How Theory Attempts to Replace Reality
There exists a creative reality that does not arise in the mind but flows through the body, the voice, the hand. It is not yours—but you can gain access. This field is collective, like a memory beyond the individual. Many have entered it, but few dare speak openly of it. It took me many years to start talking about my own experiences.
It is a space where creativity is not something you invent—but something you connect to.
For some, it comes suddenly:
– Music begins to play “by itself.”
– Words write themselves.
– The brush becomes a channel.
It feels like ascending into something—and at the same time, being illuminated from within.
This is where Jacob’s ladder appears as an ancient image.
Jacob’s Ladder – A Climb into the CollectiveIn the Book of Genesis, Jacob dreams of a ladder reaching from Earth to Heaven, with angels ascending and descending. This image has inspired mystics for centuries—but here, we can read it as a vision of creative practice:
The ladder is not a gift. It is built.
Each rung is discipline, repetition, surrender.
It is a training that teaches you to lift yourself out of personal thought and into the collective field.
This is essential:
You don’t think your way into it. You climb into it by doing.
Being in the Field: The Real Experience
When you’re in the field, it doesn’t feel like an idea. It feels like a reality speaking through you. It is spiritual—not in some vague sense—but existential. It experiences you.
🎨 Jean-Michel Basquiat:
“I don’t think about art when I’m working. I try to think about life.”
🎵 Björk:
“I don’t really make my music… I just have to be quiet enough to receive it.”
🎥 Andrei Tarkovsky:
“Art is not a mirror to reflect reality, but a hammer with which to shape it.”
🖌️ Hilma af Klint:
“The pictures were painted directly through me… with great force.”
Paraphrased from multiple Rumi poems:
“I am merely a flute through which the breath of God flows.”
These are not metaphors. They are accounts of a meeting with a deeper collective reality—a “field” where creativity doesn’t belong to anyone, but chooses those who listen.
When the Uninitiated Try to Explain It
The problem begins when people who’ve never been in the field try to systematize it. They don’t understand it from within—so they reduce it to something measurable, analyzable, and controllable.
Theories, academic models, and pedagogical tools become like little nets trying to catch the wind. But the wind won’t be caught.
✏️ Gaston Bachelard:
“How can one judge a word’s growth, if one has never seen the tree from which it springs?”
Examples of this reduction:
- In music education: Music is reduced to technique and notation—no one speaks of the field where composers listened inward.
- In art theory: Composition, color psychology, art history—but the living, painting presence is lost.
- In writing workshops: You learn plot structures and genre—but not how to grow quiet enough to hear the words come on their own.
These systems try to pull the collective down to Earth, where it doesn’t belong—and in doing so, they flatten it, dry it out, and mistake it for the real.
Theory as Ersatz-Reality
The collective field requires courage and silence. But it also exposes you.
So in our culture, there’s a tendency to replace the real with the explainable.
Theories give safety. You feel you “understand.” But understanding often closes the door to experience.
We mistake “knowledge about something” for “contact with something.”
It’s like talking about fire, writing about flames, analyzing combustion—without ever feeling the heat.
The Genuine Way: Practice, Not Theory
If you want to reach the collective, you must train. Not to become better—but to become more transparent. More receptive. More clear.
🪜 Jacob’s ladder is built one practice at a time.
Here are examples of creative training that opens the path:
The musician repeats a single tone—not for perfection, but for silence.
The painter works with the same motion—until the ego steps aside.
The writer writes each morning with no goal—just to open the channel.
The actor breathes—not to perform, but to speak from within.
🧘 Zen master Shunryu Suzuki:
“The goal of practice is always to keep our beginner’s mind.”
The collective field needs a mind that doesn’t know. A body that listens. A will that yields.
Back to the Ladder
In Jacob’s dream, angels ascend and descend the ladder.
It’s an image of how the field moves: the collective doesn’t only rise—it also descends. It flows through you, if you’ve built the path upward.
You don’t become a creator. You become a channel.
✍️ Meister Eckhart:
“Only the hand that erases can write the true thing.”
It is through the removal of ego, ambition, and control that true creation appears.
Conclusion: Will You Analyze, or Ascend?
There are two paths in the creative life:
- You try to understand, explain, analyze.
- You train yourself to be quiet and receptive—and let the field choose you.
The first leads to predictability. The second to transformation.
The first is comfortable. The second is a kind of death and rebirth.
But those who’ve been in the field know:
Nothing compares to being in it.
✨ “You do not make art. You prepare yourself, and the art comes through.”
So ask yourself:
Will you build Jacob’s ladder—or stand below, explaining what a ladder is?
Christ, Buddha and the Highest Collective Field
When we speak of connecting to the collective field, we must also mention the greatest example in Western spiritual history: Christ.
He didn’t speak from knowledge, nor from doctrine—but from a field beyond all human thought. His words, his silence, his presence carried the weight of an insight that could not be explained—only experienced. And that experience was God Himself, in human form.
Christ was not a theorist. He was the field in motion. A living ladder, where word became flesh—and flesh became light. What he transmitted was not doctrine—it was direct transmission.
✨ “I and the Father are one.”
(John 10:30)
He spoke from an inner mountain ridge where his words didn’t come from self—but from eternity. Every time he spoke, something in people shook—not because they understood—but because something within them recognized.
Buddha was a little different. He transmitted access to higher consciousness to those of his students who were ready to receive. This has become many lineages of teachers that all leads back to him.
In either case, access is only granted if you are ready. Meaning years of training in how to silence your mind.
How the Living Became Dogma
After the death of Christ, it didn’t take long before the living became law. Before experience became belief. Before silence became scripture.
The direct contact with the collective field that Christ embodied was eventually replaced by institution, doctrine, and fear. What was once living fire was wrapped in councils, clerics, doctrines—and later, sermons that knew nothing of the source.
The few who later reconnected to the field—mystics like Meister Eckhart, John of the Cross, Marguerite Porete—were persecuted, censored, or burned. Why? Because they didn’t “believe.” They knew. And knowledge from direct experience cannot be controlled.
📜 Meister Eckhart:
“God does not live in a place, but in a silence. And the one who reaches that silence knows God more than any sermon can teach.”
To the initiated—those who’ve touched the field—much of official Christianity feels deeply alien. Not because it’s “wrong” in content—but because its form has lost contact with the source. It’s like chewing the rind of a fruit, unaware there’s a seed within.
If you are able to be present in the collective spaciousness, you will know that the teachings of Christ and Buddha were the same. You will also see clearly what dogma has done to both. In the case of the Christ we only know that the teachings were transmitted to Thomas and possibly to Maria Magdalena. But for all we know the lineage ends there. In the case of Buddha the living teaching has survived through the lineage of enlightened souls.
Christ as Practice – Not Belief
Christ didn’t point to himself as an idol. He pointed to the path.
“Follow me.”
– not: “Think correctly about me.”
He didn’t ask us to believe in his truth. He called us to live from the same source he spoke from. To become ladders. Channels. Living bearers of the collective light.
“The kingdom of God is within you.”
(Luke 17:21)
If you think this is about theological correctness, you’ve already lost the thread.
This is about experience, not dogma. About silence, not hymns. About speaking from the field, not speaking about it.
Back to the Silence
The collective field Christ spoke from is not reserved for him. It is still open.
But only to the one who dares to be silent long enough, to train deeply enough, and to forget themselves.
Faith cannot get you there.
Theology cannot build the ladder.
Only spiritual practice—craft, prayer, listening, emptiness—opens the door again.
When you pray, go into your room, close the door, and pray in secret.”
(Matthew 6:6)
The secret is the field.
The door is your ego.
And the key is your practice.