When I felt closeness with the central coast in those later years of grad school and weird phase in-between Cal Poly and Big Sur, my imagination drifted to the bigger mythological/philosophical aspects of the work in my thesis.

Creativity involves divergent and convergent processes. Divergence can be expansive or fragmenting, just as convergence can be unifying or homogenizing. It’s hard to map divergence and convergence to source and sink, because open-endedness can be a motivator or a hindrance, just as focusing can be a motivator or hindrance. There are obstacles to creativity, and the obstacles to creativity are the obstacles to the human spirit. I would say the obstacles to creativity are the obstacles to human flourishing, so in addressing the blocks to creativity you actually also address the evils in humanity.

People tend to think creativity is simply idea-generation, novelty. Creativity is just the buzzword for the whole process of developing something, from idea to completed product. That’s not the same as the creative sparking when you’re looking at a blank canvas. The creative sparking is just part of the process, it’s a kind of divergent process. I don’t want to get into the nitty gritty of the nature of creativity, because I already did that at length in my thesis and I’m exhausted writing pretty much to the air in this blog. Creativity is not a snowflake quality, it often has very critical elements. Most serious artists are quite technical about their work. They aren’t drifting around in lala-land most of the time. They do that some of the time. It’s important, but it’s only part of the process. Gestation is very important, and it should not be rejected. Criticism is also very important, because improvement relies on that. Deep in creativity is an alliance between what we typically think of as soft femininity and hard masculinity. The nonlinear and the linear are in mutual relationship, communion in creativity. Life and death are interwoven in small ways in the creative process. The creative process in human beings is simply a semi-intentional version of biological evolution. Creativity and evolution are a single thing, it’s just that creativity is something we consciously partake in (AND who is there to say that evolution is unconscious or lacks something akin to awareness?!). “We are co-creators with God.” Jung would say that God is the collective unconscious of the material underworld. I think that is incredibly interesting and powerful, but since I’m alive after Jung, I have the luxury of picking at his errors and trying to improve upon them. I think equating God with the material unconscious plays into the old dualism causing us to split from divinity in the first place. God must transcend all parameters, including the opposition to parameters. Maybe I’m deeply a Christian, believing an absolutely unfathomable reality can incarnate into a human representation. I think the idea that humans are made in the image of God insofar as we have the ability to intentionally create that differentiates us from all the other organisms on this planet really gets at something. I think it is outright ridiculous to weaponize the notion of the imago dei to create echo chambers of simplistically egotistical, self-referential understanding of divinity, people who prejudge everyone and assume they are right constantly, even by feigning at humility. Those people have no sensitivity. Those people are part of all of us, we are all torn between Pharisee and Gentile, Cain and Abel, chimpanzee and bonobo. Incidentally, when I was in college, the blocks to the human spirit kept cropping up in different areas of life, again and again, there were vortices in the spirit. I honed in on creativity as a basis, a set of least terms for the existential problems of being human.

The spiritual forces at play in creativity were in the forefront of my mind when I was in grad school, but it proved very difficult to maintain awareness of those force while also compressing them down into the context of aerospace engineering, with awareness to the loss of information in that compression. Awareness of the loss of information in rationalization is actually key to understanding the essential nature of creativity. I was applying creativity to itself, which internally contorted me quite a bit. The links in my mind I was straining to maintain and develop were easily swept aside or misconstrued by the people around me. It was very hard to get a step past our current societal biases, which affirm all sorts of classical dualisms: intuition/feeling and reasoning/thinking are opposed, minds and matter are opposites, etc. I was trying to get into a form of nondualism, where there are aspects of profundity that are lost in the structuring of information, but those information structures are not inherently opposed to their deeper roots. Is it possible to compress nonlinear associations into linear formalizations without causing an implosion of the “energizing complexity” that is in the nonlinear? In other words, can you truly talk about your feelings? Can art present your inner self? Can science be an art form? If so, how? How can we simplify information without causing a rift between the representation and the represented? Can we go beyond representation into pure information? Is the movement of information a physical process? Is there a mind-like quality to matter? Posing these questions on paper is actually tiring to me. My mind shuts down with fatigue. The existential weight used to be a very depressive force, because my life was in sequence with my ability to project the ideas into a mathematically elegant solution text. I could not graduate until I worked myself out of this corner in the form of a thesis, and I felt very helpless, because a vast portion of myself is totally contingent on outside events, or so it was back then. And I felt I was doing so because I was stuck in my parents’ unacknowledged fantasies, I was living out the reconciliation of their shadow selves. I didn’t want to be stuck in the karma of perfectionism, of someone else’s psychic dilemmae. Thank God I pulled through. Life is a funny thing.

The challenge of relating vast expansive mysticism to words is incredibly confusing, unless you’re under your own illusions. To take that span (between the mystical and the rational) and then relate it to aerospace was again very challenging. I was trying to first span a huge philosophical problem and then span that philosophical problem to aerospace, on the other end of the humanities-STEM divide. Lots of spans aggregated on top of each other. It was compounding, fractaling. The complexity kept stacking and stacking. People run from complexity because the spirit realm, terra incognita will begin to tear you apart if you spend any length of time there. But as most epics go, you spend long enough there, and it either kills you or it kills you and revives you. My experience showed that there were meta-patterns emerging, even if I felt like I was in the heart of a roaring radioactive riptide. These meta-patterns were critical to pay attention to. They opened all sorts of doors. My private experience was a window into all these other worlds. The seeds of the world’s wisdom are all inside oneself, and sometimes they leap beyond yourself and link you to things outside, serendipity and synchronicity start becoming ordinary. The world becomes a grand musical machine. Patterns go from appearing as mere common inferences to appearing as being generated by common forces, and sometimes these produced instantaneous results regardless of space. Strong relationships become telepathic, precognition becomes more common. It’s not merely sensitive pattern sensing, sometimes there is a profound dirth of evidence for why I knew someone was about to text or call me. People have dreams of their loved ones being in danger, and at that very hour their loved one across the world was in trouble and cried out for help. Animals know to go uphill to avoid a tsunami even before the earthquake happens. Empiricists and atheists get hung up on this as superstition because spiritual people love to split the spirit from matter, as if the supernatural is non-physical. It’s not. It’s simply less perceivable. If you split supernatural from natural, you get to believe whatever you want, and that’s BS when it comes to scientific truth. There are, quote-on-quote, “supernatural” forces that are real, natural processes that can be observed, but might be opaque to prediction. Predictability is a terrible precondition for acknowleding something’s reality. If you believe in that tenant, then you should act like nothing is real except your stupid little game world where you’re God. Fuck that. So-called psychic phenomenon are not breaking space and time, they’re simply folding space and time. There is natural causation happening, it is sometimes based on familiarity and pattern recognition, but sometimes it is special insight with no precedent for a rhythm, like an earthquake or meteor strike, etc.

All of this is to say that relating the “spiritual” domain to engineering academia is dauting. How the hell was I supposed to convince engineers that psychic powers and loving Jesus and the Buddha as two emanations of an underlying creative rainbow serpent mythologized by cultures around the world as being projections of the psychological component of evolutionary biology existing prior to the emergence of both sentience and life were important to aerospace engineering procedures?

Some timeless themes keep coming back for me. One of those is the mythic significance of fluid turbulence (as an avatar of chaos in general). Before I go for today, I want to jot down my thoughts about there being three aspects of the storm vs sea myth. In one, it is a primordial source (storm) vs sink (ocean) dichotomy. In another, it is an expansive dynamic (male storm god) vs an oppressive normalization (neurotic Freudian maternal ocean, Tiamat). In another, it is a rebellious arrogant ideologue (mind/storm) vs a unifying continuum (body/sea). The weaving of these three together has maybe not been done to make a fourth interpretation, and that’s where I think I’m heading. A myth of how the storm and sea can be seen classically as types of cosmic processes, in a cycle from preconscious bliss to victory/rebellion, and the restoration of the consequential desolation.


June 4, 2023
Lemaca, California