Doorways To Creativity

Question: You have said that feelings such as fear, anxiety, and depression are beginnings, not ends, and in fact, that these feelings are doorways into a universe of creativity and discovery, not barricades.

Richard Moss: Psychological survival leads us to become profoundly conditioned to prefer certain kinds of feelings to others. This causes us to refuse a conscious relationship to darkness such as fear and despair. But, you can't know unconditional love if you continually and preferentially exempt, or try to negate, or escape from all the difficult feelings that are part of human experience. Then love is only conditional and fleeting.

If you take an individual who has feelings of fear or despair, this really represents a distrust in his own essence. He then externalizes this distrust out into the world, distrusting that the world is safe, or that others are good in their essence. This is the story of most of the human race.

If we're going to change that, it won't be by creating a model of wholeness with our rational minds, because all those models rely on hope and use reason to escape the domain of difficult feelings. We have to go much deeper than hope and find a way to start an original and creative relationship to our essential self, which to our egos seems like nothingness and emptiness. Once we no longer flee from this deep sense of non-being, then we can truly know life's fullness.

For example, we each think there's this "me" who is an exclusively private and separate being, but in reality we are a movement of attention that simultaneously creates this sense of me and the sense of others. As long as you are identified with the separate self, there will be things that threaten you and send you running down the road of your own survival project. For the modern person this is not just survival, but a level of success that threatens to engulf the world. All of that stops when you come to grips with your own fear of non-being and face the movies that seem to be about fear and despair.

-- Richard Moss