There is an interesting anomaly with updrafts. Working in an updraft doesn’t necessarily mean all the things we think of when we consider success. Or happiness. Or contentment. It can provide those things—but it might not. It doesn’t necessarily provide them. It provides what’s necessary to accomplish the goals of the updraft which might not include success or contentment.
You see, doing the right thing isn’t necessarily about making you happy or successful or content. It’s not necessarily about putting security in the bank. (The truth is that the universe may need something more important from you than for you to have money in the bank.) Not that there is anything wrong with money in the bank or happiness or contentment, but just because you’d like it, doesn’t mean it’s part of the current you are catching.
Each of us is living a different life, a different updraft, and so we will not live the same result. We are not meant to be the same, live the same, do the same, or have the same. We are each a different creative movement of the universe and will create and be something unique. And you will experience passion, interest, curiosity, and the joy of the creative force. There will be some momentum carrying you along.
So trying to keep up with the Joneses (or Myspace or Google) is really not where it’s at. It’s all about truly being yourself. There are so many ways in which we hamper the idea of who we really are by judging, comparing, and wishing it were different, wanting what she’s got. All wasted time, wasted effort. You are your potential coming into being in every moment—perfect as it is, able to make a new decision and create the next thing. It is precisely what you are.
Whatever comes to you will be the fulfillment of your updraft, your capacities, and the choices you make. The goofy part of this is this: it is what you actually are—simply creativity happening in a particular time and place as you. And it turns out that it is very fulfilling to be you. So enjoy it!
What makes some succeed?
Just as some of us are better singers, or some days we are more coordinated than other days, there is a great deal of variability in the effectiveness of any given thing which we might do. The final measure of success is the results of the potential generated—what eventually happens.
We see that some of our actions have more power than others to affect the future—they generate more potential:
- Some people have more power to affect their own futures and the future of others;
- In some areas we are more effective, that is, we each have areas of “talent”.
- Within different scopes we will have more or less effect—I may find that I can effect something in my home or business, but not in every home or business. (Though someone else with different knowledge, capability, or capacity may do just that.)
Where do the variations come from?
- Capacity: our talent, skill, knowledge
- Congruency: our ability to stay on track, to stay focused
- Alignment: our ability to find our updraft—the purpose and direction which is ours—and to align ourselves with it.
Alignment is an important facet of our success toolkit, that is, our ability to sense or intuit the possibilities that are already in the pipeline so to speak. If we can find a creative current that has a strong potential already we can leverage it’s momentum into our lives by our engagement with it. Ideas and intuitions we have are often precisely these potentials coming into our awareness. Part of this creative practice is to develop our ability to fully engage with the existing potentials, learning to leverage this current as our own creative power.
So we see that our success in affecting the future is mediated by many factors:
- Our ability to sense what is already arising in the potential of the future,
- Our ability to catch the current of that arising potential,
- Our ability to generate appropriately directed action,
- And then, what everyone and everything else is doing.
Our ability to dramatically change our world is limited to our ability to generate potential through powerful individual and group action, knowing all the while that everyone is making things happen, but many are only diffusely effective.
It is key to remember that an action does not generate a result. An action generates potential that arises with the rest of the potential into an actuality. This indirection is key to understanding the magic of the arising universe and understanding this will dramatically enhance our ability to succeed.
Darren Rowse, a leading blogger and blog consultant, had a post today titled “9 Attitudes of Highly Creative People.”
You can step over there and see his list. I, of course, wanted to see where he went with that and how it jived with Updrafting. How does our model of creativity get reflected in the general discussion? (And isn’t it interesting that the subject of creativity is of passionate interest to people trying to make money blogging—which is, of course, just a reflection (sometimes distorted) of trying to communicate and share—a basic creative impulse. For to be a successful blogger, as in any other creative endeavor, you must find some creative communications that are meaningful to others.)
It seems to me that his nine attitudes reflect two basic rules of the stance implied by Updrafting:
- Holding no fixed ideas about what should be now and how things should become in the future.
- Problems as interesting and acceptable
- Suspending judgement
- See hurdles as leading to improvements
- Constructive discontent
- Perseverance (not giving up just because what you thought would happen didn’t happen yet)
- Knowing that you are the creative impulse that gets to play with the medium of life to create something new.
- Curiosity
- Problems as interesting and acceptable
- Confronting challenge
- Constructive discontent
- Optimism
- Perseverance (knowing you are the force that can get it done)
- Flexible imagination
The first of these rules of Updrafting (holding no fixed ideas) keeps us from putting the brakes on the power of the creative force and imagination with our resistance. The second facet (knowing that you are the creative impulse) is the accelerator that pushes us to engage in the creative process.
Brakes are a protective device and we must know what we are trying to protect ourselves from. Creative people tend to be unafraid (at least in the area of their creative successes) and therefore don’t use their brakes. People who are cautious overuse the brakes and therefore don’t get anywhere.
And that is always the question: where do you really want to go today?
A Few Basics
These concepts are core to the practice of Updrafting.
Actions Create
We are all creating all the time with our every action and thought, though we do not often realize the effect we are having on the world. (When you have a grumpy day, it matters*.)
To cause the state of the world to change into something we desire, we must understand what is already happening, and we must act in accord with our desire. We must understand that all our action is generating potential which will, at some point, evolve into being as the world. What we do in any present moment is our investment in a change of state of things in our future, and it is this evolutionary process which we must learn to leverage through our actions. In this practice we considered everything an action: what you do, what you say, what you think, what you feel, and your ideas. Though they all don’t have the same power, they are all important to the end result.
It is an Visible Process or an Invisible Movement
The practice of updrafting manifests in different ways depending on the creative team (individual, groups) and their skill.
- It might be a momentary impulse, a seamless artistic expression (as in acting or dancing), or an organizational development lifecycle.
- It might be implicitly or explicitly practiced; that is, one might “flow” with the process without attention to the shifts in awareness, or one might have a structured step-by-step approach.
The Indirect Effect of Action and our Lack of Control
One thing we need to come to understand is simply this: while everything we think and do contributes to the possibilities and potentials of the future, it is also true that we are not in control the way we might have thought. The dance we do with life is a little more intriguing and indirect than a command-and-control scenario. It’s not necessarily less potent, but it is different; and when we live as if we have control, but don’t, we are not as effective as we could be. We also find ourselves frustrated because, in fact, we are then working in a world that we don’t understand and cannot predict. (And, of course, we cannot control it, because we never had control in the first place.)
So the world arises from the potential generated by all creative actions across time, and our part is to act to generate potential for the future. The potential, as part of the state of the universe, is the structure that holds the energetic information that will or can arise in the future becoming the actual world. This structure is as complex and deep as the universe itself. What happens in the future represents the potential from all of the creative acts that the universe has experienced.
The Ocean
The ocean is a beautiful example. Billions of actions happen within the solar system that cause waves to be generated: the earth quakes, the moon circles, wind blows, whales swim, clams open, sand shifts. All of these cause waves and ripples to flow into the moving structure we call the ocean. And each of these movements generates potential for a change in the state of the ocean having large or small effects. But the actuality emerging in any moment is the result of all of those movements as they arise together. Which wave hits the shore is a complex emergent behavior of the entire being of the ocean.
Our relationship to the future world is similar to sending a wave out into the ocean along with a few billion other waves.
* “It matters.” This turns out to be a very interesting phrase. It seems to mean: “It makes a difference to the results.” Another way to say it is that it results in the material world or it manifests as matter. In this practice we will assume that everything (including your thoughts and ideas) “matter”, that is, they affect the manifestation of your future.
Since this is called the “Illustrated Philosophy of the Everyday” I thought maybe some illustrations were in order. The practice is based in something we called modes. There are different modes for different parts of the process to be used at different times. They are not necessarily used in strict sequence though there is a general flow.
What is a mode?
A mode is a way of being in the moment while you relate to your project/process/creation. When we are embodying a mode we use a particular stance with chosen practices and tactics that help us to move the process forward.
A mode has a name. We use a “bubble” image (often used for “process”) to represent a mode. A mode ususal requires something: information, data, reports, vision, etc. A mode often produces something: a new perspective, an idea, more information or structure, or sometmes a product.
Here are a few definitions that contribute to our understanding of the term mode:
-
A way or manner in which something occurs or is experienced, expressed, or done
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In physics: any of the distinct kinds or patterns of vibration of an oscillating system
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Music a set of musical notes forming a scale and from which melodies and harmonies are constructed
One can experience modes in a very practical way (things to do, our practices and tactics) and one can (and hopefully will) experience them as differnt ways of paying attention, different levels of awareness. In that sense, they are different “patterns of vibration” in our awareness; similar to different “keys” in a musical modal structure.
Let’s look at one of the more “physical” modes: Embody.
For the Embody mode, we need to know something about what we are trying to do—our target. We will also know something about the the state of our creative environment (our team, our capabilities, our market, etc.). Then we “embody” what it takes to create our target. We may use several different “practices” or ‘tactics”. (Practices are process we engage like planning cycles or training programs; tactics are ways we respond to things that happen. We’ll go into these ideas more later on.)
Some things we may need to do as part of the Embody phase:
- Build the right skills
- Hire the right people
- Buy tools
- Train the team
- Acquire facilities
- Put processes in place
And it doesn’t matter if it is for an individual to prepare to paint a picture or a company to build a new product. The specific processes and tactics will different, but the intent is the same.
The Embody mode is one of the most famiiliar to us. We all know that we need to get our “things” together, though as usual, there are many things that we habitually do wrong in this mode. But that discussion is for another time.
The Practice
The Practice is, of course, about what to do. There are two parts to the questions we ask:
- What should I/we be doing?
- How should I/we go about being successful at it?
The answers to both questions come from engaging in the practice. You see, knowing how the world works (the model) doesn’t tell you what your role is to be in all of this. And though having the right stance helps you to be ready to do the right thing (and may ultimately be all you need to do), most often, we are going to be making decisions about how to best go about our work. So understanding the basis of a creative relationship to our work gives us the right tools to pick up as we move through the process. It can also help us to teach, diagnose, and realign any creative process.
Ultimately the practice brings us to a state of full engagement with our work by reorienting us to the truth about our relationship to the world. We find that what we think of as control does not exist, and that, even so, we are never disenfranchised. We are always a part of the creative team that generates the future. And we discover another exciting truth—that our lives are an adventure just waiting for our full participation. The goal of the practice is to give us an active, adventuresome approach to life and all of our “projects”—to put all creative efforts on the same level as planning our greatest adventure.
Why This Practice Is Valuable
There are many methods taught for moving through a creative or development process, and most of them help us to improve our odds. This practice is a little different in that it derives from a very specific philosophical base. But it also is the same, in that it is attempting to guide us into a more effective and powerful relationship to our work. Many components are consistent across various practices: strong visions, appropriate action, sensible planning.
Here are a few elements of this practice that are unique to its orientation. Though we’ll go over the details later, it has a strong focus on:
- Our awareness of the environment in which we are working and the whole array of possibilities (known as the arising potential)
- Paying attention to all levels and sources of action
- Leveraging existing potential to create your goals instead of thinking we have to (or can) create it all ourselves
- Maintaining the most powerful relationship to the process (the stance)
- Maneuvering quickly and efficiently; and knowing how to discover what maneuver is appropriate
- Enabling the emergence of natural organization and management structures.
There are three keys to understanding Updrafting as a way of life:
- The Practice
- The Stance
- The Arising World Model
We can work with the keys in any order and we can apply the principles separately depending on our interests. Most people are more interested in what to do next than they are in a philosophical view of the world. So we can skim or skip the philosophy part knowing we can apply the stance or the practice without it. Some of us know precisely what our next project is and want to apply the practice to something specific—so diving into the step-by-step aspects of the practice is one good way to start. But the keys do arise from the same source and understanding all of them will enhance our application of each of them, maximizing our ability to make effective choices and actions.
The Practice
The Practice is the answer to:
- What should I be doing?
- How do I become most effective?
- How do I get it done?
It describes the creative process and illustrates it in a way that makes it practical to apply to everyday activities. It incorporates the expansiveness of the Arising World Model and the personal experience of a perfect stance into a set of relationships to the creative processes, which are expressed in practices and tactics that 
help us choose the next action. We like to call them maneuvers because they are actions engaged in the moving arising potential and when we use a new word (maneuver, in this case) we can incorporate the new sense of ourselves and the world.
For many of our activities, goals, and actions, we do not need to break down the creative process into steps and modes of behavior. We just do it! But, if we need to understand our creative process more completely, if we want to enhance our capacities, and if we want to create with others, it can be helpful to understand the subtle underpinnings of creative action.
The Stance
The optimal stance is the answer to “How should I live?” or “How should I relate to the world?”
When we choose and act in the world, we do it from some basic assumptions of who we are and what we are capable of doing. This includes positive assumptions and negative assumptions, positive views and negative views. Perfecting a stance is both understanding how the outside world works and understanding how your internal perspective affects all of your choices and actions.
We will see that the optimal stance comes in two variations:
- The Engaged Stance- when we are lucky enough to find the perfect quality of engagement with (or submersion in) the arising creative potential. It feels less like a stance than a way of being.
- The Conscious Stance – when we don’t find the Engaged Stance, but are able through our conscious awareness to choose and maneuver appropriately.
From the outside, the two stances look the same. From the inside, they feel quite different. We all have times of perfect engagement, when we are going with the flow, and times where we have to make conscious choices. For the conscious stance we help ourselves with guidelines, practices, tactics, and rules. The engaged stance doesn’t require any rules, for it arises perfectly in the moment, transcending any requirements to think about the tactics to keep us on track (we still make decisions and maneuver).
We can look at this from a simple perspective and ask, “How should I behave?” But the question is bigger than that. It is truly about who we need to be at the deepest level to engage with the world at the deepest level. In the same way we learn an optimal stance for surfing a wave, we can learn to surf our lives from a powerful stance as the world arises dynamically into our experience.
The Ar
ising World Model
The Arising World Model (AWM) is a philosophical model for how the world comes into being and what our role is in that process. It is a little challenging to learn, partly because it is broken down into such detail that it seems a bit simplistic, and because some of its deeper underlying principles are fairly foreign to us. Once we understand it, AWM becomes a whole new way of relating to the world that is fascinating, practical, and inspiring.
Very simply, every moment we make choices that generate actions, which create our lives and the things in our lives. This is a process called creativity. There is a tendency in our culture to treat the creative process as a big mystery. It’s not a mystery. It’s a practical and predictable practice. But we don’t control it the way we try to control a bowling ball. It’s a different kind of maneuver and takes a more sophisticated and subtle approach.
The myths:
- It’s all mysterious and uncontrollable.
- Only special people are creative. I’m not creative.
- If you are “lucky”, it happens, and if you aren’t lucky, then it will never happen.
- It’s unpredictable and scary.
- It’s just a mechanical, though complicated, process—make the right set of actions and you will get the result.
The truth:
- Everyone is creating all the time. No exceptions.
- It seems mysterious but it is really a subtle maneuver of consciousness that we can learn to manage.
- There is much of the usual work to be done.
- You ‘engage’ with the arising idea and together you and it evolve the future.
- It’s somewhat unpredictable and therefore an exciting adventure.
- There is nothing to be afraid of.
Let’s Talk Surfing
Surfing, sailing, skydiving, and gliding are all good analogies for Updrafting.
In each of these activities, a current and force (the wave or the updraft) is moving through a medium (the water or the air) and the participant uses their knowledge and skill to choose actions that leverage the moving force to create their experience—the great ride they envision. In a sense, the actor and the arising force are one—the interaction of the surfer and the wave become an expression of the intent.
The ocean waves are moving toward the shore. The resulting wave that hits the shore (and its nature, speed, size, and force) is a result of all the actions that have affected the arising (or you might say arriving) state of the ocean. The wave itself is a momentary expression of all of the actions and motions that have affected the ocean in past moments including wind, currents, earthquakes, swimming dolphins, shifting sands, and crawling worms. These actors and actions each have various capacities to create results, which are changes in the nature of the movement of the ocean. But they all contribute to the end result.
The surfer chooses her interaction with the ocean and uses the power and motion in the ocean to create her experience. To actually surf, she needs to learn the proper stance that incorporates what she knows about the water and its movement, her skill, her balance, and her senses. In the midst of surfing, she has to pay close attention to what is actually happening in the wave. It is a process of inquiry. She is inquiring into the nature of what is happening at a deep and subtle level. She must react moment by moment to what is actually happening with subtle maneuvers of her body and attention. She can’t have a fixed idea of how to stand on the wave or make assumptions about what will happen for the wave is changing in every moment.
Life is precisely like this. The nature of life arising into your experience is fluid and dynamic. We must learn to be fluidly aware while engaging with its arising potential—to catch the updraft or to catch a wave. Then we discover, like a surfer, that our engagement with the potential is exactly what our life is. Life IS the fluid engagement with what happens and the courageous attempt to create something wild, beautiful, and free with our every choice.
creativity/
Why We Care
The truth is that we are each active, creative, and productive. We’ve been very successful at creating a great many things including a successful, functioning life on the planet. This is no small achievement. But, there is always room for improvement, and it seems to be the nature of a human being to want to make more, make new, make more beautiful, make more joyous. So this illustrated philosophy book is about just that: how to be more engaged, more successful, more productive.
This story of the relationship of human life to the world at large consists of a philosophy on one hand, and a practice on the other. These are answers to the perennial questions of “Who am I?” and “How shall I live my life?” (Or “What am I?” and “What shall I do?”) To relate the philosophy (what is) to the practice (what to do) we define a stance, that is, a definition of the most appropriate and effective relationship to what is and what we do.
Why bother? Because we all know the life can be more—more fulfilled, more productive, more free, and more fun. It also turns out, that in perfecting our ability to engage in this way, we contribute to more fulfillment, productivity, freedom, and the possibility of evolution for others and the world in general. Because as it turns out, we are not just in this boat together—-we are this boat together.
Creating Our Personal Basis for Choosing
There are many reasons to look into improving our lives—sometimes we are not pleased with what is happening and want to find a way to change things. Othertimes, we are happy but want to be more effective and powerful in what we do. In either case, the solution is evolving a more effective way to make the choices that comprise our everyday.
Most days we just want the world to be different. We wish that it should just become what we want it to be. We resist what is because we don’t like it. This is a really bad habit which we seem to think will change the world. As if disapproving what’s going on is a way to improve things. Turns out that it isn’t helpful or productive to just be unhappy about things—it is necessary to envision and work toward something different. We have to learn how to make the choices that will change things. We need to understand that the world as we experience it in this moment is a result of all of our past actions, and that it is our present action that will cause the future to be different than the present. You can’t just wish the world away, you have to live the process of changing it.
The truth is that if we are searching for a better life or more effectiveness in our work, then we are searching for a better, more workable basis for choosing our actions. Every choice we make leads to action, which leads to the results that we see in our lives, our art, and our businesses. And all of our choices derive from our understanding of the world—the working model we have internalized.
The way we understand the workings of the world is precisely the world we live in. We function in the world in the way that we understand it. So we must understand the world in such a way as to make it possible for us to succeed.
(At what? That is a key question: What is it that we want to succeed at? We will explore what it means to discover our own goals. And an explanation of the world must be relevant to our goals; if it is not relevant to our goals, then it will probably not make any sense in our worldview. It may not even be comprehensible.
Why don’t most of us understand quantum physics? Not because we can’t, but because it is not relevant to our understanding of what we want to do.)
Now considering and deciding what we want to do in life is an ongoing and changing thing. We are all more or less in tune with our life goals and constantly refining them. But at any given moment, we are attempting to create something (at a minimum a successful day), we are more or less succeeding, and we are seeing the results of our actions. We can see whether or not our choices, and therefore our worldview, is working for us.
We Live By Our Worldview
There are many types of worldviews with different contexts. Most of us have a physical or material model of how the world works. (For most of us this model is far from complete, accurate, or as deep as the reality of the world. Most of us are lacking a model that includes quantum physics, for example.) We also have metaphysical (beyond physical) models of the world that include beliefs in religion, luck and misfortune, superstitions;, beliefs about power and where it resides; beliefs about the intent (or lack of intent) of the universe; beliefs about our own adequacy to meet our challenges. These are conscious or unconscious decisions about how the universe deals with us beyond the scope of the physical.
And though we all work from such models of how the world works, we often have not considered them carefully. In fact, for the most part, we have not considered them at all. They are unconscious. We have adopted them from our personal history, our culture, or our families. We have not considered whether these adopted ideas are useful in helping us make the choices that will allow us to realize our goals.
In truth, the universe expresses itself as it does and we have only a human ability to comprehend it. So we build models of how we believe it works and the test of the model is how well it serves those who use it to accomplish their goals. Because, in the big picture, since our goals are the goals of the universe, it behooves us to have the most effective and relevant worldview to make our dreams not only possible, but probable.
In these pages we will find a design model that we can visualize and internalize, and therefore leverage into a working process for living a human life, creating a work of art, or bulding a business. It can be used to decide how to create our next self or our next creation—your very own illustrated philosophy of the everyday.
Catching the Updraft! is a story, a philosophy, and a practice of living. It concerns who we are, what we do, and how we find our piece of the puzzle. And, in a practical way, it reveals how we can effectively respond to the challenges that are particularly our
s. We irreverently call it Updrafting.
The principle is this:
Amidst everything else that is happening, there is a momentum to our true, best life and it is arising every moment with force and direction creating an updraft of creative potential that we can choose to catch the way a surfer catches a wave or an eagle catches the wind. We can catch the updraft of our life and take a great exciting ride.
Too corny? Perhaps. But once we get a handle on this model of how the world works, we’ll find that it is ultimately practical for our life, our work, and our businesses.
For many of us, a time come in our lives when we want to improve or evolve our engagement with life, we often ask traditional questions:
• Who am I? What is the world about?
• What should I do? How do I do it better?
The questions come in all flavors depending on the scope of the challenge we are engaged with. The answers we come up with form the basis of the worldview from which we work. So the answers to these questions are very important.
The first question is about coming to an understanding of the reality of the world.
The second is about how we should choose our actions in the world.
Updrafting provides a worldview that comes with a practical approach to living, which can be applied to any endeavor. It can answer these questions in any context. While the precise things we do, practices and tactics, vary for different creative activities and goals, the principles are the same for any project. Once we get it, we can apply it to choose effective action in any situation. Or, we might say, to live an effective life we must apply it everywhere.
On my personal blog, I have posted another style of introduction to Catching the Updraft! See what approach you like better.
