The field of potential

Art and the invitation of the unseen

This morning I started reading Rick Rubin’s “The Creative Act”, a profoundly inspiring tome on creativity and being an artist. Within the first few pages (every sentence absolute gold), I was frozen by this paragraph:

“Turning something from an idea into a reality can make it seem smaller. It changes from unearthly to earthly.

The imagination has no limits. The physical world does. The work exists in both.”

– Rick Rubin

The work exists in both. The work exists in BOTH.

I’ve always thought of creating as the act of drawing an idea out of the collective pool of possibility and making it manifest, so the bit about making the unearthly earthly is familiar to me. Also that it seems smaller once we’ve done that - man, it’s always so great when someone puts words on an experience you’ve never had words for.

But the idea that once we’re done the idea still exists in the ether, in the unearthly as well as in the earthly realm, is kinda blowing my mind.

As I write that it seems obvious.

But the way it’s resonating in me in this moment is that the thing we create is not only as we’ve created it (words, paint, sculpture, whatever) but also a link to a much wider world of ideas in the unseen. I have a visual of a sculpture on a stand in the middle of a room and around it and above it the invisible realm is shimmering…

Shimmering with the ideas and possibilities that that work connects to. As though the material expression as generated by that artist is just one version, one expression of the infinite possibilities suggested by that idea-form.

Maybe this is obvious to other people, that art is this kind of potential-carrier that can inspire an infinite spectrum of ideas in the observer (including the artist themselves) but it hasn’t been to me thus far. I always thought I just don’t “get” art, like there’s a specific message in every work of art that I’m just not able to understand.

But now I can see how this is just another manifestation of how my mind wants to understand everything.

I wish it wouldn’t.

I’m beginning to believe that life might be far more enchanting and interesting if I didn’t need to understand so much.

And actually, I get to create the meaning (of everything!) myself. I get to “imagine” (what even is that?! What is imagination?) whatever I want. And so really, every manifest object is a connection back to where it came from; the ethereal realm, the uncreated - source.

If I choose to, I can use my awareness of the manifest world to connect me to the unmanifest.

I think that’s why it froze me - that invitation.

What if we walked through the world with the awareness of the unmanifest realm ever-present? Connected to the endless possibility that we humans, as bridges between the unmanifest and the manifest, have to create?

Connected to that field of potential that is ever-present, always available to us to draw from, to bring something new into the world.

I think it would be a good thing. Maybe that’s how dedicated artists of all persuasions live - in a state of permanent listening for what wants to be brought into the manifest realm from that field of ideas.

I like it because it feels so hopeful - all that potential! The endless possibilities to solve any problem or challenge, to invite in wholly new thoughts and ideas that can revolutionise how we experience life as humans…that change how we think of ourselves or what we believe about what it is to be human…

I want to live in the awareness of that shimmering field that lies beyond sight.

I want to stay connected to the quiet hum of potential that surrounds us. To the knowing that anything and everything is possible and all of it lives as possibility in the vibratory matrix that I exist in.

WILD!

Throughout my life I have dipped in and out of holding this awareness - it’s hard to keep hold of it in the mundane reality of everyday life. But possible. Hard but possible.

And when I manage it I am lifted, expanded, enlivened - imbued with hopefulness and that childlike sense of magic.

Because ultimately that field of possibility - of the unmanifest - is the source of all, is our home…and feeling connected to it brings us closer to what we truly are and what we might be.