How do we navigate a time when our very thoughts, our images, our photos, our actions and our voices can be rendered by a machine? We navigate the difference between truth and deception, whether or not it’s real or false. And I think that we have to find the courage to create out of ourselves, such as this podcast being created as I speak with all the imperfections, the breath, the pauses, the so’s, the um’s, that I’m intentionally leaving some of them in to let you know that it has not been created by a machine, that I am not reading a script from ChatGPT or anything else that comes out of a computer, but that I’m actually speaking out of lived experience.
Because if we don’t speak and act and work and write out of lived experience, how are we passing a legacy on to our children and their children and their children to come about what it means to be human, what an anthroposophia is, how to find our humanity in a sea of noise, confusion, chaos, lies.
I think that this time has us all reaching down deep, deep into our own authenticity, so that we can create out of our sense of both uncertainty and certainty, the fulcrum of ourselves and our self-awareness, out of our lived experience, out of our humanness. And why do we need to do this? Why? Because in order to live and leap into the future, we need to be able to recognize that we are, as Otto Scharmer put it in his work, Presencing, or the youth theory in his overall Presencing network, that we need to reach into the future and draw it down rather than draw from the past forward. We need to reach from the future forward into ourselves.
So what will our future look like for humanity if we’re not finding our fulcrum of experience in this sea of deception? And I think that for me anyway, I can recognize what is real with all the humanness, imperfections, the wabi-sabi of creation, as the Japanese would put it, the perfect imperfect. And so I look for the imperfection rather than the perfection as being the beauty of art, as being real, as being both courageous and vulnerable at the same time. And if that’s not the role of art in the world, I don’t really know what is.
They say that artists yearn for immortality and seeking the beyond in ourselves through our perceptions really encourages us to name our game and what we play in society. Whatever sphere that we are in, we have to realize that there is joy in the realization that we’re helping to form the structure of the new world. This is creative courage, said Rollo May in Courage to Create, which he wrote in about 1952.
And he said, however minor or fortuitous our creations may be, we can then say with joy, welcome old life. We go for the millionth time to forge in the smithy of our souls, the uncreated conscience of the race. Let’s hope and find great reassurance in his validation of creativity as essential for the needs of our times.
