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The life of the creator or artist is perhaps the hardest to undertake because you
have to keep true to yourself, when as a culture we are encouraged to betray our
soul for survival. To be a true artist demands that we do what it takes to keep our
soul alive. It is also a practice in personal sovereignty and self-expression beyond
the cultural wave, but through the cultural tide. Of course the illumination of
true art runs off the libido, but if the culture at large is operating at a lower-
spectrum libido level due to chronic ongoing stress and sense of hopelessness, then
the hormonal juices necessary for genuine art do not flow. As soon as things turn
around though, they turn around in the collective psyche and so all the artist will
undergo a revolutionary renaissance overnight.
The thing is many of us including me are “waiting” for the renaissance to
arrive, hanging out for creative potency and purpose. But that kind of “on-hold”
behavior of waiting for Grace to magically arrive is why we are in this imagination-
desert in the first place. If we all did the work of calling in grace and illuminating
our own lives with the Presence of spirit, then it is this action that will bring on the
change we so seek in the collective psyche...and we can all get juiced up together,
excited, inspired, divining and Alive. If we fail to light our own creative fire we are
complicit in the problem instead of being part of the solution.
“Libido” is life energy, desire, the source of human striving. I think creative-
libido or “creative-potency” are apt terms to describe the sex hormone basis to
consciousness. “Potency” correlates with the idea of energy, potential, ability,
effectiveness, efficiency, validity and zeal. It is really the zest or will for Life. Here are
some synonyms for the fertility aspect of the word potency: abundance, copiousness,
fecundity, fruitfulness, luxuriance, plentifulness, pregnancy, productivity, prolific,
puberty, readiness, richness and virility.
“Since ACTH release is increased by stress, and ACTH production correlates
with increased b-endorphin production, and increased b-endorphin decreases
GnRH and then LH, and decreased LH correlates with decreased fertility, stress
via increased b-endorphin production contributes to infertility in both men and
women.” http://www.neurosci.pharm.utoledo.edu/MBC3320/ACTH.htm
The above is one of the main chemical pathways by which stress chemistry can
produce a loss of fertile artistic imagination and creative zeal. There are probably
many reasons for artistic impotence...even including prolonged stress hormone
release contributing to the loss of synapses and dendrites in the prefrontal lobes,
hippocampus and hypothalamus. Since art is one of the main “stress relief ”
mechanisms in culture, this drying up of our creative juices means that we fall
into a perpetual feedback loop of lack of imagination, which produces stress which
produces lack of imagination etc...and if we do this collectively it is very hard to get
genuinely inspired by the inferior “impotent” quality of the spiritual “artifacts” of
others in order to break the impotency cycle.
It is clear that perpetual stress and its effects on the body, mind and behavior
create a vicious cycle of perpetual stress. By destroying the neurological hardware
for visionary and psychic foresight and illumination, stress neuters our potential
for an inspired life and right livelihood. This brain damage produced by stress