Consumption vs Creation

Level 4: Serious Player

How our perspective, our intent, and the outcome we ultimately produce is impacted by our inner drive to either consume or create.

Future Guardian,

Live to Learn. Give to Earn.

This foundational "motto" of The Guardian Academy has deep layers of self reflection, self understanding, and power of giving and Creation built into it.

Creation.

There's a power there. 

A power which taps into the formless void of existence within which life as we know it, time, energy, joy, sadness, have all emerged.

What does it mean to really create? I don't just mean to make something.

And how do we know when we are CREATING and "giving to earn" vs CONSUMING and contributing little to that power of giving?

I have found two opposing internal drives. I want to talk about them as Creation and Consumption.

Because how you perceive yourself and your motivations on this spectrum ultimately dictates how you impact others and 'Give to Earn' in this life.

What is Creation?

What do you think of when you think of Creation?

Do you think of making things?

Is building a house Creation?

Let's talk Lego for a moment.

Lego makes for an excellent example of how I think of Creation.

Just putting Lego pieces together is not Creation.

Putting a set of Lego together to make the thing on the box is not Creation.

Creation is about ... well ... creating something that was not there before.

And the something I'm talking about almost always goes beyond the physical form.

The Lego pieces were already there. You just put them in a particular order. You didn't make something new, you reordered that which was already made.

So putting the Lego pieces together is NOT Creation.

I would argue the same about building a house.

Building a house is not Creation.

You are just reordering materials that were already created.

It's not the thing itself that is the Creation.

(I think this is one of the things I find so bothersome about gurus and charlatans. Often all they are doing is reordering that which already exists, slapping a new label on it, and then saying "look what I created." But more on that in a minute)

But,

What happens when you reorder Lego pieces to "make" a starship, and then that starship is piloted by The Last Starfighter In the Galaxy, who sets out on a lonely mission to defeat the enemy that lives in Planet Laundry.

THAT's Creation.

The Creation of a world, of a story, of an experience. 

As I wrote that, I imagined a child finishing the last piece on the Lego set and then suddenly transforming the entire thing into this imaginary world, buzzing around the house between laundry baskets.

That is Creation ... pulling from that which already exists something which could never otherwise exist without the input of the creator ... and that Creation impacts other things in the world.

This might be semantically confusing because we can argue ultimately that everything in existence is reformed matter, but I'm talking about the meaningful essence of things. (You might even call Creation an emergent property of our reality, but that's a conversation for another time)

Let's explore deeper.