Creativity as a Spiritual Quest:
There is Something Here in Nothing

Apparently, according to quantum physics, ‘as long as you have empty space — the ultimate in physical nothingness — simply manipulating it in the right way will inevitably cause something to emerge.” (Seigal, 9/24/23)

For my money, causing something to emerge from nothing is the utmost in creativity. But what does it mean to “manipulate it in the right way”?

It’s an interesting conundrum, because manipulation can connote a lot of heavy handed activity. Maybe even lead to overthinking. Overworking.

Lately, I am finding that there is a gentler path to creativity: The path of allowing the empty space to speak for itself. Of constructing life habits that support the spiritual nature of our own creation. Of stepping back from an overly active involvement and trusting in what wells up from its own impetus. Leaning into the unknown. Living with the uncertainty.

If this is something that feels intimidating, then may I just confess to you right now: I’m with you. I get it. And … well, then, I’ve also got something to tell you here. Hopefully once you’ve finished reading these 3000 plus words, your relationship with the ambiguity that surrounds “creativity” will have been manipulated into a less intimidating and much friendlier paradigm. One that helps free your inimitable imaginative spirit.

“The blank canvas syndrome.

Artists of all persuasions talk about it.

It’s the paralysis you face when starting a new creative project, as you stare at a blank canvas, empty notebook or glaring computer screen.

In that one instant, a thousand voices come tumbling through with admonitions of “Who are you trying to kid?” “Ha! You think you’re going to create something worthwhile?” “You have nothing to say anyway.” etc . . . etc . . .

I think you get the drift.”

I wrote chapter 9 of my first book, What Have I Forgotten? about how I managed to draw the song “Blue Jay (That Summer’s Day)” for the companion record out into existence. The song was a gift that flew in from nowhere; but only when I released my attachment to what I thought the creative process needed to be.

Because it’s a funny thing about the creative process, isn’t it?

If I had started with the directive that “I am going to write, arrange and produce a double album of 50 minutes of cinematic art pop music, write and illustrate a 170 page companion book about it, and write and record an hour’s worth of associated, guided pathworking all centered around the idea of the seven stages Spiritual Alchemy”, I would’ve been so put off by the pretentiousness and difficulty of how it all sounded, I very likely may have never started it.

But as Michelangelo so famously quoted: “Every block of stone has a statue inside it and it is the task of the sculptor to discover it.” Not necessarily to predefine it.

While as creators, we all aspire to be a master such as Michelangelo, that aspiration can sometimes also delude us into imagining that every stroke of his chisel or brush was perfect and inspired.

And since ours clearly aren’t, who are we to presume we have a right to unleash our work on the world?

Imagining things is the currency of our craft; yet its double-edged sword can also trap us in our own world of hallucinations and anxieties about the value of our own acts of creation.

All we need to do is learn to recognize the difference between our useful imaginings versus our useless ones.

When we sit down to create, we do it because we have a deep need, an innate drive, indeed; a spiritual call from our most essential self to express our viewpoint.

I have learned to accept that the creative life feels to me like a spiritual quest, propelling me forward into the unknown. An incredibly magnificent adventure that is as confounding and confronting as it is elevating and affirming.

I began my project knowing it was time for me to make my next album. It was January 2020, and I was coming off the release of album number 2, a Kate Bush cover album called Naked Kate.

It had been close to 2 years since I had written any material of my own, and little did I know at that time that the act of immersing myself in understanding Kate Bush’s music had completely transformed my own by giving me a broader vocabulary.

By increasing my vocabulary, I found that it loosened my grip on process, because I had more choices, and could play with ideas in more innovative ways.

However, I also remember sitting down in my recording studio, ready to write, being overcome with the terrifying realization that due to my transformation as an artist, the way I produced my first album, Dream Dance, was no longer viable or possible for me. I was sickeningly and profoundly stuck.

So, what was I going to do now?

I say that creativity feels like a spiritual quest, because there are many times when all you have to go on is faith.

Dejected, I went into my garden and entreated the Universe to please help me find the co-producer I needed to work with so that I could bring this music to the next level that it needed to be.

Three weeks later, I was called out of the blue to record a session for a songwriter, and sitting at the console was the exact co-producer I needed. I knew it the moment I walked into the room.

When I’m feeling a bit less lofty about it all, creativity also often occurs for me like I’m merely project managing all the tiny blips of insights that come through, drawing them down, and arranging all the disparate puzzle pieces into a cohesive image.

Oh, there’s that root word again: image.

I, mage. Interesting.

As far as I’m concerned, creativity is, without question, a magical act. Because as much as it ultimately ends up being a very large and quite messy project to manage, those blips of insights, those inspirations, those passionate moments of desire to express an idea … all seemingly emanate from nothing. One moment they are not here. The next instant they are.

The definition of a mage.

Which conjures up another crucial aspect of the ongoing spiritual quest of creativity: the practice of setting yourself up so that you can receive.

In my circle of musicians, there is a T-shirt floating around which reads, “I can’t, I have rehearsal”.

We all laugh at it in recognition because it’s so true. While others may be out and about socializing, or lounging, or playing sports, we can’t, because we must constantly make the space to hone our skills so that our work can come through.

If I were to concoct my own first tenet of creativity, it would be: Create the space for creativity to occur. And while we’re at it, let’s concoct a second one: Allow it to occur. Three is a sacred number, so let’s just add a third: Recognize when it does occur. OK, and now the fourth tenet is coming clearly into focus: Act on it. Stepping back now to look at my four rules, they all appear equally weighted to me. But nothing will happen at all without dedicating yourself to the first one: Create the space for creativity to occur. That can be in any form, and sometimes it can take a while to figure out what that means for you. For me, it means first and foremost to set aside unassailable time that is so sacred and inviolate, nothing will preempt it. And to guard it with all that I have. It’s the “I can’t, I have rehearsal” T-shirt. And in that space that I have now created, I have an empty container. Since Nature hates a vacuum, I have now graciously set myself up to allow this container to be filled. Would quantum physicists consider this discipline “manipulation”? Tangentially, I learned that once I created this guarded space, an interesting shift happened in my day-to-day consciousness. Openings for inspiration were starting to bubble up in my awareness from out of nowhere, in service to the large, empty container that I knew needed filling. It’s similar to the well-known adage that once you decide on what kind of automobile you’re interested in acquiring, you start seeing that same model everywhere. When I have my perpetual creative territory marked out, I begin to receive inspiration from all sides: the turn of a phrase in a book I’m reading, a comment in a podcast, an image in an art book I’m perusing, a song on the radio, a scene in a movie, or a bird showing up in my garden. Once I realized this dynamic was happening, I very soon learned how important the second and third rules, “Allow it to occur” and “Recognize when it does” are. Because rather than brushing these microseconds of a flash of insight away as superfluous, I pay attention. And grab onto them; give them meaning. A very spiritual practice of awareness. Elizabeth Gilbert writes in her book Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear that creative ideas are akin to a fleeing animal, and if you don’t reach out to capture the tip of their tail as they rush by you, someone else will. Which leads to my fourth tenet: Act on it. If you’re grocery shopping and suddenly you get a flash of insight, stop, take notice, take out your notepad, or your mobile phone, and record it. I have made the mistake too many times of excitedly thinking: “Oh, this is so good, I’ll remember it!” And then, of course, it’s gone forever, for someone else to nab and make their own. It means getting out of bed sometimes in the middle of the night to record what just came to you. Carrying some sort of note-taking device everywhere you go, just in case. Turning off your distractions to sit quietly in the emptiness to let it be what it is, and seeing what arises. Intentionally priming the pump sometimes with something you know inspires you if you feel completely dry. Excusing yourself from the room to go to a private place to jot down your idea that the conversation just sparked. (I have huddled in many bathrooms, public and private, quietly singing a phrase or two into my phone.) It’s choosing your actions to best serve your art. And that is what I ultimately experience as creative spiritual practice. It becomes a lifestyle.

Where the collecting of the ideas and inspirations may feel like a fascinating treasure hunt at times, the “project management” of assembling them into cohesive lyrics or songs or paintings or prose can feel like completing a multifaceted puzzle…

But unfortunately, one with some puzzle pieces whose oblique shapes don’t fit anywhere, making it a little more challenging.

I feel the call to focus on the stage of wrestling the ideas into form deep within my body and have learned to heed it. It feels almost like an itch, a sense of momentum stirring. I usually start with music first, having a groove or a feel in my inner ear that attracts me or that I desire to explore. When the itch appears in that form, I will often go into my studio and lay in a basic rhythm loop to start vocally improvising against. Once I find melodic snatches I like, I will lay out the syntax of how many syllables I need to fill the melodic lines by drawing a map of underlines for each syllable on paper. Then it becomes an artistic word game of finding the right words with the right letter counts and meanings and syllabic meters to express my theme.

It was one of the insights I did learn making my first album that remained with me for this one: rhythm alone is a really good prompt for me. However, it isn’t the only one.

Harmony can be, too. Some of the songs came in response to hearing a harmonic change over the airwaves in a store, or from my computer while working on something else, where something in the chord changes strike a resonance in me. In the case of inspiration coming while I was deeply entrenched in writing the book, I heard an instrumental song on Spotify that made me leap up from my computer, walk over to my keyboard in the studio, and write the entire melody and chord changes in a 5 minute download.

In that case, I had one lyric phrase that came through simultaneously with the music: “Don’t let this moment go”. That was all I knew at the time. I had the melody, I had the harmony, now I needed to complete my lyrical word game puzzle. I had no theme in mind for this particular song; it emerged as the lyrics did; the sculpture in the stone.

I could describe the genesis of each song, each chapter, but that would be tedious, I believe. The point I am attempting to make is to simply be open to however the puzzle will be assembled. Because each creation is unique and will make it clear what needs to be born. Our job as the caretaker of these delicate fledglings is to pay attention to what they need.

Some never make it past the idea stage. Some make it through that first milestone, but then it becomes apparent that they are one of the obtuse puzzle pieces that you just can’t make fit. It all becomes part of the exploit of creative life.

Which brings me back to the adventure of the “Blue Jay (That Summer’s Day)” song, where I followed all the rules I just laid out above. I had perceived the itch, feeling some sort of inspiration coming, and acted on it, setting myself up in the garden on my teak bench, tea cup and notebook in hand, expectantly waiting for lightning to strike.

And nothing happened.

I of course responded first by going through my usual epithets of questioning my self-worth accompanied by accusations of delusions of grandeur, when, as I write in the book:

“Then I had an idea. An actual idea, which was so thrilling in the face of all the nothingness, I went with it.

I decided to just dive deep into the nothingness. Embrace it fully. Have no attachment to anything. Get out of my expectations, and just be with it, without judgment or drama or betrayal or any of my usual nonsense.

And that’s when it happened.

In my release of all expectations, I allowed a random thought to direct me: “Maybe some music will inspire you” and so I picked up my phone to press play.

Like magic, “Rocket’s Tail” by Kate Bush came up and started playing. (I will get into the stunning synchronicity of THIS song being the one that appeared a little later. . .)

Then the next random, undirected insight came: “Why don’t you just start writing exactly what is happening right now?”

OK, I will . . . So I shut off the song.

“Mmmm mmmm mmmm

That summer’s day

Sitting quietly

Under the canopy

Wrestling something out from nothing

I randomly press “Rocket’s Tail”

And turn it up too loud”

In my imagination on the bench that warm, sunny July day, I knew immediately that the next section of the song would be an instrumental of some sort. But I didn’t know what, exactly.

So as I darted in and out of present time, projecting myself into the future to try to excitedly discern what this instrumental was going to be, and returning to the here and now on the teak bench under the willow tree, I reminded myself that what I am actually supposed to be doing right now is simply be present.

Simple, but not easy.

And then, Nature stepped in to help.

“Look! Here comes a Blue Jay

Screaming at me in a tree

Darting and diving

Scrapping and crying

In excruciating disharmony

He shatters this moment

Into thousands and thousands

Of fractals and fractures

Of glistening shards and sparks”

And from the broken shards

I pick out a fragment

While he screams at me

Over and over and over

And over and over and over

Calling in his conspirator

A cacophonous pas de deux

And bebop noise improvisation

Incessant and demanding

Up and down

Here and there

Bah doo dah

Boo doop

Bah doo dah

Bah doo dah boo dah dup

Boo doo dah dee

I look closely at my shard

A sparkling piece of Time

Glistening now in my hand

There is something here in nothing

It fills the air with its sound

I hear it all around

And it’s when I start to write

“That summer’s day”

That I notice the deafening stillness

And that the Jays have both

Flown away”

Blue Jay, That Summer’s Day  – NYMPHYA

So… it turns out the blank canvas maybe isn’t so blank.

And maybe by following the 4 tenets I just told you about, it ended up being exactly the ‘manipulation’ I needed.

As I began to project manage and draw down the lyrics and the melodies and arrangements of all of the eclectic music on What Have I Forgotten?, I very soon began to notice that a theme was emerging: Each song was about a treasured spiritual principle I had uncovered in my 20 years of practice in the Western Mystery traditions. I looked at that and thought, “Hmmm, OK”.

Then I started to sequence the material.

As I write in the introduction to the companion book:

“When you sequence an album, you want to create an experience for the listener that carries them through from the beginning to the end, shows off each song at its best, has variety, tension and release, some drama, and keeps the listener’s interest flowing. It’s an iterative and fun process; almost like putting together a set list for a live show.

After trying out multiple sequences and taking them for a spin (literally; I took each version out for a drive only to keep changing it until I got it right) I was finally able to sit back in satisfaction and look over the winning sequence.

And that’s when I had an absolutely shocking revelation: The individual themes of this set of sequenced songs represented each phase of what is known in the Ancient Mysteries as Spiritual Alchemy.

Not only that, but the songs were in the exact order of the Spiritual Alchemical journey.

And then I had the next (maybe even more) shocking revelation: “I need to write a book to explain all of this.”

That moment was the genesis of the book, which propelled the project to a whole other level. It was the natural outpouring of the creation, itself, asking for more expression. One that I would have never conceived of until I arrived at that place in time.

Like the Blue Jay moment, which I eventually understood to correspond with the Distillation phase of the Spiritual Alchemical process:

“The 6th stage of the alchemical journey is the Distillation phase, which is the beginning of greater spiritual awareness, where we start to understand the importance of the divine while accepting our egoic limitations with non-judgment.

This is the turning point from being stuck in more “earthly” or “lower” energies to “heavenly” or “higher”. Chemically, Distillation is the boiling and condensation of the fermented solution so that it becomes purified. “It rises from Earth to Heaven and descends again to Earth” is how it is described in the Emerald Tablet.

Distillation takes us into the exalted territory where our lowest, base emotions are not able to pursue us. It is when we are all that we truly are and can be, spiritually.

Which is why being in the Now is the ultimate expression of Distillation. When we are in absolute present time we are connected to all that is, the one mind. We are resonant with it, and in our highest state.”

There seems to be a point where what we create takes on its own life. All we need to do is react accordingly and lovingly. I have consistently noticed that once the initial impetus is allowed to spring forth, there also seems to be a logarithmic momentum that occurs as the work matures and starts demanding its needs be met.

We simply need to tend to it until we know it’s complete.

To get out of our own way.

And help the something that is in nothing fully bloom.

Yes, seeing it through from the project management side can sometimes feel like drudgery… how many times do I need to rewrite this passage, or arrange these drums, or tweak this melody? Ugh … I just want it to be DONE!

And yet we persevere …. Because we must. That is also perhaps the greatest aspect of this spiritual quest called creativity.

When we manipulate “it” in just the right way: create the space, allow it to occur, recognize when it is occurring, and then act on it, we are gifting ourselves the possibility for our inspirations to be realized.

It is gracious, it is exhilarating, it is ruthless, it is unrelenting.

And I wouldn’t have it any other way because I’m not quite ready to throw out my threadbare “I can’t, I have rehearsal” T-shirt.