Said Hayden, in a comment on my last:
“I continue to think about your comments, Vincent, on your “magical” experience and the whisper in your ear. I’d love to hear more about it directly. Not the abstract philosophy that flows from it, but what you remember of the experience itself.”
I didn’t know which experience she may have been talking about, but I promised to write more, taking as an example the latest whisperings—whether from angel, muse or unconscious mind, I cannot tell.
On 1st September I woke at 2.30am with an exciting idea that seemed important to record before I fell back to sleep and forgot it. Later, deciphering the almost illegible scrawl, I read “Life is an improvisation” in my notebook. Some of the excitement remained but I had to use a bit of “abstract philosophy”, dear Hayden, to make sense of it. I’m convinced that philosophy starts with feeling, not abstraction.
So, trying to reconstruct that feeling, I’d have to say something like this: “Nature is spontaneously creative. Just look around. First there was the Big Bang: now there’s all this. Or if you prefer, first there was Creation, as in Genesis, chapters 1 and 2: now there’s all this. It’s not the organized work of a Great Designer, but the best that a host of improvisers can do.” But it was more personal than that. I am part of Nature. Wasn’t this a message for me, to improvise more freely?
I still didn’t really know what it meant, if anything. A day or two later, worrying about a difficult situation, taking a walk to calm myself down, I glanced at my reflection in a shop-window on Desborough Road. “Life is an improvisation”, I told it. For a moment then, perhaps by the power of suggestion, I felt like a musician in a jazz band, caught in a clash of counterpoint; or like a pedestrian caught in the path of oncoming trams from two directions at once. What does he do? He improvises with a hop, skip and jump; or if he’s a musician, with some freshly-minted melodic phrase. In a trice, the slate of my worries was wiped clean with a damp cloth.
“Life is an improvisation.” So my phrase worked as a mantra, at least once. Did it make any sense, though? Even Evolution doesn’t constantly produce fresh melodies. Life depends more on continuity than 
on variation. Of the millions of species, how often does a new one appear, compared with those which go extinct? We see Nature repeating itself, mostly. In exactly the same way, I feel content, at this time in my life, with well-tried repeating patterns of sameness.
Improvisation is a survival trick, a creative Tourette’s tic to get us out of a rut. Nature took millions of years to perfect the slug, a placid creature which doesn’t have to improvise, and isn’t equipped to. A human does, and is.
A couple of nights later, the whispering was a single word: investment. Again I scribbled it in my notebook, so as not to forget.
The biggest ingredient of life, including human life, is investment, I mean a continuity of effort, without which very little can be achieved. If some Buddhist, say, preaches detachment at me, and proposes I live spontaneously in the here and now, I now feel equipped with an answer.
“Attachment is good, O Monk! A baby is attached to the mother, and vice versa. And after that, in adulthood, it is right to cherish and protect our investment, just as Nature does with its own.
“Yet you are right, there is no joy like spontaneity, nothing like letting Creation happen. For it does just happen. That is why I call it improvisation.”
a wayfarer’s notes 
“continuity” and “improvisation”
In daoism there is a related pair:
san = disintegrating
ning = coalescing
For them this is the creative process, depending on what we already have put together, and simultaneously destroying some (or nearly all) of it to create something new.
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Interesting, but I wonder how they arrived at this. What are the models in nature (including human nature)?
If for example you were to say that old vegetation rots (san) and new vegetation takes its place (ning), I'd argue that this is neither destruction nor creation. It's just an ordinary metamorphosis. Nothing new is created because what grows from seed is identical to the parent plant. What rots is identical to another plant which has not been destroyed.
Whereas investment and improvisation, it seems to me, are the two base elements which have created Nature from primal chaos, via evolution.
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Maybe my brain is not working well.
But to me it looks like you answered your own question. And perhaps you are not giving me a generous understanding of my word “destruction”. I know as well as you that energy is neither destroyed nor created.
Of course this is the kind of help that is useful for me in “improvising” some new approaches for conversations with Vincent.
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Sorry Raymond, my fault. I'm charging in as usual from complete ignorance. I cannot discover anything beyond you have said about san and ning. Are these alternative transliterations of yin and yang, by any chance?
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I enjoyed the personal argument in this post. As I read it I did feel that at times, you were trying to improvise just a bit too intensely. It sometimes brokered a flow, to use an investment term, rather than allowed it to happen.
Then again, I marvelled at your ability to wake and make an almost legible note of your sleeping thought, as such, to be able to work with it. I have often made a mental note in my sleep, remembered I had made that mental 'must do' but forgotten what it was.
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That-which-rots may be identical to it's brother-which-does-not-(yet)-rot – but – the “rot” itself, that magical transformation of stuff, will always differ from every other.
That's a law I just made up, so of course you can argue it.
I'm thinking, though, of those natural processes of decomposition, and how no two situations are exactly identical: moisture, sun, temperature, vigor of invading microorganisms, and the chance touch of a bee's knees against a petal, and the subsequent deposit of a random bit of biological material that she'd brushed against & picked up, elsewhere.
Two plants may be clonal twins, but they will decompose into different richnesses of life, that will subsequently decompose and feed yet other life, quite possibly growing further and further apart in identity.
Improvisation.
Two roses, deadheaded, fallen to the earth below have the capacity – indeed, the likelihood – of nurturing quite different colonies of life. It almost feels like a jazz riff as I contemplate the possibilities.
I've yet to search for that reference, Vincent. Will try to do so tonight or tomorrow.
Does this inspirational voice most often seem “other” or like a bit of wisdom from deep inside the self?
Two days ago, driving a bit fast on a country road at dusk, I had the sudden thought “Deer in the road” and hit my brake to slow, just as I crested at the top of the hill and saw them – 2 – standing in the road below me as it swooped down into a shallow valley.
A very satisfying angel-ridden moment.
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I shall never argue with any law you have just made up, Hayden. I respect your improvisation.
“Does this inspirational voice most often seem “other” or like a bit of wisdom from deep inside the self?”
Well, I don't know. I don't know if it is possible to know. One has a choice how one thinks of it.
I try to spend lots of time in the day (or indeed night) being passive to any kind of whispering. Often it is memory – being suddenly whisked back to something long ago, almost always in early childhood. And as for that, a psychoanalyst might have a ready explanation, but so do I. The experience that stays in the memory is the first discovery of something. If we are speaking of direct sensual experience, there are more firsts in early childhood than at any time later, I think.
When it's not memory, but a “message” as it were, it just comes and I am much more concerned to grab hold of it before it vanishes into oblivion, than to ask it where it comes from.
I shall avoid answering directly and say it probably comes from the same place as dreams.
It is of course more important to know whether to have confidence in the inspiration, or reject it as a “will o' the wisp” that might lead one astray.
Did you know that the original “will o' the wisp” was methane spontaneously igniting on Dartmoor which led the unwary to follow it because they thought it was fairies, with the risk of getting lost or stuck in a quagmire and drowning?
Fortunate are we, if have learned to tune in to the right whisperings, and distinguish them from other reliable ideas that might drag us into the mire.
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ZACL certainly if I try to improvise, it doesn't always work out too well. One day I shall learn to let Creation happen, and not do very much at all.
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And ZACL the making of mental notes in sleep, or in broad daylight come to that, is something I do a lot too. They go, and then they might one day come back – or not. It's the same with illegible handwriting though. I've written things in the past where just one word could not be deciphered, without which the whole didn't make sense! But I rarely let them go these days.
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Ok, here is your comment from #4 of ashok's karma posts:
“I too cling to my ways because I was healed of something magically. In my case, I interpreted the remedy in a particular way, distorting the intention of the therapy to suit my need. To me, it said “You are an animal”. Not only did I get instantly and permanently better, I also ended my spiritual quest.
Unfortunately it is not easy to explain what “You are an animal” means, when it is whispered in my ear. That sentence is the best translation into language that I can come up with. But I'm trying to make it clearer by adding a further 72,996 words approx..”
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what I'd love to hear more about isn't your 72,000 words of explanation.
what I'm curious about is how it felt, what the texture of the experience was.
what you *saw * – and I use “saw” in the broad way of “senses” – vision/hearing/smelling etc – were there colors? Did you have a sense of a being behind the whisper, and what did that feel like?
How did you feel – in mind and body – during and after? calm? exhaulted? resistant?
In my experiences it's often a struggle to convey this texture, but I find it really illuminating to understand how others perceive these events.
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Ah, I have unintentionally misled you, then. “You are an animal” was not something whispered to me. At the moment of my cure, something physical happened, that made me know that I was well. It was so significant in itself that it needed no accompaniment. It was an uneventful event. I can only give the analogy of a fire alarm that has been on for so many years you don't hear it any more. Then in a moment, it stops. You notice the absence.
“You are an animal” is my present summary of the way I later interpreted the meaning of the therapy, after I had trained in it and practised on perhaps a dozen patients. I never shared this interpretation with them. There was a set way to take the patient through the treatment. I had a disagreement with my supervisor and ceased practising after nine months, at the end of 2006.
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As for “the sense of a being” I don't know what that would be. But, looking more widely at other experiences, there is indeed a special texture. I wouldn't be able to add anything to that either!
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Vincent, Those moments when inspiration comes when we do not call are to be treasured. It seems you’re visited often. My most spontaneous moment was during a thunder and lightening storm, when the crickets were so loud I couldn’t stand it. I couldn’t sleep. I went in the bathroom in the dark and wrote. I could hardly see my words. I didn’t end up with much, but what was there was so raw, so free. It wasn’t great, but it was pure emotion. It was very much like an improvised jazz piece, a frenzied one at that.
Your posts often shake the leaves of the books on these shelves. If you have not already read it, you may enjoy the book on creativity by Stephen Nachmanovitch called “Free Play: Improvisation in Life and Art.” It’s a fun book to revisit. In fact, I will probably revisit a few chunks now that you’ve reawakened the book. I took a class a time ago called “Creativity and Intuition” and this was one of our books.
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Wow, Rebb, I just googled Stephen Nachmanovitch and found his website and the text of a lecture called “All about frogs” which covers a several of my own enthusiasms – Basho, Sengai, Seng-Tsan, with quotes and images I know very well. Thanks. I shall look to see if he can introduce me to other stuff!
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I’m glad to hear that, Vincent. Even if you come across only the familiar, perhaps it will ignite yet another spark! We can always find the new in the old, which you seem good at. You’ve inspired me to fire up my old laptop at some point and perhaps post an essay I wrote in that class. If anything, I may as well add it to my blog ‘time capsule’ rather than let it sit and collect dust alone.
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I remember you posting about the decision to part ways on a healing methodology back in 2006 – but I was always foggy on what it was all about. Of course, then if it wasn't laid out in scientific terms I was immensely frustrated and had no recognized context from which to participate.
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we improvise, we create, we respond, all the time with whatever is available in any given moment. Even when we think we have prepared we still improvise because no one moment is completely predictable.
I improvise as I write my response here tonight. I may come back tomorrow, re-read it and have a completely different creative response to it. I didn't have any prior preparation. For me it is about surrendering myself to the moment and to some extent getting out of the way enough to let a flow happen spontaneously and naturally through me.
I agree with you about investment of effort, and cherishing the investment and fruits thereof, but I'm not certain this is necessarily at odds with Buddhism and detachment, as least in my way of thinking.
Since the ultimate goal of Buddhism is eradication of suffering, the issue of attachment inevitably comes up because attachment is equated with suffering. But I don't think we need to look at attachment as the root of all suffering. Take a mother's attachment to her baby, as an example. There is no suffering in her attachment to her baby (or her love). There is suffering when she begins to attach to her expectations for her baby. Why is he not talking and walking by a certain age? Why is he not getting good grades in school? Why is he growing up so fast? Why isn't he doing what he should be doing with his life? She's now losing sleep and tearing her hair and heart out over her attachment to her expectations for the life of her son. Is it possible for a mother to have an attachment to her baby and love her child as he is, as a miracle of creation… without attaching to her own expectations of him, which inevitably cause not only her own suffering but his as well?
I just don't really see the attachment itself as the problem.
But then, I'm improvising here. Maybe tomorrow I'll cross it all out and create something new. 🙂
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Thanks very much for this, Joanne. I do agree with you, I think we are on exactly the same wavelength here.
As you say, it is not the attachment but the expectation that causes the pain.
Expectation is the enemy of improvisation.
Investment is the source of attachment. Either it is evolutionary investment, that places instincts within us, or the investment of a single lifetime, that creates some asset, whether a skill, a relationship or a material thing.
Can we invest, be attached, and still devote ourself to improvising?
I think yes, and agree with you that it is “to let a flow happen spontaneously and naturally through me. “
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You may well be right about Buddhism, but I have withdrawn from that religion the awed respect I once had, so it's nice to question & possibly reject anything about it.
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Vincent…
Isn't it wonderfully improvisational and creative (not to mention liberating) to have freed oneself to ask questions of anything, religion or otherwise?
For me, if I stop asking questions (or stop being open to considering something), I am more closed off. When I am more closed off, there is more constriction, where there is constriction there is reduction of flow.
Being open to consideration is also being a conductor of spontaneity.
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It's an 'and/and' rather than an 'either/or', in my view. Improvisation and investment. We need both. An attitude of 'detachment' helps – detachment from the outcome. Improvise and invest – then see what comes!
This is one of the reasons why I really struggle to answer when someone says to me “what do you do?”
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It's nice to answer the question “What do you do?” with “Nothing!” with a sense of immense fecundity in that nothing. Or, as you say, Joanne, the sense of being open to consideration (of everything).
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Vincent… the answer to the question “what do you do”… I do many things, including nothing. It reminds me a little of the “what is God's will for my life” question… God's will is whatever is happening right now. How could it be otherwise?
What do I do? I write comments in Vincent's blog post on improvisation. 🙂
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Perhaps I've understood it wrong, but I thought that attachment IS connected to suffering because one seeks to maintain the attachment – not just because the one attached to does not meet our expectations.
I recall a story….
a Buddhist monk's mother died unexpectedly. He cried for several days, and his followers were astonished. They asked “but didn't you teach us that attachment is illusion? Why do you suffer?” He responded “yes, it's illusion. But the illusion of attachment to a parent is a particularly difficult one to break!”
So a mother's love brings suffering not only because expectations of the child's behavior are not met, but because she risks losing her child. Every accident, every potential accident that the child encounters – brings suffering.
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Yes, Hayden, I am sure you are right about what a Buddhist would say. But I would say if that is suffering then a woman would be expected to overcome it and be a Buddhist nun, renouncing possessions and motherhood in order to make it possible to avoid suffering. Which is fine for those who choose that. But such a nun would have to renounce the corresponding joys. To preach avoidance of suffering through that means strikes me as repulsive.
It is nature's way that the mother should feel pain at any threat to her child. It is part of the package of instincts. If we reject that it is tantamount to regretting being human at all – a sentiment which is sometimes to be found in extreme religious positions.
But
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Hayden…
A Buddhist might say, what you describe IS expectation…the expectation (or perhaps desire is another word you could choose) that the mother has that the child not die. It is attachment to the desire, to the expectation, that causes the suffering, not the attachment to the child.
Can the mother just love the child in the moment without desires or expectations… free from ALL desires and expectations, including that in the next moment the child should not die?
Sometimes Buddhists are criticized that at some point one must become a robot. But what I've heard from some Buddhist friends is that actually it brings them into a deeper state of caring and compassion when no longer tethered to their attachments to their desires.
I wouldn't know myself… 🙂
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and I just wanted to add a bit of an apology, Vincent, for it wasn't really my initial intention to launch into a Buddhism discussion (first off, I'm not qualified to do so… secondly, I don't think it was the main point of your post and I didn't mean to drift from that point)…
I do suppose though the very twists and turns are a real-time example in your comments section of spontaneous creativity!
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No Joanne, it was I who turned it into a Buddhism discussion. I note that there is a tendency to assume that Buddhist ideas make perfect sense and represent some infallible truth. Buddhism has had too much of an easy time! Even some Zen Buddhists realized that burning the Buddha could be a help towards liberation.
Every religion has its sales hype. Christianity has John 3:16. Buddhism has the notion that you can eliminate all suffering from your life.
Please (everyone) resist the temptation to say that Buddhism is OK and you have just understood it wrong. Buddhism knowingly allows the hype to go out, despite its being demonstrably wrong.
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It's not my intention to be offensive to any religion. Unless it is offensive to point out that religion tries to sell back to us (rather expensively) that which is already intrinsic to our own nature.
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We're not very good at understanding what is 'intrinsic to our own nature', are we? This could be (one reason) why religion (which 'explains' our nature to us) is so very widespread.
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Yes Kathleen, I believe this is how religions have all come about. I think they all started with prophets or teachers, who inevitably died, but left disciples who wanted somehow to preserve the wisdom of their revered mentor. These seers and holy men didn't just have explanations about the gods, but about nature, human and otherwise; how the world came about; how the tribe came about; why it always fights the other tribe and so on.
And I'm not conducting any campaign against religion, either. I wouldn't change a thing about this world: just like to study it, and peep below its surfaces.
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