How New Perspectives Inspire Creativity and Meaning
You are a monkey. You live in a very tall tree with all of the other little monkeys of your kind. Everything you need exists within the canopy. The fruit feeds you, the rain collects as puddles in the leaves for you to drink. There are very few predators this high up, and there is plenty of shelter. The trees are all you know. It’s all any of your family and friends have ever known, and no one has ever left and returned to talk about it. The only real danger is The Fall. While your instincts keep you tethered to the limbs, it’s no secret that a lazy, sleepy, or just plain unlucky monkey has been known to slip. No one survives The Fall.
You go on living your monkey life until one rainy day with the winds high and your strength fading, the branches escape your grasp. You are Falling. Time slows down as you see your home shrink further and further up. The only sound is the air rushing past your ears as you hurtle towards the unknown. An eerie hum reaches a crescendo. You see a brown mass approaching. You perceive a dull thud, and everything goes black.
You happened to land on a thick pile of decomposing leaves near the base of your tree. The tree provides, yet again. As you regain your senses, you take in your surroundings. The air is thick and fragrant. The earth itself rises to meet your feet, a soft, warm cushion. The chirping of insects merges into an unrelenting choir of strange frequencies. Sound gets absorbed and reflected in the most disorienting ways. Yet you are alive. And in this wild moment, perhaps more alive than anyone you’ve ever known. Your eyes catch movement in the distance, and The Fall becomes The Fear. You begin the return home, faster than anticipated.
The rest of the story unfolds however you think it would. Are you the type to experience something like that and just go right back to living a normal life? Might you at the very least feel a bit more appreciation for how easily you could not be here? Perhaps you would want to try to describe the sights and the smells? How would you even begin to describe the ground to the tree-dwellers?
I’d like to think that this is where art steps in. Translating the unfathomable is sort of the hallmark of our species and throughout history we have been taking all types of Falls and coming back to tell the tale. While certainly a little more taboo in our culture, we as a species have found some very easy ways of taking ourselves out of our head and viewing the world from a different perspective.
While I could present to you the myriad of cutting-edge psychedelic research papers documenting the heightened brain activity, increased free-association, and boost in creative drive that non-ordinary states of consciousness can provide, I would rather take the time here to appeal to reason: How could you not be inspired after experiencing a completely fresh take on your reality?
I think that if either of us were that little monkey, we would have no choice but to regale our little monkey friends with legendary (but true!) stories of the Infinitely Wide and Soft Branch, out of which everything grows. Tales of the mist in the void, and the populace of robotic insects. Certainly describing a fern at face value would be a revelation to those who had never seen one. How creative do you even have to be to describe a unique event that happened to you?
While the concept of a bush might be novel to a little animal that lives in the leaves, in our world of cars and computers, there isn’t much left to the imagination. This dense age delivers ancient wisdom to your doorstep by the bookload and we are all inundated with information. Utilizing non-ordinary states of consciousness can provide a fresh take and can show us what really matters in the grandest of all schemes. Our time here is so limited and valuable, and that knowledge can easily scare us into submission.
But we’re not little monkeys in trees. In fact, we’re not even little monkeys in suits and houses. We are far more creative than that! We are beings of creation! It is in our nature to dance and sing and build and decorate and love and all of the little temporal things that will all eventually be lost in the sands of time. It is in knowing this that we arm ourselves against the inevitability of The Fear. It is better to dance in the face of death, than to turn away. For he arrives, nonetheless.
