right on! i think i would like to do this, although i feel my records are usually meaningless anyway, haha.

It's interesting (and slightly uncanny) that you should talk about accessing the subconscious via HitRECord. Just a few days ago, I was reading a similar article, however in an old-media stalwart, Glimmertrain magazine (short fiction).

http://www.glimmertrain.com/b39kennedy.html

I have a feeling that this is going to be longwinded, so maybe you need to buckle in.

I have just come back from beautiful New Zealand where my brother and his wife and daughter live. From playing with my niece, I've learned so much about spontaneity, creativity and just the process of teaching yourself. She's almost 2 and she's quite happy to build things and tear things down and build them again and tear them down again.. She is completely unconcerned with maintaining the purity of an object, her surrounding or herself. She and I once spent an entire afternoon decorating ourselves with toothpaste. By the end of it, we looked like warriors. She basically taught me to look and see and play, to not take myself or objects or my surroundings as immutable, as having only one meaning, one purpose, one possible use. Turn things upside down, tickle its belly, listen to it speak, inspect its joints... The world is alive and yet we kill it by thinking that we have owned it and built it and it occupies this rigid cage in our conscious.

I think that is very much something we learn to do as adults. We learn to regulate things, to categorize them, instead of pushing them altogether and seeing what new connections you make.

I think nourishing creativity is partly about unlearning adulthood and relearning play. And that's kinda hard, but it's unbelievably important -VITAL even! - not just for "artists", but to solve some of the world's biggest problems.

"and in a way, i can almost learn more about myself..." right on friend! it's so true :) i think i need to take your advice and start doing a bit more curating of the RECords.

you're just right... sometimes mening comes later...

Via - you know what I mean :) You sort of have just know, for the language to describe Zen concepts doesn't really exist - maybe cannot exist, as the essence of it is more primeval than language. What I needed was a reminder. To stop grasping and let go.

Dee, et al - On finding in meaning in randomness: The human need to find meaning in things, regardless whether it was intended, whether it's even "really there" or not is fundamental to our psychology. Our brains are giant pattern matching machines. We are literally built to find patterns... and we're designed to err on the side of finding patterns that aren't there rather than risk missing patterns that are there.

horrorshock: i think what you're talking about is when technique trumps inspiration. technique is one of those useful things you need to repeat so often it starts running on autopilot in the background....but it makes a lousy navigator.

like the difference between hard judgment and a more fluid discernment, perhaps.

ntheon: studying zen has always struck me as an oxymoron. :-)

People need to find a meaning to things, it's actually why god-like concepts exist: to give a name to something that's beyond their understanding. But then again, there's a group of people -like us :)- that don't necessarily need an explanation right away. Just now I was reading Mushr's comment on a story I wrote called The Old Man And His Shadow and she said that every writer needs a Boo Radley story, and she's got a good point, but I never really thought about it when I was writing it: I was just writing.

It's also why people sometimes misses the beauty of simple (and unexplained) things, which are mostly little details of life.

You go ahead Joe and do meaningless things, I'm pretty sure we all do it anyways :) plus, it's fun!