“The world is the doer and we are the witness. We have little or no control over the content.”
– Rick Ruben
Rick Ruben is a record producer credited with helping hip hop music go mainstream in the 1980s by working with artists like Run DMC, The Beastie Boys and Public Enemy. In 2023, he released a book called The Creative Act: A Way of Being that brought together his creative strategies with the practices and principles of the Buddhist and Daoist traditions that he has been a student of since he was a teenager. This excerpt is a short treatise on the role of awareness in creativity – the ability we can cultivate to better tune in to what is happening around us, to more clearly see the objects of our perception, and in doing so, “to expand our universe.”
In most of our daily activities we choose the agenda and develop a strategy to achieve the goal at hand. We create the program.
Awareness moves differently. The program is happening around us. The world is the doer and we are the witness. We have little or no control over the content.
The gift of awareness allows us to notice what’s going on around and inside ourselves in the present moment. And to do so without attachment or involvement. We may observe bodily sensations, passing thoughts and feelings, sounds or visual cues, smells and tastes.
Through detached noticing, awareness allows an observed flower to reveal more of itself without our intervention. This is true of all things.
Awareness is not a state you force. There is little effort involved, though persistence is key. It’s something you actively allow to happen. It is a presence with, and acceptance of, what is happening in the eternal now.
As soon as you label an aspect of Source, you’re no longer noticing, you’re studying. This holds true of any thought that takes you out of presence with the object of your awareness, whether analysis or simply becoming aware that you’re aware. Analysis is a secondary function. The awareness happens first as a pure connection with the object of your attention. If something strikes me as interesting or beautiful, first I live that experience. Only afterward might I attempt to understand it.
Though we can’t change what it is that we are noticing, we can change our ability to notice.
We can expand our awareness and narrow it, experience it with our eyes open or closed. We can quiet our inside so we can perceive more on the outside, or quiet the outside so we can notice more of what’s happening inside.
We can zoom in on something so closely it loses the features that make it what it appears to be, or zoom so far out it seems like something entirely new.
The universe is only as large as our perception of it. When we cultivate our awareness, we are expanding the universe.
This expands the scope, not just of the material at our disposal to create from, but of the life we get to live.
Excerpted from: The Creative Act: A Way of Being by Rick Rubin. Published by Penguin in 2023.
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