Transcending Myself

In my last project, I wrote about how this transitional stage of my life, has caused several feelings I’d long since buried to come up. Effectively for the past 7 years, I’ve surrendered myself to a predetermined path. I became a golem, giving up my desires, my personality, and my will to satisfy whatever my parents or teachers told me was “good to do”. Now, at the end of that path I’m left standing alone with unprecedented dominion over myself but without the knowledge to use it. That project, along with a few of my other final classes of college have made me realize how disconnected from myself I’ve truly been. I look through my memories and see a playful, curious boy, but I look in the mirror now and am greeted by a jaded, uninspired, young man. That project made me realize how far I had let myself sink. Throughout school I let myself be eroded into an academic output machine rather than protect the curiosity and drive I had to understand and create. That project is why I chose this experiment; I felt a deep need to re-engage with my creativity, to learn how to access the person I had lost so many years ago before it was pushed any further. I’m left with the burning desire to finally throw off the yoke of academia, and fully embrace a creative life. I want to rekindle my appetite to read, to write poetry, and to chase the satisfaction of honing a skill, but I’ve abandoned that part of myself for so long that it’s strange to me. So it is with this project that I’ll chart my own path, and take the first step to evolve my mindset to better pursue my better self.

The first step, again, is to take stock of myself. To chart a path forward, I must first understand where I am. So how do I view creativity? My initial instinct, what I’ve been led to believe is that creativity is a tool. Painters, musicians, poets, and sculptors, all have some innate quality that let them mold a medium into a message. They see what is unseen, they reveal, they create. Creativity is the hammer and chisel which strike at the rawness of life. Without creativity, one is left with a monolith of unshaped experiences. Inspiration precedes creation but is inert without the creative spark to translate the immaterial, emotional realm to the physical or experiential realm.

My second instinct, formed by observation of others is that creativity is a luxury. In my art classes I’d be amazed at how easily it seemed for my classmates to harness the power of film to move an audience in a mere 4 minutes, how deftly they could mold clay into the shapes they saw in their mind, how movingly they could play a piece of music. I would ask how they got their skills, and always their answer was something along the lines of “I’ve been doing it since I was a kid”, all the while holding their Sony a7 camera, $2,000 clarinet, 50 piece brush kit they brough from home. Of course, I heard the analogy “creativity is like a muscle”, the more you use it the stronger it becomes, but I quickly understood that the factors which set these individuals apart was time to practice, and the money to fund it. The luxury of free time to practice, and the means to erase any barriers of entry, neither of which I had.

By senior year of high school my jealousy of these people, freely able to explore their creativity, reached its peak. I was angry at them for being what I couldn’t be, at my parents for the academic path they forced on me, but most of all at myself for accepting the lot. I could’ve fought harder, convinced my parents to let me take more ceramics classes, to let me get a job so I could buy my own camera gear. I might’ve slacked off more in my classes, exchanging As and Bs for time to practice. I could have tried but I didn’t. I simply burned the desire from my heart and proceeded down my path.

Only now, in my final semester of college have I turned my head towards the creative path again. PHIL-255, My Existential Awakening. Throughout this semester I was exposed to a school of philosophical thinking I had never considered: Existentialism. We read Kierkegaard, Dostoyevsky, Nietzsche, Sartre, and Beauvoir. Thinkers who seeing the failure of the institutions of their time against the radically changing world dared to empower individuals to define their lives meaning for themselves, even against reason and odds. One of the class readings was Friedrich Nietzche’s Beyond Good and Evil. A foundational piece to his other work that doesn’t expound any answers such as the elusive “Meaning of Life” but prepares the reader to begin the process of questioning their beliefs, why they believe them, and who or what put them in their heads in the first place. He states: “A living thing seeks above all to discharge its strength–life itself is will to power; self-preservation is only one of the indirect and most frequent results” (Nietzsche 211). From birth, we are told to carry on certain practices, traditions, and beliefs. They weigh down on us like a load on a camel, but it is only when we shirk off the weight of our obligate burdens and begin questioning the purpose, verity, and significance of our actions that we can attain true freedom. I allowed myself to be burdened by the desire of my parents to be a certain way. I was expected to take the most advanced classes and succeed in them, to do several extracurriculars with leadership positions. Why? Because mother and father said so, because the teachers say it will get me into a good college because it has already been decided for me. It became so natural to trudge along, grasping the next rung up the ladder that I continued it all the way into college, becoming a club president as a sophomore for Christ’s sake! All the while I was suppressing my inner “will to power”. It wasn’t until I read Nietzsche that I began to question: why the hell was I doing all of these things when in reality, I couldn’t care less about it!

Sartre led me down further. I learned that I am not bound by the facts of the world and myself, I can transcend them to become something aligned to my greater purpose. In his work Being and Nothingness he provides a famous example of a cafe waiter. The waiter overly zealous in serving the diners seems too absorbed in the act of being a waiter, despite the fact he is not a waiter, he is a human with multitudes of dreams, fears, opinions, imperfections, etc. Despite this, he strips himself down to perfectly play the part of a waiter–unobtrusive, attendant, perceptive. On playing the act Sartre states: “I am separated by nothing, but this nothing isolates me from him; I cannot be him; I can only play at being him, i.e., by imagining that I am him” (Sartre 158). Truthfully, the concept is difficult to illustrate isolated from the entire work, but it satisfies to say that we as humans often conduct ourselves through “acting”. We represent ourselves as something we aren’t whilst consciously recognizing that the performance and our true selves are two separate things. We “act” as waiters, teachers, firemen, CEOs, sons, daughters, and parents; at the same time we are our act, and we are not our act. For 17 years of my life, I’ve acted only as a student. In those 17 years as a student, I’ve forgotten who I was without the act. Sartre says that most people have forgotten their “being” behind their acts; he says that they have fallen into “bad faith”, the only escape from which is consciously recognizing yourself as a being of multitudes, of autonomy. It is through that conscious transcendence from the act you play to the person you believe yourself to be or can become that we can find our true selves. At this point, I realized my desire wasn’t just me being in a rut or simply feeling detached from my creativity. Thanks to Nietzsche I began questioning why I identified myself with academic success over creativity, thanks to Sartre, I realized that I’m not bound to be what I’ve always been. Existentialism opened the door for me to transcend the identity I’ve been acting as into a higher more complete version of myself.

I recognized the origins of myself, then I began dismantling my restricting beliefs. The next step was creating a new perspective to replace the old. I began tracing back my creativity to its origins. My first poems I wrote for fun. That was the basis on which I started this project. I would follow the teachings of my high school creative writing teacher as best I could while juggling the rest of my responsibilities. The process is thus: Spend 30 minutes each morning writing a journal, it can be about anything, but my pencil must move the entire time. Then after the 30 minutes on the first day of the week, I would write a poem. On subsequent days I would make edits, until the last day I would say farewell to it (for now) and begin the process again. Looking back, this process is similar to that which is outlined in the book The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron. It mirrored the Morning Pages which flush the cognitive clutter and inner critic’s thoughts. But reading on I realized that Cameron was challenging me. I said earlier that I thought creativity was a tool, my tool which I ought to be able to wield and strike with as I please. Cameron immediately dashed that notion by revealing that my creativity is not mine. She says creativity is a spiritual experience, an “alliance, artist-to-artist with the Great Creator” (Cameron 48). She doesn’t require you to believe in the concept of capital G-God, but she wants the reader to understand that creativity is most akin to a spiritual experience, of channeling energy, a collaboration between ourselves and a higher creative force, not simply something we are either capable of or not. At first, this frustrated me. I was angry that this creative force wasn’t “mine”, that it didn’t originate from myself. But as I read on I realized that true creativity really only works, as Cameron says, in the spirit of being creative. By emphasizing becoming a channel for the creative spirit, and not its source, I can understand how the act of being creative broadens itself within me. I see it less as a success-failure binary, I don’t feel the need to measure my creativity by the medium or the tools that are at my disposal. Most importantly, creativity becomes an everyday practice. It’s no longer a spigot to “turn on” when the time comes, but a meditative practice. By following Cameron’s advice, the onus of creation shifts from the output to the process; and the process is a constant channel, a stream of energy flowing from a transcendent source through my own hands.

The object is not the goal, the process is. What a beautiful revelation! Such a large part of my act of “being a student” was the act of producing an object to be graded. My language is distilled to that accepted by rubrics. The few art pieces I was able to make were criticized based on form, medium, and competence which completely nullifies the idea of creativity as an experience. Coincidentally, at the same time as writing this, I listened to a podcast by Philosopher C Thi. Nguyen where he illustrated the idea that action, in-itself, is a form of art. In his paper The Arts of Action he proposes that art can be divided into two schema: “The Arts of Objects” wherein an artist creates an artifact imbued with properties of aesthetic significance which can then be appreciated by an audience (think paintings, sculptures, etc.), and “The Arts of Action”, where the artist creates an artifact which calls forth an action where the aesthetic properties emerge from the action itself (games, rock climbing, etc.) (Nguyen). To illustrate his point further, consider the act of rock climbing. The artifact would be the cliff face, and the actions would be the variety of movements and holds required to scale it. The climber, as the audience to the cliff, embraces the aesthetic of his physicality–his capability to conduct the movements; he does not climb the wall to reach the top but to experience the emergent aesthetics of what it takes to get there. In this frame of thinking, creativity itself becomes an art of action. I no longer write to create a poem, I write to experience the act of writing. The hesitance to buy paint and brushes, or needle and thread for fear of being bad at painting, or sewing melts away, and I feel as though I can be satisfied with the actions themselves. It’s a monumental shift in control! By recognizing that I am the channel, that through my actions meaning emerges, I become the creator and the outlet. My creativity becomes an act for the sake of itself. It mirrors Sartre’s transcendence which requires one to forgo his act, being-in-itself, and accept his transcendent self, being-for-itself. I can shift my systems of being from producing artifacts for an audience and instead focus on creating systems that channel aesthetic actions–systems that channel my transcendent self.

On the note of a transcendent self, I can’t help but draw lines of similarity to a similar journey I’m taking to connect with my ideas of masculinity. 6 years ago, I began feeling a deep longing in my body and soul to undergo some kind of challenge to demark the transition from boy to man. Alas, no such event happened. I passed from 15 to 17, and now to 22 without any such defining event. Perhaps society has progressed past such rites of initiation, but in my search for one, I read King, Warrior, Magician, Lover by Robert Moore. Moore outlines the four Jungian archetypes of Masculinity, The King–Embodying authority and fertility, The Warrior–Aggression, The Magician–Knowlege, and the Lover–Passion for life. I revisited it for this paper and noticed parts of myself still operating in the “boy psychology” and worse some parts in the shadow archetypes of “man psychology”. One section stood out to me, the section of King Energy. Moore explains that when we channel the king, we channel aspects of order, stability, and centeredness, that “The ego of the mature man needs to think of itself… as the servant of a transpersonal Will. It needs to think of itself as a steward of the King energy” (Moore 193). Once again, a transcendent force is channeled through a mortal form. We cannot embody the archetype of the King, in fact, identifying too closely with it will turn one into its Shadow Form, the Tyrant. Instead, we must recognize it as an energy to tap into; we become its vessel, its gardener, its steward, to be realized in our daily lives. We first form the foundational mountain within ourselves, then spread it outwards into the world, and unto others. This is my path, beginning with the cultivation of my mind. The way forward is to separate my identity from creativity and masculinity so that I may allow these energies to flow through me, to ring throughout my thoughts and actions. By graduating, I am finally able to let go of the student, of the boy, and take my first step as something new. I can finally transcend, not by embodying these forces, but by thoughtfully channeling them through myself. I realize now that in seeking perfection in the act of being something, it becomes stagnant and corrupted. It is the cultivation of these attributes as aspects of ourselves, parts of a greater whole which leads to true satisfaction.

Starting this project, I was lost within myself. I couldn’t see a life outside of playing the role of a student, yet at the same time, I resented what I had allowed myself to become. I was jaded and couldn’t see a path forward. The work I did this semester might’ve truly saved my life, I’ve learned to question what others have planned for me, and it showed me that I am not destined to always be what I currently am. I no longer define myself by the presence or lack of qualities, I transcend them. I’m not “creative”, I weave and imbue creativity in all my actions. I am not King of the world, but I act as King would over myself. This shift in thinking, this transcendence has unshackled me and set me on a path of my choosing.

Works Cited

Cameron, Julia. Artist’s Way : 25th Anniversary Edition. Penguin Books, 2016.

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, et al. Basic Writings of Nietzsche. New York, Modern Library, 2000.

Moore, Robert L, and Douglas Gillette. King, Warrior, Magician, Lover : Rediscovering the Archetypes of the Mature Masculine. San Francisco] Harpersanfrancisco, 2001.

Nguyen, C. Thi (2020). The arts of action. Philosophers’ Imprint 20 (14):1–27.

Sartre, Jean-Paul, and Sarah Richmond. Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology. Washington Square Press/Atria, and Imprint of Simon & Schuster, Inc., 2021.