Back on Track
Posted on | December 4, 2007 | 8 Comments
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the intersection of law, business, creativity, and spirituality. I’ve been listening to some recordings of Joseph Campbell and reading his work, along with a lot of other great thinkers. Here’s what I’ve come up with:
Law enables Business
Business is the vehicle for our Creativity
Creativity fuels the spark of divinity within our Spirit
Spirit should inform Law
Here’s a visual model of what I’m talking about:
When you see it this way, you also see that Law effects Creativity – in a left-brain (law) v. right-brain (creativity) sort of relationship. Business and Spirit also interact in a quasi-kabbalistic way with Spirit on a “higher” plane manifesting on the material plane in the form of business.
I think it’s worth examining these relationships, especially in the areas of the overlap.
How can we get more spiritual influence in our legal policy? Should we? I’m not talking RELIGION, I’m a firm believer in the separation of Church and State. I’m talking about SPIRIT – or at least the golden rule, should infuse all of our laws. Can we overcome the greed and short-term self-interest that seems to motivate our law-makers and lobbyists working behind the scenes? Maybe that’s naive, but I think we need to start somewhere.
How can we get more people, especially small business folks (the backbone of our country and future), to understand and engage in the aspects of the law that KEEP them out of trouble rather than waiting until they’re neck-deep in bad stuff to ask for help? It seems that people get upset that legal fees cost so much – but they usually are only engaging with lawyers AFTER they’ve gotten in trouble. I can guarantee that it costs way more to get out of trouble than to avoid it in the first place.
How can we get more spiritual inspiration happening in our businesses? Maybe that’s simply through the Creative process itself. Maybe the role of Creativity is simply to channel a spiritual aspect of existence into our daily lives, which tend to revolve around business. Maybe our arts organizations need to take on more outreach programming (if possible) rather than constantly trying to just get people to come to the museum, symphony, etc. (Of course I recognize that many arts organizations already do great outreach programs.) How can we get more Creative inspiration infused into our legal framework at the national, state, and local levels?
I think if you have read books like Dan Pink’s A Whole New Mind, watched Shift Happens on YouTube, engaged in Bruce Mau’s thoughts of Massive Change or even just been allowed to lift your head up out of the cubical and take a fresh look around – these questions should be bubbling in your subconscious.
To use some of the language of Joseph Campbell, I think American Culture is hearing “the call” of the “hero’s journey” into some challenges that we need to face head-on, or be forced to face in a bad way (much like those small business owners who wait until after the trouble starts to create a plan). Maybe an understanding of the interactions above might help us in that quest.
I’m no expert on these topics. I’m as guilty as the next person (maybe more so) of waiting until I’m in trouble to start finding a way out, but I think these issues are too important to ignore. Maybe that’s just me, but I don’t think it is this time.
I’d really like some feedback on this topic and I’ve enabled the commenting feature on the blog again (thanks to some blog-spam software that seems to be working). So, feel free to chime in with your thoughts on this or other things I should be considering. I’m going to keep exploring and writing on these issues and hearing (and sharing) some different perspectives would be great.
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8 Responses to “Back on Track”
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December 4th, 2007 @ 9:34 pm
Testing the comments function again…
December 5th, 2007 @ 9:53 am
It’s an interesting idea, but difficult to implement. Western culture tends to place a higher value on business than on creativity or spirit, in whatever form you imagine it, and law is viewed as a way to “grease the wheels.” Therefore, as long as money talks, the balance will always be weighted in favor of business, even though I believe it’s that very lack of balance that’s put us in increasingly untenable positions in the war, the environment, energy needs, immigration, and all the other current hot-button issues. Unfortunately, the right thing to do is often more difficult, less monetarily profitable, and certainly neither expedient nor the path of least resistance.
December 5th, 2007 @ 10:42 am
Abra says the diagram should have Business and Art in the blue circle because some creativity manifests in the Arts rather than “Business” and Law does as much to protect and foster Art as it does Business.
She’s smart, why she married me is still and always will be a mystery. 🙂
December 5th, 2007 @ 2:15 pm
Love it, Kevin. The quad is inherently unbalanced, however, and history has favored a trifecta, or three faceted philosophy, which is inherently more stable. Maybe the notion of Law, Spirit, Mind in lieu of the business facet, with Spirit and Creativity really coming from the same source…..just a minor tweek to the discussion.
December 5th, 2007 @ 5:00 pm
Good point Monica. As a Freemason, the number 3 is prominent all over the place – from our 3 main degrees, to the 3 branches of American Government, to the various Trinities, to the whole thing of right-brain inspiration, filtered through left-brain order, and manifested through the power of the heart. I might be able to explore not only the pairs, but the triads contained within these several areas.
December 12th, 2007 @ 3:13 pm
Are these two posts? One about waiting to obtain the help we need until it’s too late or almost too late. And one about the intersections and dynamics of aspects of humanity?
Together with Shift Happens, your ideas about Creativity and Spirituality and Business and Law all working together are inspiring. I would love to find a way to balance all of these things, to find the niche that would bring the dynamics into resonance for me and my family.
How to do that?
January 2nd, 2008 @ 7:45 am
I really like the quad model since the number four represents balance and stability. In a perfect world, the quad might be represented by the 11th card in the Major Arcana of the Tarot, the Justice card, where business (and art), spirit, law and creativity would manifest equally in our lives. But as you point out, that presently is not the case.
The overlapping areas are quite intriguing, and I think your model has great merit. Each area influences the others in numerous ways, so all are interrelated. Spirit definitely should preside over everything else, because its influence impacts all areas of our lives. If spirit became our primary focus, and if we all understood we were participating in Joseph Campbell’s monomyth, the Hero’s Journey, the world of business, law and politics would naturally transform since our focus would be on the highest good for all concerned. The perspective for the highest good would stem from spirit, which understands the bigger picture and knows how all things are connected, and not from our limited, ego self.
January 2nd, 2008 @ 8:57 am
Thanks Laura!
I’ve been thinking about the quad model in a little different way. I don’t have an illustration yet, but think of a 3-Dimensional triangle – like a pyramid without the 4th side. That makes the relationships fall together better and it also makes the spaces between more interesting and dynamic…