Creativity & the Diamond Approach

My inner journey began with making art. In 1965, I was 17 and going to high school in Palo Alto. I went to an art show at the tiny art gallery at Stanford University for a show of psychedelic ink drawings, and left saying, “I can do that.” I went to the local art store, bought vellum paper, India ink, and crow quill pens, and began to draw. When I drew, all sorts of things tumbled out onto the paper and I entered into a state of ecstatic absorption. I felt that I was entering into another, far more profound world, and began to draw any chance I got. I didn’t understand this compelling state or know what to call it, but I was hooked on it.

A few years later in art school, no one mentioned the state that I experienced making art or seemed to know what I was talking about. It was all about the skills needed to make “good” art. My roommate, Karen Johnson, understood what I was saying. She turned me on to books by spiritual teachers. I began to understand that this blissful state of being in what’s now called “the zone” was one that seekers throughout the ages have aspired to realize and make part of their ongoing lives.  

I joined a group dedicated to spiritual realization led by Claudio Naranjo, and began to access the same state of what I came to know as “samadhi” through meditation. In the years that followed, I pursued meditation and eventually got involved with the Diamond Approach, which my friend from the Claudio days, Hameed, was developing with Karen’s support. Through the teachings, I began to understand that the state I often entered making art has to do with manifestation arising out of the mysterious Absolute, called in the Diamond Approach the dimension of the Logos. The creative act, whether one writes, paints, plays an instrument, or engages in other artistic activities, is alignment with that miracle of something arising out of nothing that has always fascinated and compelled me. The self can be sitting in the background, or it can completely disappear—that’s the deepest and most satisfying experience.

Over the almost 40 years that I’ve been involved with the Diamond Approach, periods of making art in my life have waxed and waned.  But the “art space”, for want of a better name for it, has become more and more of a constant, regardless of what I’m doing. The capacity to become fully present in the moment, to be fully engaged, is the entryway. And it’s what we practice from the very beginning of our work—in inquiry, meditation, and in the sensing practice.  So whether our focus is on writing, making music, painting, sculpting, or whatever form our creativity takes, the capacity to fully be here and to let Reality express itself through us is what makes it so fulfilling. And the deeper our process goes, the more our life itself becomes our creative expression, embodying Being no matter what we do.