What inspires us?

Okay, maybe.

I’m still stuck however trying to figure out why on earth I keep coming back to this…

"He was like a man who wanted to change all; and could not; so burned with his impotence; and had only me, an infinitely small microcosm to convert or detest. " John Fowles

…all the time.

And then the part where I take my own point of view seriously.

To wit:

I really don’t know [in a free will world] whether I might someday come across a new experience, a new relationship or a new source of information and knowledge [like a post here] that does manage to tug/yank me up out the hole I’m in.

Correction:

You have your Paul Simon lyrics, I have mine.

You obviously haven’t taken into consideration that you are making it about you. You try to turn every thread into a thread about you. It doesn’t matter what subject is chosen, you make it about you. You are simply a plague of narcissistic selfishness, and you can’t bear it when people are not talking about you.

This is the last time I will react to your posts.

I have been wondering whether the act of imitation after being inspired by someone or something has a larger effect on our behaviour than we notice. That could be the reason why we look for inspiration as a means to preparing ourselves for situations, for encouraging ourselves in times of difficulty, or for finding direction when we feel lost.

This is then the value of games, of families, of drama, of music, of traditions and rites. They all pick us up in a way and carry us along in times when we need assistance. Uninspired people are often perceived as being bland and grey, unmotivated and boring. They fail to help us feel as though we are in flow, “In flow, you are consciously aware of and choosing your behaviours. There is nothing “passive” about being in a state of flow. Your mental and emotional resources are being completely devoted to the task in which you are engaging. You will find that your behaviours are focused, deliberate, and intentional in nature”. We need inspiration to move, act and find focus and direction, which is why we look for inspiration in whatever way we can get it.

_
The worst… is when there’s nothing to inspire Us.

…a clean slate, having to start from scratch… now that takes a lot of effort and imagination.

Yes, that is true. Sometimes you have to go looking for something. In a way it is good that there is YouTube and other sources, where you can find other people trying to find or talking about inspiration, or songs, music, poetry, and other things. Of course, you can also get lost in all that too. That is why I find a certain amount of silence and solitude helpful to drown it all out for a while.

Flow is the essence of Being.

felix dakat

True but it goes deeper than that, I believe. I think it just becomes suppressed in many because of all of that existential angst we experience.

I love violin music and I have always loved Joshua Bell from the first time I heard him play. Puccini and Joshua Bell, especially O Mio Babbino Caro, well, there is some music, when in listening, I have thought could have been responsible for the creation of the Universe. I am kidding of course but who knows. :angelic-blueglow:

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MHLzoyTrD0w[/youtube]

No, it was not that. I was always very aware of that for the most part. I used to sneak outside at night when I was really young and look up at the stars and silently communicate with them. No words. None necessary except to say “How beautiful you are!” I have just always been open, at the core of my being (or my brain), to recognizing what I experience as “real” beauty.

I always somehow felt that “The Sound of Silence” was actually about the lack of intimate (non-sexual) conversation that we people engage in…every time I listened to those words, that is what I experienced - the message I received from it.

We will do anything to hide ourselves, not to reveal ourselves. Idle, boring chitchat which only creates such a sense of loss and meaninglessness within us. Why? We are incapable of allowing ourselves to just bubble up inside and reveal who we really are; albeit we do have to be careful about that.

Isn’t Facebook wonderful? Our way to salvation. lol

Note to others:

Decide for yourselves what to make of this.

Once again, he simply refuses to actually engage the points I make above. Why? Because, in my view, he has enough intelligence to grasp – if only subconsciously/unconsciously? – that if he does go there he risks sliding down into the hole with me.

And the sheer gall in ever and always turning our exchanges into points about me of accusing me of doing it instead!!

And now – once again! – he is insisting it is the “last time” he will react to my posts.

Only he has still yet to grasp why.

Keeping me out of his head, no doubt, is the best way to keep his Christian God in there instead. Only, again, with Bob, I still have enough respect for his intelligence to not entirely give up hope that 1] he’ll come down into the hole with me or 2] he’ll come up with a way to bring me up out of it instead.

Just a hint from an admirer:

“There is no pit you cannot climb out of provided you make the right effort at the right place.” But you have to do the climbing yourself.

Bob,

Thank you for this passage. I had to read it a few times. That would seem to be the experience which I have when listening to certain types of music, et cetera, if I am understanding the passage.

What I experience could ALSO be compared to Martin Buber’s I and Thou. – my experience is of the I and Thou … believe it or not … as opposed to the experience of the I and It … I do not believe that God enters into this though.

It may not make any sense to some but it is what I experience…

[b]The subject-to-subject relation affirms each subject as having a unity of being. When a subject chooses, or is chosen by, the I-Thou relation, this act involves the subject’s whole being. Thus, the I-Thou relation is an act of choosing, or being chosen, to become the subject of a subject-to-subject relation. The subject becomes a subject through the I-Thou relation, and the act of choosing this relation affirms the subject’s whole being.

Buber says that the I-Thou relation is a direct interpersonal relation which is not mediated by any intervening system of ideas. No objects of thought intervene between I and Thou.1 I-Thou is a direct relation of subject-to-subject, which is not mediated by any other relation. Thus, I-Thou is not a means to some object or goal, but is an ultimate relation involving the whole being of each subject.[/b]

angelfire.com/md2/timewarp/buber.html

Yeah, this is Maia’s point too.

And, I suspect, noting my reaction to it with you is likely to be just as futile as noting it with her. And that is because both of you, in my own hopelessly subjective rooted in dasein opinion, have found your own rendition of the One True Spiritual Path.

With you, it’s not Bob’s Christian God I suspect but, with you [as with those like phyllo], I have yet to come even close to grasping how God and religion and spirituality play themselves out “for all practical purposes” when it comes down to you connecting the dots between morality here and now and there and immortality there and end.

And Maia almost never went beyond the one or two sentence “explanations” that she gave. In what, given my own hopelessly subjective rooted in dasein opinion, was always in the shallow end of the philosophical pool.

Anyway, yeah, ultimately each of us will be the one responsible for making that “right effort”. But given that we can clearly learn from each other’s experiences, we come into places like this in order to gain insights that “on our own” might never have even occurred to us.

You probably don’t even recognize how this “rugged individual” mythology is rooted as much in the historical advent of capitalism as in anything philosophy or religion or spirituality can provide us with.

I think that this kind of experience of music, or any concept that is expressed in some way that affects us, as “like entering into relation with another living individual” could explain where the perception of “God-experiences” that people have comes from. If you can be affected to that degree, it explains why people sense people in a room where they are on their own. It would explain visions and ideas, that come in the form of spirit. It also says that we are receptive in ways that we hadn’t imagined.

Yes, if we understand a creative transmission of sensibility from a work of art, a piece of music, or concepts that have a deep affective effect, as a metamorphosis of emotional feeling that is put into the production, it would effectively be a I-Thou encounter. Not of a single artist, but of the creative act.

So a piece of music is like a person. Learning a piece of music is like getting to know a person. Remove the simile and step into the imagination. The archetypes of the soul are persons. They speak to us through music. To learn to play or sing them is to come to embody them.

I think that all creative processes set archetypes free and make them accessible to us. The enchantment that may grow during the experience makes us receptive in a special way and is a form of inspiration born of embodying a creative process, whether human or natural.

:angelic-whiteflying:
:character-cookiemonster:

That’s all i could come up with.
Your post is deeply meaningful, though.

When nothing inspires,
it can be found,
deep within the recesses,
of a quiescent mind.

…eventually.

Well said …