Entrusting, Breakout Creative Style

The philosopher Heidegger proclaimed "we are only what we entrust ourselves to be." (The Essence of Truth, p. 58). 

I thought about this statement during a recent conversation with a friend and colleague in our "breakout creative"  project.  She felt that it was important to acknowledge where a person was in their lives and probe for what that present state of things offered.  I countered that it was the role of the breakout creative project to  help people to get beyond where they are now, to appeal to their aspirations, and to show them their readiness, the readiness they now embrace, for taking their next bold steps. 

The breakout creative is that kind of person who never settles into the everyday, and instead takes up on their yen and yearning for a more vital, encompassing, expansive and generative human endeavor. And our job in this project is to help people entrust themselves in order to live that way to the fullest extent they can.

I have met many such people in my professional mentoring work.  They aren't famous and they aren't all brilliant or even competent in all aspects of their lives.  Most don't write books and many have failed relationships in their pasts.  But they all exhibit one thing: an indomitable faith-for the generativity of life. They feel this so strongly that they risk success and fortune so that more people can be freed from their fears and self-limiting stories.  And they realize that to make such a risk pay off, they have to do the work of a breakout creative every day:  study in their fields, labor hard to expand their grammars and vocabularies to reach the new and touch the old, find new avenues of expression and new friends for support.

This is such hard work.  And yet breakout creatives entrust themselves with such a task.  

What is it like to entrust yourself with such a mission in life?  You have to feel in your bones that something else has to happen in the human endeavor if it is going to survive at all.  You have to feel that in some way, no matter what the outcome, something has to be ventured.  And there has to be the backbone to stand in this vision so that what you do can be seen, heard, touched, encountered.  Somehow you have to both entrust yourself with the talents, energies, interests and values you hold, and simultaneously you have to let go of yourself, laugh a bit at your own earnestness and let loose of what you want to give.

Then comes the scary part: You have to be willing to go public with these orientations.  Without going public, you aren't trusting yourself, you aren't entrusting what that life of yours is offering.  And you have to go public with what it is that your work, your heart and your sense of what generative brings you to.  Settling for old slogans, ideologies, religions, institutional glorifications won't do.  You have to take responsibility for putting something into play, into the public arena that can open up beyond what anyone has yet comprehended.  And take the consequences.

That is why for  breakout creatives their status quo states -- who they are, what their identities and affiliations have always been -- are not sufficient.  They entrust themselves, and look for others who do likewise, to what can only be enacted by living in the faith-for what is generative, what surpasses even them. And so they have to entrust themselves to being able to step into and grow into what is yet to be brought forth; and then they have to entrust to themselves the task of doing so, to bring forth what is to come, by their own hands.  

And for all those who do not consider themselves to be breakout creatives, but choose to stand with them, to learn from them, we see what we must make ourselves more awake to, and we learn how to do so. Maybe we can't learn to write poetry like Holderlin, or philosophy like Heidegger or Nancy or Deleuze;  maybe we can't paint like Picasso does or compose music the way Messiaen does.  But we can learn how to entrust ourselves to that faith-for the generative and we can learn how to entrust ourselves to a great task.  

Breakout creatives are just like you and me, except in one regard: they are never satisfied with where they are, who they are or what their identity and "selves" are.  They are not even curious about such things. They live to learn. 


The breakout creative project is dedicated to such learning:  learning to become awake to the living we are, the living all around us, and the call to entrust ourselves to bring forth the generativity that sustains it all. 

Mystics: Lou Andreas-Salome and Restoring the Feminine

One of the great contemporary mystic figures I have been studying is Lou Andreas-Salome (1861-1937). If you don't know about her, it is worth the trip to Wikipedia to find out about her.  To begin with, she was a muse, a deep companion and loved mentor to Nietzsche, Rilke and Freud.  So one could say that  these male avatars were able to do their work because of her power to inspire their greatest aspirations.  For another, her deep insights, as a writer, observer of the creative human endeavor, and mystic (a term she never applied to herself) are unsurpassed.


Lest the feminists in the readership think I am guilty of placing Salome in the category of "the woman behind the great man," I want to make clear that this is far from my intention.  I see Salome as the modern Beguine -- the Beguines are the women  in the 13th Century who founded Western mysticism.  She is every bit the courageous envisioner of the grand human endeavor as they were; her writings are just as seminal to the mystic endeavor; and her complete identification with her womanhood and the great and primal feminine potencies is seminally instructive for those who study mystics.  I recommend her memoirs, Looking Back, as well as her works on Nietzsche and Rilke, at a minimum, for any course of mystic education.


In fact, her observations on the feminine (that extend far beyond feminist political and socio-economic concerns) are my subject today.


My contention, as presented in detail in my book The Mystics Among Us:  Into the Open (working title, and soon to be published) is that mystics in the West strive to restore the feminine generative potency in the human endeavor.  By that I mean that the very notion of "generative" (see below) is an expression of feminine cosmic potency.  Most briefly, the feminine potency names that aspect of our universe that "makes way" for, enables the "enduring placing" of distinctive singularities as viable aspects of the universe.


The male potency, in this view, takes up this opening and does the work of forming those singularities, those self-organizing systems into viable entities.  While increasing complexity could not take place without the driving potency of male constellation, organization and concentration, it also could not take place if, prior to singularizing acts, the universe did not offer its feminine aspect of "generative opening." Generative opening means an opening of  dimensions so as to become more expansive, and also doing so in a way that enriches and energizes that opening, and so is able to generate the great variety of singularities (things, beings, creatures, forces and events) within it. We have sexual division in the form we do because of the character of these potencies, not vice versa.


A line in her memoirs points to her profound grasp of this dynamic: "when I wrote scholarly essays, I felt strengthened, as if I had been doing something feminine, where as in the case of anything poetic, the activity seemed masculine." (p. 108).  EXACTLY.


Her "scholarly essays" were often about the grandly encompassing aspects of the human psyche, as it took shape and formed people's lives.  Her works on Nietzsche and Rilke were mystic realizations of the forming of two different figures -- the mystic and the artist, respectively -- out of the free-flowing potencies of feminine opening generativity.  Thus, she was speaking not as a muse or a lover to great men, but as one who discerns pure potencies forming as living psychic/somatic forces among us; she is speaking as the mystic.  She is telling us, as a mystic does, how to listen to these breakout creatives who were her soul-mates so that we can step into the generatively open way.  And as we have said, this is precisely the mystic precept:  restore the feminine potency.


Poetry (and psychoanalysis, as a prophetic expression) are decidedly male-potency based.  Poets ferociously drive the great and diffusely open energies of the generative into a singular form. In his Duino Elegies, Rilke expresses this intense effort at constellation and singularizing as his "angels" speaking to him, driving him to words and verse and the specific, pointed, tightly formed work.  In her chapter on Rilke, she notes his "ascension of the poetical work above the poet as a man."  This is the drive of the male potency in the breakout figure of the artist perfectly expressed: Work above being.


The prophet too expresses a derivation of the male potency. The great prophets in biblical tales are men; and   the great philosophers in Greece are men (who love men).  Freud is our exemplar of the contemporary prophetic figure.  The prophetic impetus is to shape the relation and interconnections among beings (alive in the generative open made way for by the feminine) into specific bonds, ties and laws. Salome disagreed with Freud exactly because she did not see his categories and descriptions of "complexes" as rigidly as he did.


Mystics restore the feminine against this male tsunami that has overflowed Western history.  Salome's writing is dedicated to the search (more or less successful, as with all the contemporary mystics) for a way to express the co-generation of the human psyche/somatic being with the most vast and incalculable and indescribable potencies of the feminine.  Far from being the "support" of these men, whom our culture is capable of acknowledging, she drove these male figures into the most vivid of living such that generative way spoke to them.


Today, we need her instruction on how to listen to breakout creatives most urgently.  She is our teacher in opening up to our own generativity.  And breakout creatives need to take her life as a precept for being able to open to listening to other breakout creatives (mystics hearing other mystics especially -- her ambivalence toward the fellow mystic Nietzsche bears witness to this).


Part of the greatness of these men was recognizing and taking into their own beings her truly feminine, mystic way.  For us, the standard of becoming a breakout creative to begin with, is just this action:  taking the likes of Salome, voices of the generative open,  to heart as the beginning and engine of the work to be done.