What is a Good Life? #96
The Call Of Creativity with John Oliver
On the 96th episode of What is a Good Life? podcast, I am delighted to introduce our guest, John Oliver. John is an artist and sense-making facilitator, exploring multidisciplinary practices based on complexity principles and narrative frameworks. Since 2020, he has developed an artistic practice that integrates the arts with complexity principles, working in portraiture film, and experimental installations. Certified in developmental psychology coaching and co-founder of Human-Equity Ltd, he specialised in qualitative metrics for organisational development and human insights in investment portfolio management. Previously, John managed technology transfer projects in Nepal and Ghana for the NGO Intermediate Technology Development Group, spent 15 years in strategy consulting, and was an early team member at the French start-up OneAccess. He holds a BEng from Brunel University and an MBA from EDHEC in France.
In this expansive conversation, John shares his journey towards greater creativity and his explorations of self and no-self. We discuss sense-making through dialectics, revelations through creativity, and the concept of positive disintegration. We also delve into the dissonance experienced during transitions, with John sharing his insights on the arts as a spiritual practice.
If you are currently navigating, or contemplating, major or minor life transitions, this conversation offers many valuable insights and themes that are worthy of your contemplation.
The weekly clip from the podcast (4 mins), my weekly reflection (3 mins), the full podcast (78 mins), and the weekly questions all follow below.
1. Weekly Clip from the Podcast
2. My weekly reflection
Towards the end of this conversation, John asked me what I might consider to be a dialectic of soul. If you, like me at the start of the interview, do not know what dialectic means, it is a process of reasoned discussion that seeks to resolve or synthesise opposing viewpoints, ideas, or concepts to arrive at a deeper understanding.
After a moment or two of contemplation, I suggested spirit as being in a dialectical relationship with soul. Given we were talking about transitions amidst self-inquiry and concepts of positive disintegration (coined by the Polish psychiatrist and psychologist Kazimierz Dabrowski), the interplay, as I see it, between soul and spirit is quite fitting.
I don’t know about you, but when I, like many I have encountered, began to meditate, attended retreats, read new ideas and books—Eckhart Tolle’s wonderful A New Earth, for example—and heard of things like Ego and pain bodies being discussed in detail for the first time, it was easy to see, hear, and feel the truth in it.
Instead of waiting for the realisations to be my own or embodied, with the enthusiasm and naivety of a young puppy, I wanted to be more virtuous, harmonious, and enlightened to some extent. In hindsight, they were very heady aspirations—heady insofar as I had absorbed a lot of intellectual information and assumed I really knew something.
I view these early aspirations as a very immature or early expression of my attempts to engage with spirit, to ascend and transcend my current state at the time. It wasn’t a case of spiritual bypassing, as I was exploring various pains, emotions, and frustrations, but there was something very disembodied about it.
It didn’t emerge with much self-love or acceptance of who I was or my experiences; it felt as though there was a pious judgement of many of my flaws, and while my language and intellectual knowledge had changed, the pattern of self-judgement remained. I wanted to disavow or cast off parts of myself that conflicted with my new aspirations.
There is something about engaging with soul that makes me think of my hands in the clay of life. For me, a greater engagement with soul has brought me into a much greater acceptance of myself, of what it is to be human, not looking away from any of it. It’s coming to terms with what a human is, what I am.
Like spirit, I sense that soul has its shadow, in that we can remain trapped where we are if there is only a justification of ourselves in the context of humanity. However, before making our attempts to ascend once more, I see the act of deeply knowing yourself—not rejecting any of it, intimately knowing the terrain of your inner world—as profoundly important before we take flight towards spirit once more.
A movement towards spirit without this embodiment often leaves us in that annoying role of broadcasting values and theories, while those around us may perceive us as disconnected or blind to the whole of ourselves. We talk a good game that we do not know how to walk, probably preaching self-acceptance while being as harsh as ever with ourselves.
I suspect that this is a tension or a loop that we take many, many times in our lives. The ascent into spirit, only to realise the need to descend to the ground once more, to become even more intimate with our humanity, to ascend again from a more genuine and fortified base.
I sense for myself that I have spent a number of years getting deeply comfortable in the ground of my being, so that I may now be seeking spirit once more. Aspiring from a place of greater acceptance of myself and life in general, only to realise, when engaging with the spirit, where I am still somewhat disembodied or resisting this human experience of life or myself.
I believe there is something beautiful in that continuous loop and the potential for refinement—not driven by a sense of lack or desire, but by engaging with our natural or true selves, the natural growth inherent in the human experience, and our innate tendency to look toward the stars.
3. Full Episode - The Call Of Creativity with John Oliver - What is a Good Life? #96
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4. This week’s Questions
Has a creative act ever revealed something of yourself you had previously not known?
Are you experiencing any dissonance between who you have been and who you now are?
About Me
I am a coach, podcast host, and writer, based in Berlin, via Dublin, Ireland. I started this project in 2021, for which I’ve now interviewed over 200 people. I’m not looking to prescribe universal answers, more that the guests’ lines of inquiry, musings, experiences, and curiosities spark your own inquiry into what the question means to you. I am also trying to share more genuine expressions of the human experience and more meaningful conversations.
If you would like to work with me to explore your own lines of self-inquiry, take part in my weekly free silent conversations, discuss experiences I create to stimulate greater trust, communication, and connection, amongst your teams, or you simply want to get in touch, here’s my email and LinkedIn.
We cannot 'see' the subject (soul and spirit) because we look outward for an object (the mind depends on the external senses for inputs).
"We are so addicted to looking outside ourselves that we have lost access to our inner being almost completely. We are terrified to look inward, because our culture has given us no idea of what we will find. We may even think that if we do we will be in danger of madness. This is one of the last and most resourceful ploys of ego to prevent us discovering our real nature.
So we make our lives so hectic that we eliminate the slightest risk of looking into ourselves. Even the idea of meditation can scare people. When they hear the words "egoless" or "emptiness," they think experiencing those states will be like being thrown out of the door of a spaceship to float forever in a dark, chilling void. Nothing could be further from the truth. But in a world dedicated to distraction, silence and stillness terrify us; we protect ourselves from them with noise and frantic busyness. Looking into the nature of our mind is the last thing we would dare to do.
Sometimes I think we don't want to ask any real questions about who we are, for fear of discovering there is some other reality than this one. What would this discovery make of how we have lived? How would our friends and colleagues react to what we now know? What would we do with the new knowledge? With knowledge comes responsibility. Sometimes even when the cell door is flung open, the prisoner chooses not to escape."
~Â Sogyal Rinpoche. The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying.