It began with a book, many decades ago
At the start of the 1970s, a friend (also named Jack) gave me a copy of The Dog-Exercising Machine: A Study of Children as Inventors, one of the early works by lateral thinking originator Edward de Bono.
This delightful book sparked my interest in the creative process and prompted a long-running and wide-ranging inquiry into how the new comes into being, beyond models and methods, and how to convert US President Woodrow Wilson’s widely quoted “You are here to enrich the word” dictum into practical action.. The inquiry continues, with extensive study, thinking, discussion, experimentation and real world application made possible by my work as an innovation consultant and business advisor.
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Many more books, then just a few
During the 1970s and 80s I built an extensive collection of non-fiction books covering a wide range of business-related topics such as strategy, leadership, marketing, problem solving, creativity, innovation and organisational change.
The collection also included a large number of titles of the sort you’d find in the Mind–Body–Spirit section of a decent bookshop. Authors included Alan Watts, Meg Wheatley, Caroline Myss, Peter Russell, Fritjof Capra, and Lau Tzu.
Then one day I decided it was time for the books to find new homes, and sold most of them to Watkins Books. Of the remaining few, these four occupy a corner of my desk:
There are many threads linking the four titles.
Both Talking with Angels and Think and Grow Rich! stress the importance of personal purpose, faith (the secular kind), creative imagination and focused action.
In Talking with Angels, the created world and the creating world correspond with the tonal and the nagual (pdf) described by don Juan Matus in the Carlos Castaneda books and discussed by Tomas in Creative Victory.
Napoleon Hill’s fingerprints can be found on Edward Matchett’s works, and I have hard evidence that Matchett’s later writings were inspired in part by Talking with Angels. I don’t know if Matchett was familiar with Castaneda’s writings, but this is highly likely.
Curiously, there are echoes of the Angels’ teachings in the first edition of Creative Action, which was published in 1975, the year before Dialogues avec l’ange, the French language forerunner to Talking with Angels, appeared in print. This is a mystery, yet my entire relationship with Talking with Angels is beyond rational explanation.
Breakthrough
The next diagram illustrates a fundamental Talking with Angels principle, and Newcreate would not exist had I never discovered it.
I made an intuitive leap from the seven souls (mineral, plant, animal etc.) to the Hindu system of subtle energy centres called chakras. View the Wikipedia entry for Chakra. Traditionally, these are numbered from the bottom (first or root chakra) to the top (seventh or crown chakra).
Later, I reinterpreted the chakras as a set of seven creative powers, located as illustrated below. The work required to fully understand the function of each power was carried out over the course of several years.
After a long gestation, Newcreate is born
The locations of the seven powers match those of the chakras with the exception of Realisation, which I reassigned to the pelvic floor muscles as proxies for the reproductive organs. Also known as PC muscles, these are the ones that can be used to stop the flow of urine.
When the newcreator is living in accord with his or her Intent — a heartfelt desire to enrich the world through unconditional service — the seven creative powers can combine to form three superpowers: power to transcend the mundane, power to create the new, and power to enrich the world with value, meaning and joy.
This is an embodied metaphor. It should not be taken too literally.
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How to put Newcreate into practice
Seven creative powers and three superpowers
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