The Creative Act: A Way of Being
by Rick Rubin, co-founder of Def Jam Records | Neil Strauss made a contribution of some kind
Reviewed in The Guardian | Order from The Guardian Bookshop
A quick flip through this glorious book may give the impression that there is no underlying structure to its 78 Areas of Thought. This is not the case, as a thorough reading will reveal Rubin’s four phase approach: 1) Seeds; 2) Experimentation; 3) Crafting; 4) Completion. His ideas resonate strongly with mine, there’s a quotable passage on every page, and I found little to disagree with. As an object, the book is a work of art and a joy to hold. The image — curiously similar to 
— appearing on the hard cover was designed by Pentagram, and the typography makes for easy and enjoyable reading.
Rick Rubin: The 60 Minutes Interview (13:22)Many famed music producers are known for a particular sound that has its day and then ages out. Rick Rubin is known for something else: creating a space where artists of all different genres and traditions can home in on who they really are and what they really offer. He has made a practice of helping people transcend their self-imposed expectations in order to reconnect with a state of innocence from which the surprising becomes inevitable.
Over the years, as he has thought deeply about where creativity comes from and where it doesn’t, he has learned that being an artist isn’t about your specific output; it’s about your relationship to the world. Creativity has a place in everyone’s life, and everyone can make that place larger. In fact, there are few more important responsibilities.
The Creative Act is a beautiful and generous course of study that illuminates the path of the artist as a road we all can follow. It distils the wisdom gleaned from a lifetime’s work into a luminous reading experience that puts the power to create moments – and lifetimes – of exhilaration and transcendence within closer reach for all of us.
Source: The Guardian Bookshop
Creative Action
A book by Edward Matchett.
Creative Action is not a method or a process. Rather, it is Edward Matchett’s original term for what he later named media, the creative impulse that streams into the manifest from the unmanifest through the gap in time. In the Carlos Castaneda books, don Juan Matus calls it intent. In Think and Grow Rich!, Napoleon Hill calls it Infinite Intelligence. I call it the G-field (generative field).
Every human being has a creative potentiality greater than he can ever tap. The fact of material existence in a material world is the greatest of his constraints to true freedom. The limitations of his particular personality further inhibit his expression. At any one moment, his mechanical identifications can result in virtual enslavement by his circumstances, without the vision of a better future to which he might aspire.
Behind these apparent constraints to creative expression lie possibilities for freedom. Creative Action is the intelligent search for and proper use of such opportunities. When an opportunity is grasped, and responsibility taken, then the Action has its maximum effect. But Creative Action is really a continuous flow of creative acts; it generates a force that can heal divisions, make better use of all resources, solve urgent problems and bring more meaning into all achievements and pursuits.
By bringing forth people’s latent potentialities in a business, home or social situation, all kinds of breakthroughs become possible. The chief value of Creative Action is that it can bring about an understanding of the essential needs and priorities in a complex world, bringing as its fruits increased harmony and fulfilment. The principles can be summarised as follows:
- Action extends consciousness, capability and attainment only where it involves a genuine personal sacrifice.
- Action succeeds to the extent that it is needed by and benefits the community as a whole.
- Action succeeds to the extent that it complements and gives direction to efforts, impulses, desires and concerns already existing within the immediate and wider community.
- Action succeeds to the extent that people can identify with it: thus making that action the true extension or projection of themselves.
- Action succeeds to the extent that the negative as well as the positive aspects of human nature are recognised and taken into account.
- Action succeeds to the extent that it is a genuine service, well beyond the notions of “doing good”.
- Action succeeds to the extent that it becomes at one with the primal creative process, which is active behind and within all the affairs of nature and of man.
Edward Matchett, The Principles for Creative Action, in Creative Action, First Edition (Turnstone Books, 1975)
Creative Victory
A book by Tomas, inspired by the works of Carlos Castaneda.
Review of Creative Victory by Thriftbooks.com User, 26 March 2010 | View source
I’m finding it hard to figure the best way to open this review. Tomas is one of the most, if not the most, impeccable warrior of the Toltec Path I have had the pleasure to read from in a long while.Not much is known about this man, excepting what the publishers have cared to share. His other work, The Promise of Power: Reflections on the Toltec Warriors’ Dialogue from the Collected Works of Carlos Castaneda, is a substantial bibliographic reference to the work of Castaneda, truly remarkable is an understatement because only somebody who immersed deeply within the work of Castaneda, so as to realize that Castaneda was but a vehicle to a purpose, could come up with such a thing.
Now here comes this book, Creative Victory, which an entirely different matter, this book here is indeed only for the learned in the Toltec ways. As you read it, it will go directly to your left side awareness, there is little here, if anything at all, that you will be able to digest using your right side awareness. Therefore it stands to reason that most people will prefer something more “clear”, or more organized, and will wander elsewhere looking for more “accurate, informative, and useful sources of Toltec knowledge”. Which is normal by the way, I want to empathize this again:
This book is not for everyone, this book is not for newcomers to the Toltec ways, you will barely find something here that you will be able to waste your life away rationalizing upon.
Ultimately, As I write this review, trying my best to pay a dim homage to a man who indeed is second only to Castaneda, I’ve come to realize that what is hard is not to speak about this book, what’s hard is to find “justiceable” words to define what Tomas stands for. Together with his true to the path anonymity, comes this, quoting directly from the book:
“As with The Promise of Power, I intend for this work to stand as a payment to what the Toltecs call “the account of the spirit of man”
There you have it, it does not get much more impeccable than this, instead of looking to fill his pockets, funding forprofit organizations, claiming the legacy of mankind for himself, coming with schemes to claim superiority over others, in other words, instead of looking spending his creative power to devise clever ways to fill his own bank account, he is looking to make a “payment” to The Spirit
I could name more than one author out there, writing about the Toltec path, preaching to be impeccable warriors, they all could learn a thing or two from this man, yet, naming them in this review would be a vastly unjustifiable act towards an impeccable warrior of the Toltec path.
This is the work of a truly impeccable warrior of the Toltec path.
Need I say more?
Innovation Methods Mapping: DeMystifying 80+ Years of Innovation Process Design
by GK Van Patter and Elizabeth Pastor, co-founders of design firm Humantific
Click on image for a preview and to place an order
[Innovation Methods Mapping] provides a travel guide for touring the wide and so far mostly uncharted area of design and innovation methods. The work reveals the great variety and – at the same time – the striking commonalities of the process models. An invaluable resource for learning and research in design.Dr. Wolfgang Jonas, Professor of Research in Design, Braunschweig University of Art
The Red Hand Files
Talking with Angels
Talking with Angels is a collection of esoteric teachings of great potential value to Newcreators.
From the Newcreator’s perspective, the main themes running through the Angels’ teachings are these:
- As humans, our task is to become a conscious link between the creating world (the unmanifest, source, the eternal) and the created world (the manifest, matter, the temporal). Some of the book’s explanatory diagrams (see here) led to the discovery of the seven creative powers.
- Remain true to your task (i.e. your intent)
- Do not fix what is broken or rearrange what already exists. Instead, create the new.
- We have a seventh sense: Light-Awareness (the sixth is a union of the five, which some would call intuition). Light-Awareness is our ability to perceive and co-create with what Napoleon Hill calls Infinite Intelligence, what Edward Matchett calls media (etc) and what I am calling the G-field. Read more about Light-awareness.
- Time is not what we think it is. Read more here: The truly new comes from nothing.
Tantra Spirituality and Sex
by Osho (Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh)
The subject matter is not what you might imagine, and it is wholly relevant to the art of enriching the world with value, meaning and joy. Here are some excerpts:
Your thinking part and your feeling part have become two, and you are identified with the thinking part, not with the feeling part.
Thinking is analytical. It divides, splits things. Feeling unites, synthesizes, makes things one.
AbeBooks (new but expensive) | Amazon UK (used but may not be in stock)We divide time into three parts — past, present and future. That division is false, absolutely false. Time is really past and future. The present is not part of time. The present is part of eternity. That which has passed is time; that which is to come is time. That which is, is not time, because it never passes — it is always here. The now is always here — it is always here! This now is eternal.
Read more: The truly new comes from nothing
Theory U and Presencing
A theory and associated practice originated by Otto Scharmer and colleagues. This is not one of my sources but there is much of value here. See also u-school: our tools.
Think and Grow Rich!
A book by Napoleon Hill.
This book contains some profound insights, such as Infinite Intelligence, sex transmutation and the two kinds of imagination.Think and Grow Rich! was written by Napoleon Hill in 1937 and promoted as a personal development and self-improvement book. He claimed to be inspired by a suggestion from business magnate and later-philanthropist Andrew Carnegie. First published during the Great Depression, the book has sold more than 15 million copies. It remains the biggest seller of Napoleon Hill’s books. BusinessWeek magazine’s Best-Seller List ranked it the sixth best-selling paperback business book 70 years after it was published. Think and Grow Rich! is listed in John C. Maxwell’s A Lifetime “Must Read” Books List. While the book’s title and much of the writing concerns increasing income, the author insists that his philosophy can help people succeed in any line of work, to do and be anything they can imagine.
Source: Wikipedia — Think and Grow Rich.
Think and Grow Rich! website page | Download pdf of entire book
Toltec School
Dedicated to the teachings of the Toltecs of Ancient Mexico, graciously brought to us by Carlos Castaneda, Florinda Donner, Taisha Abelar and Armando Torres, thanks to the impeccable generosity of the naguals Juan Matus, Julian Osorio, Elias Ulloa and their lineage; as well as the nagual woman doña Silvia Magdalena, nagual don Melchor Ramos and don Berna of the ticis lineage of healer-sorcerers.
Toltec School
The Totality of Oneself: the tonal and the nagual
Excerpted from Tales of Power, by Carlos Castaneda | pdf; 20 pages
With his characteristic wry humour, don Juan Matus explains the nature of the tonal (i.e. mundane world) and the nagual (primal world).
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