My boyfriend and I were walking the other night and we were talking about how important it is for kids to learn skills in order to be able to express what’s in their minds. He teaches coding to kids, and he just wrote a book about it, in which he says “we’re not teaching kids how to code so they can become programmers, we’re teaching kids how to code to help them understand that they can be creators”. In my blogging these past few weeks, I’ve very much appreciated getting back into the daily processing, systematizing, articulating, and synthesizing the thoughts bouncing around in my head, and I just find it such a helpful exercise. As an Enneagram type 4, I regret not having learned artistic skills to express what was roiling under the surface as a young person, and when I’ve encountered young type fours, I have encouraged them to become good at an artistic skill so their creativity doesn’t trap them inside their bodies. The greater the skill and the more attuned kids are to their inner experience, the more possibility that the resultant art or creation can achieve a level of objectivity, bringing value and meaning to the world. My boyfriend quoted a section from Nietzche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra:
Creators the Creator seeks, not herds and believers,
Creators the Creator seeks, those who write new values on new tablets
Creators the Creator seeks because everything about him is ripe for the harvest.
I thought that last line was pretty wild, that everything about God is ripe for the harvest. I kept thinking,
“What does that mean?” “God” is what we harvest in our creativity.
Nietzche didn’t actually believe in god, and I believe when he’s saying “everything about the Creator is ripe for the harvest”, he’s actually saying “everything about the unconscious is ripe for the harvest.”. I believe the God Christians worship IS our shadow self. It’s the parts of ourselves that we can’t integrate (our adulthood, our personality responsibility for the contents of our psyche) we and have projected his qualities onto a loving father figure so we can remain children to whatever extent, thus putting off individuation. So I think the unconscious is ripe for the harvest because god is at least in the unconscious, if not comprising it, and to some extent, I think Jung supports that idea.
Last night I was reading in Robert A. Johnson’s Owning Your Own Shadow. He is one of the great synthesizers of Carl Jung’s ideas, and he opens the book talking about how one of Jung’s favorite stories was about a life-giving artesian well with water that was so pure and nourishing that corporations came and bought it and put a fence around it and sold the water to people, but the water didn’t like that.
“The water was angry and offended; it stopped flowing and began to bubble up in another place. The people who owned the property around the first well were so engrossed in their power systems and ownership that they did not notice that the water had vanished. They continued selling the nonexistent water and few people noticed that the true power was gone. But some dissatisfied people searched with great courage and found the new artesian well. Soon, that well was under the control of the property owners and the same fate overtook it. The spring took itself to yet another place and this has been going on throughout recorded history. ….
“…. the wonder of the story is that the water is always flowing somewhere and is available to any intelligent person who has the courage to search out the living water in its current form.
“… Many people fail to find their God-given living water because they are not prepared to search in unusual places…. One such unexpected source is our own shadow, that dumping ground for all those characteristics of our personality that we disown. …These disowned parts are extremely valuable and cannot be disregarded. As promised of the living water, our shadow costs nothing, and is immediately — and embarassingly — ever present. To honor and accept one’s own shadow is a profound spiritual discipline. It is whole-making and thus holy, and the most important experience of a lifetime.”
Johnson, Robert A. Owning Your Own Shadow: Understanding the Dark Side of the Psyche, pg. viii-x.
This has been a long-winded way of saying that when we have skills to create art and look inward to create it, we are accessing, or at least sending down pipes into the unconscious to be able to tap our inner artesian well. The integrated self is only possible through reflection and creation. Reflection is the means of integration; therefore we must teach kids creative skills.