Underneath Everything

Creation Grows Up

I read an article earlier about Itzhak Bentov, a scientist, a meditator, and a guy who drew “co(s)mic (s)trips” about the origin of the universe. And it rearranged my brain a bit...

He wrote a book called A Brief Tour of Higher Consciousness, and in it, he lays out this theory about how creation works. Not “creativity.” Creation.
The whole thing. The mechanics of how something (be)comes from nothing.

His thesis is basically this:

The Creator doesn’t sit above creation, managing it.
The Creator becomes Creation.
And pours itself into the thing it’s making.

The source and the thing it produces aren’t separate. They’re the same substance, just vibrating at different frequencies.

He calls the cosmic “blank canvas” a fertile void. Pure potential. Everything that could ever exist, sitting in silence, waiting to be vibrated or created or shaped or made into form. To become some THING.

And says that, essentially: what is vibrating from the void will manifest and what is not vibrating will not come to be, but it shall still contain a seed for all that could be.”

I’ve been building things for 30 years. New brands, designs, identities, businesses, a podcast, a community, a Museletter (you might be reading right now).

And for most of those years, I’ve thought about my creative work the way most of us do… Sort of, like an org chart?

With me at the top and my projects underneath...
Lines of authority running downward. CEO of my own little creative empire, managing the various divisions of “Aaron Embrey, Inc.’

Bent Barn Studio: the client work division.
Wild Creating: the community division.
The Unfolding: the content division.
Teaching: the education division.

So, tidy and professional. And it kinda makes sense on paper.

And I also think, it’s... wrong (for me).

I figured this out by accident while I was mapping out my own brand architecture. Organizing everything I’ve built. Literally drawing boxes and arrows, trying to figure out how all these different things relate to each other.

Everything I’d been sketching had me (or my personal brand) sitting ABOVE everything else.

Just, there… Looking down. And presiding. Lording over the things I’d created...

But something in my body was saying: absolutely, NO.

It wasn’t “no, that’s strategically incorrect.”
It was more like... “no, that’s not how any of this ACTUALLY grew.”

That’s not how creation works.

I didn’t stand at the top of... something... and delegate the Wild Creators’ podcast into existence.

I didn’t issue a memo that launched the Wild Creating community.

I didn’t manage my Museletters into being.

I just... became them.

And I think, that’s when Bentov’s model clicked inside me.

The Creator doesn’t sit above its creations. The Creator exists BENEATH them.

The Creator is the soil and the root system. The fertile void from which things emerge because that’s what fertile soil DOES. It grows things.

And once they break the surface, they have their own shape. Their own direction. Their own relationship to the sun.

The podcast wasn’t any sort of strategic initiative.
It was just the first vibration of a new idea.
A sound I put out into the void because I couldn’t not.

And from that initial vibration, everything else grew.
The Wild Creator’s community, the conversations, the writings, the workshops, all of it.

It’s because I took action. I opened my mouth and started creating, and then, creation just… did what creation does. It kept going.

I think we (all!) get this wrong a lot (creatives especially).

We think we’re supposed to be in charge of our work. Managing it. Directing it. Standing above it with a clipboard and a five-year plan.

But what if the real posture of creation isn’t above? What if it’s below?

What if we’re not the CEO of our creative life? What if we’re the SOIL?

I think, that changes everything.

It changes what we optimize for (--> fertility)
How we relate to the things we’ve made (--> nourishment)
What we do when something we built takes a direction we didn’t plan. (--> feed it)

And maybe most importantly, it changes what we do in the quiet seasons and slow times and weeks where nothing is growing and we think something must be wrong with us (or our work or our offerings)...

But nothing is wrong. The soil is resting.
It’s doing the work we can’t yet see.

Here’s what I know right now.

Wild Creating isn’t a new brand I created. It’s a world that has grown from me and from the same root system that feeds my client work, my teaching, writing, photography, conversations over fire pits and in DMs at midnight...

I’m not above any of my ideas. I’m underneath all of them.

And the things I’ve made are perpetually, reaching toward the light in ways I didn’t design and can’t fully control and wouldn’t want to even if I could.

Bentov said the whole point of creation is that the Creator wants experience. Wants to know itself through what it makes. Wants to play a cosmic game of hide-and-seek and then, at the moment of recognition, shout “Boo! I’m YOU.”

I think that’s what’s happening with me. Slowly. Messily. Here in the quiet, pineywoods of East Texas. With mom and dogs.

The vibration started a long time ago. And it’s still going...

If this is the kind of writing that makes you lean in... The longer, stranger, more personal kind that circles around creativity and identity and what happens when you stop trying to manage your life and start letting it grow. That’s what the paid tier of The Unfolding is for! It’s where I write and share the stuff I can’t write and share anywhere else...

But this one’s free!
Because some things need to be shared where people can find them.