into shape and attached them to the car's frame to hold this tailpipe in place. I now had two tailpipes. Only one had exhaust fumes coming out of it; the other one was a dummy tailpipe just there as a façade for show.

How much of our thinking is just for show and doesn't get us the real thing?

When we suspend our thinking to make room for what Lao Tzu called "The Great," creativity shows up. We have to quiet our critical consciousness and its rules for thinking to make room for the creativity that happens without conscious intervention.

Yes, keep your mind sharp. It helps you articulate and assemble the creativity that flows through you. To give it an open door, you have to give up the barren concept that thinking makes creativity happen.

Ask anyone who plays golf if they remember the shot that felt effortless and traveled a country mile. Each one will tell you there was no thinking involved. It just happened when the mind ceded its controlling efforts to a power greater than itself.

The memotable line from the movie, Field of Dreams illustrates the process of creativity:  "if you build it, they will come."

Set up the framework and creativity will flow into it. Use your intellect to gather the ideas. Use your powers of logic to assemble them, and then get out of the way and watch a tower of greatness be built.

Do the practice and then let the game come to you.

This is not a prescription for laziness. It's a shortcut to greatness. There is a point in every conscious endeavor that we encounter diminishing returns. Our cultural conditioning has taught us to grind off our nose when this happens. You will always smell the sweet scent of greatness quicker when you notice that you have done all that you can do, and then step aside and let greatness pass through.

Take a walk in nature today and witness creativity on display. While walking, suspend your thinking and notice how quickly your creativity begins to bloom.

All the best,
John