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/
Samuel has an inspiration to travel down the Yangtze River to see the country and experience life there. So he sets his boat into the river with his equipment, skills, and
knowledge. Now his general direction is set for, most of the time, he will choose to go downstream. The river will carry him right through the experience that he set out to have. There is an underlying momentum and direction that is generated by his original choice. The river is what happens, what is.
But, moment-to-moment, he gets to choose where on the river to maneuver. Where to stop. Whether to go back upstream and buck the current. Where to take a run over the waterfall. He can choose to run the entire river, or to stop and stay in an intriguing place. He will meet others along the river and will make decisions on how to interact with them. The combination of his original choice and his moment-to-moment choices are the combined momentum and direction of his travels.
Life.
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.
This is a website and blog dedicated to exploring the processes of creativity, action, and evolution in our lives, our work, our businesses, and our communities.
Please explore what we have today, but expect this site to grow daily as new material is published and discussed. The base site for Catching the Updraft! and further discussion of our models of creativity, innovation and successful action is www.catching the updraft.com.
This is the blog for that site and much of the material that will end up on the permanent site will begin here as a conversation.
You are invited to participate!
Thanks
Mary
