Tuesday, April 1, 2008

Looking Ahead

Time is flying by so fast but I'm looking forward to a carefree 6 month period to do anything I want, hopefully starting in a month or so. Creativity requires complete and total uninterrupted time; complete and total time for contemplation and spiritual exploration. My two main goals are to (1) write a non-fiction book in the overall area of spirituality/philosophy/self-help, and (2) compose enough music to fill an entire audio CD of around 60 to 70 minutes (yes, of course quality should be more important than quantity, but I feel I am really lacking in the quantity area for the past decade).

Sorry for this short post! I leave you with a quote from one of my all-time favorite books, The Outsider, by Colin Wilson:
We can summarize [William] Blake's argument briefly: All men should possess a 'visionary faculty'. Men do not, because they live wrongly. They live tensely, under too much strain, 'getting and spending'. But this loss of the visionary faculty is not entirely man's fault, it is partly the fault of the world he lives in, that demands that men should spend a certain amount of their time 'getting and spending' to stay alive.

The visionary faculty comes naturally to all men. When they are relaxed enough, every leaf of every tree in the world, every speck of dust, is a separate world capable of producing infinite pleasure. If these fail to do so, it is man's own fault for wasting his time and energy on trivialities. The ideal is the contemplative poet, the 'sage', who cares about having only enough money and food to keep him alive, and never 'takes thought for the morrow'. This is a way of thought that comes more easily to the Eastern than to the Western mind.

No comments: