How to Tap Into Your Infinite Creativity + Intuition | The Big Leap EP#80

Life is inevitable in the universe.

The universe has no choice. It will reveal itself to you.

While I was laying down and meditating, I felt this infinite vastness and the sense of being able to accomplish and create anything.

Oh, it's just. It's all there. You just have to open up to it. And he says, then I just open up to it and open my mouth and see what comes out.

I wonder if. Or I wonder what. Or I wonder how we're all about.

Wonder here at the Big Leap. In this episode, Mike and I take on a really big subject, which is wondering and the art of staying open. And we tell some stories from our own life. And I share the details about how I stay open and keep that space of pure consciousness alive and working for me at all times.

So my big takeaway from this is if you really, really want to tap into your infinite creative muse in a way that just delights you and makes you feel and be happy and amplify that everywhere you go. Gay has some really, really, really fun ideas. One of them, you're going to hear the story of the monastery of an LA traffic jam. So, as usual, G, amazing insights. And you'll even hear a little story about a connection he had when he was talking to Ram Dass. And there's always a lot of fun and a lot of wonder if you're hanging out with Ram Dass. So all that and more in this episode of the Big Leak coming up next.

All right, Gay, you started this conversation with a quote from a book that I know you had shared, I believe it was with Deepak Chopra. And also the big idea in this episode, the big leap of the Day, is the art of being open. Something that when we talked about that, we both really felt this delicious sense of, ah, yeah, I want that. And there this is one of those deep, nuanced, fun topics about what it takes to be open, how you stay open, but also how we can use this as a seed for our creativity, our opportunity to collaborate. But also, it turns out we just finished a really, really great interview with Diana Chapman and Dim Detmer from the Conscious Leadership Group about this kind of thing. And I just feel so strong after having this really great conversation. I feel renewed and refreshed. So do you want to begin with that quote?

I do, and it describes the state of consciousness that I'm familiar with inside myself, but I'd never seen a quotation that really kind of described it. And I'll tell you it's from an odd source, but I want to save that as a little surprise. So listen to this. You do not need to leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. Do not even listen. Simply wait. Do not even wait. Be quite still and ordinary.

The world will freely offer itself up to you to be unmasked. It has no choice. It will roll in ecstasy at your feet. That is from.

Franz Kafka. And I don't know if you had to study Franz when you were in college or whatever, but we had to read. I was an English major. And he's one of the great writers, but he writes very dark, strange books. But how he came up with this particular quote, I do not know. But think about what he's really saying. He's saying that to be in that state of absolute openness where there's no content on your openness. It's not like you're open to enjoying an ice cream sundae or open to learning Spanish or winning the lottery. You're just purely open with no content. And he's saying that the universe, the world, will roll in ecstasy at your feet. It will freely offer itself up to be unmasked. And I found that absolutely to be true. The more I can stay in that still point, kind of like zero, zero point state here and now, right now, being in this moment, it's like things open up. I call it third way manifestation, because the first way of manifestation that I was things like visualization and affirmations, you know, like Louise Hay or Shakti Gawain's original creative visualization book. Well, those are very useful. But that's stage one. That's kind of creating positive thoughts. And that's great to get out in front of yourself with some positive thoughts and ideas. That's better than going around chanting negative thoughts to yourself, for sure. And the second stage of manifestation is when you're.

You're needing to learn to love things about yourself. That's a path to manifestation. Because as you learn to love these parts of yourself, you clear them out of your way, these old unlovable parts of yourself. And you get down to the part where there are no more unlovable parts of yourself. You're just loving in the moment and loving yourself for who you are and being in a pure space of love. And that is a measurement you can use to kind of design your life by. And I like to design my life, so I'm feeling that all the time. So I don't like to. When I'm in a traffic jam, for example, I want to just be in that open space and see what happens? Because I've had miraculous things happen. Like I used to have an office down in Studio City when I was participating more in the movie business than I do these days. And so I would go down and I would get through traffic and I would get stuck in traffic. And in a way, I looked forward to driving in LA traffic to see if I could stay in that open space. I remember once a friend of mine who's also a friend of yours, Mary Morrissey, happened to call me one day while I was sitting in an LA traffic jam. And she said, hi, Gay, what are you up to? And I said, well, I'm in the Zen monastery of an LA traffic jam. Because I was sitting there in this space of really radiant stillness while the traffic jam was going on.

And.

And when that happens, I really value that because frequently what happens right after that is something will happen, you know, the traffic will move or some new space will open up to go over into the diamond zone or something like that. And so I call it the third way because it's how you get to be after you've done level one, you know, visualization and affirmations and thinking positively. And it comes along after you've done the second type of manifestation, which is learning to love the unlovable and clearing all that out of the way. And the third way, though, the third level is just things happen automatically and spontaneously without even really having to think positively. Or you're just there, open to the moment. And the universe has a way of helping you move through to places that will really favor your evolution if you can stay open and out of your own ideas about how it has to go.

So much to unpack there.

First of all, I love the monastery. That is genius. And.

I have always been a wanderer. So my form of meditation used to be jump in a car and just go. And it kind of drives Vivian crazy because she wants to know where we're going before we get in the car. And I'm like, baby, we're going to jump in the car and I'll figure it out when we get there. And I'm going to know what I want as soon as I drive near it.

And it's never boring and it's always great and we pick a good spot. But she just like her fact finder is just like flashing red lights. But I want to go back up to the top because my interpretation, when I listen to.

The poem.

I had this moment where, I don't know if you remember this, the movie Men in Black, one of the Big ideas was this cat that had basically the thing the size of a marble on its neck. And one of the big aha's in the film is the galaxy is on Orion's belt and Orion's belt was a cat collar. And on that little pendant or the little marbley thing wasn't, it was a galaxy containing billions of stars. And basically the bad guy in the movie is trying to destroy the galaxy and it's this big chase. And on a metaphysical level, I'm a huge believer that you know what they say, so within you, so outside. I can't remember the big phrase, but it's within you and outside of you. You know, the galaxy is as above, so below. There we go. Good job. It's nice to hang out with a smart guy.

But the other part of it is I think when, for me, the art of being open is to live in a dream state where you allow your intuition to create this expansive opportunity and allow you to channel. Because in, you know, if you imagine you can be inside your room and when you're open, the universe has this interesting way of channeling through you and giving you access to wisdom and knowledge.

Because you start feeling into the formula of the universe and you know, through meditation, not just wisdom, but knowledge flows through you. And you're like, where in the hell did that come from? I never learned that. And I think tapping into infinite wisdom, infinite creativity, like, where does a movie like Avatar come from? And it's like, well, tripping balls. That's one way. You know when you're doing psychedelics, that opens up channels and removes those filters and it's like eternal knowledge flows. But.

For me, I just experienced this feeling of dreaming in a limitless space and yet being contained. And the freedom can happen inside that containment.

Yes, that's a delicious space. I had the opportunity to once I went to James Cameron's house to attend a party. And I was amazed by that guy. Just the amount of intelligence he radiated. It was like stepping into a creative.

Cauldron being around him.

And I also flash back when you were mentioning, you know, where does that come from?

When I first met Ram Dass, I was 24 years old and I didn't know anything about yoga or meditation, but he had just come back from India and I met him through a friend of mine that had been one of his students at Harvard. And so.

He talked, Ram Dass talked for three hours without any notes. And he would just stop occasionally and kind of go down inside. And then he'd open his eyes and he'd start again. And I remember going up to him afterwards and saying, where are you getting this stuff from? Because to me, I was a teacher at the time. And the idea of going into a classroom without any notes, I just couldn't imagine that, you know, I had systematic notes for every classroom class I taught. So I asked him, and he said, oh, it's just. It's all there. You just have to open up to it. And he says, then I just open up to it and open my mouth and see what comes out. And that, to me, sounded like gibberish at the time. It sounded like intriguing gibberish, but I didn't have any context for holding that. But now I see exactly what he's up to, because I've been cultivating that same space for the last 50 years. And the whole quote of Franz Kafka's about the universe has no choice. It will reveal itself to you. It will roll in ecstasy at your feet. It is so true. Because in the moment when you're in that space of openness.

The previously unknown comes to light in a way. That quote about it has no choice. It's kind of like it creates. You create a vacuum with a certain type of consciousness, and into that vacuum rushes universal wisdom and ideas and things that are useful. And if we stay locked in the zone of the known, you know, with our habitual thinking strategies, we don't ever get to taste that raw emergence of that pure creative juice that comes through when we're sitting there in that space of pure openness. This. Yeah.

I don't know how to unpack all that.

So I want to ask you just a practical, tactical.

Well, first of all, I just want to acknowledge that I. I just love stories of Ram Dass and my son Zach Red be here now when he was pretty young, and it definitely affected him. And he went back and reread it and reread it, and he obviously got something different out of it every time. That's one of those books that.

You know, no matter what phase of life you're in, you're going to, you know, interpret it a little bit differently. So it's. It's amazing. And also, it just goes to show when you talk about.

Having no choice.

I think that is the nature of the universe, right? It just wants to give birth to life and evolve. And I just saw a little news clip this weekend that they're somewhere in Australia. There's a div. A land divided, and they found snails that are evolving very differently just between two places. And it's happening so quickly, and so evolution is just so natural and normal and necessary. And when you think about extinction events, I was watching this special this past week about when one of the big meteors crashed into the Earth and just massive species died and it gave rise to mammals, and boom. Out of that, this. This intelligence just forces this behavior. And there's some.

Physicists, metaphysicists, and biologists who are just saying life is inevitable in the universe. It's just that time is so spread out, we don't witness it because, you know, there's probably a birth and a death of stars and galaxies and entire meta universes that have taken place along the way. So.

Yeah, anyway. Well, I've. I've. I think I mentioned earlier on a podcast something I saw in Scientific American. I think it was one time where there's a hot spot out in the universe that's spewing out 32 suns per second. S U n like our sun, it's. It's a cosmic hot spot where it's just pumping out suns. And so there are billions of galaxies out there. That's why I say that I don't have any question that there's intelligent life out there. I just wonder if they have somebody out there that can beat the Dodgers. You know, it's got to be like that. You know, with billions and billions of galaxies, it would be so unbelievable, statistically unbelievable, if we're the only place that can have a conversation like this. Yeah. Yeah.

Well, there's a. There's a lot of opportunities for things to go wrong along the way. So, you know, it's like, statistically, you could make an argument for both sides. So that leads me to.

Tapping into.

The infinite. How do you use the art of being open.

From a creative perspective, from a collaborative perspective, and full disclosure for folks who.

Listen to and watch this podcast. Gay and I never really plan. I've kind of tried before, but it always works better when we get together. We've got. We schedule a recording time, and then it's like, what do you want to talk about? And what are you interested in? What's exciting to you? And we just brainstorm for a couple moments until something feels good. And whenever I talk about Gay Hendrix, one of the things that I really have learned from you is how much you talk to your body and listen to your body, and it's interesting to watch you when the lights go on, and it literally is. You see, you radiate when something feels good, and then you're on and you know you go through this phase of kind of looking puzzled and inquisitive, and I was, yes, I like that. Right? And then, boom, it happens. So I'm curious if you can deconstruct your art of being open and how you give birth.

Yes. Well, I owe a lot of that space to daily meditation. So I go way out of my way. I spend almost an hour a day cultivating that open space of pure receptivity. See, I think we can make a huge number of our problems disappear by not even thinking about our problems, but by focusing on our ability to receive more and more positive energy. That solves all your problems in a way. Because if you can get yourself really wide open in every moment to receiving positive energy and letting that flow through you, then problems aren't going to occur as much. We only create problems out of learning needs we have. You know, and sometimes we create the same problem over and over 132 times until finally we get the learning message from it. And so there's a tremendous value to. At any moment, you can get off the cycle of recycling problems in your life by opening up to receiving more in this moment. And so in meditation, for example, I meditate every morning and every evening. It's a process of just kind of quieting and going down through levels until you get. Until I get to a pure space where there's no thoughts coming or going, no memories coming, no future planning or anything. Just this big, wide open space. And once I got that online and knew it was there, then it became easier and easier to favor that and open up to it. But I would say, as I'm sitting here right now.

My feeling in my body is kind of like a flowing spring. That waves of energy, positive energy, that are flowing and streaming up my body and. And that openness down at the center, I believe, is what causes that. Because if I got into my thoughts and started criticizing myself or something like that, I'm sure that feeling would go away very quickly. But since I've been cultivating that space for 50 years now, you know, it's like there all the time now, rather than something I have to go looking for. But I think the key thing is, first of all, just to be willing and open to it. Just to be open to openness, you know, to having some time off from your thoughts and your fantasies of the future and your memories of the past. See, pure consciousness is happening all the time. It's just that most of the time, we don't pay attention to it because we're out there in our thoughts about tomorrow's lunch, or we're back there last week on yesterday's argument, or, you know, we're caught up in the past or the future, and we're not in that space that Ram Dass is talking about and Franz Kafka is talking about, like, just being so still and ordinary and open that things just open up to you. And I found that also.

When I was first learning how to do counseling. You know, I have my master's and my doctorate is on counseling and clinical psychology, which is that branch of psychology which is, you know, interested in therapy and how to make the therapeutic process go better. And I found that there was a certain kind of space to occupy where people started telling me more about what was really going on with them. And it was a space of kind of. You know, nowadays it's popular to think about the idea of unconditional love, but I. I don't even remember it feeling like love. It was just a kind of an openness to be all there for the person, to not have any idea about what that person had to do to just be open to that. And it's interesting, as I got better at doing that, it took less and less time for people to bring forth and kind of open up themselves. And I had this one amazing thing that happened.

During my doctoral training where I realized that I'd gotten really good at it because sometimes I didn't even have to say a word. And I remember my bike broke one day and I was hitching a ride to Stanford on the University Avenue there with my bike kind of hanging onto my bike. Obviously I had a flat tire and I. A guy pulled up in a station wagon and I threw my bike in the back and he gave me a ride over to the gates of Stanford, which was only about maybe a mile and a half. But as soon as I got in the car, I said, thank you, I'm going to the front gates of Stanford. And he said, yeah, I'm going right by it. The next thing he said was, you would not believe how my life has been going lately. And I said, oh, really? You know, tell me more about it. So in the space of about 10 minutes before we got to the gate, this guy had basically laid out a whole bunch of inter generational issues he had without me even saying anything but hello. He didn't know I was a counseling psychology Ph.D. student. You know, and so there's some kind of vibrational shift inside where you begin to first, like Kafka says, just open up and wait, you know, and be still and be ordinary and don't think you have to do anything. And suddenly out of that comes new ideas and new concepts. And I really found that to be true. Now I can sit down next to somebody on an airplane and within a few minutes I notice they'll be talking about if I want them to. Most of the time I want to just do my email or something, but if I want to have a conversation, it's always deep. People go deep. And it's simply because I've prepared a deep space inside myself. And everybody can do that. There's nothing unique or unusual. It just starts out by beginning to have this idea that there's this big, open creative space inside each one of us, and that that can be. I say wooed. You woo it like you woo a lover. You start making love to that part of you, that creative place, that place that gives birth to 32 new sons a second. You know, that cosmic place of creation and life follows intention. If you have the intention to bring more of that forth, it will start happening like. Like Kafka says, it has no choice. It will roll in ecstasy at your feet. It's a largely a matter of invitation, inviting it, being willing, being open, being spacious enough inside. So that's about as practical as I can muster at this time of the day, anyway.

Yeah, well, I'll give you my take on it. While I was listening to you, there's some recurring themes that I really both resonate with and agree with, which is I think of openness as a relationship with a muse. And the word space kept on coming up while you were describing that. And you think about what is space now? It's creating space, but it's also space, which is infinite and vast. And tapping into that feeling. And I think about, like, what we do in this podcast, but also to me, one of the most fun things I do. I've made my whole living revolves around role playing, collaboration and improv and playing let's pretend and yes. And. And then I approach just about anything through the lens of the positive, which is, let me try on this truth, let me try on this person's truth. And imagine what got them there, you know, so part of it is when you understand.

A belief system or a story, you understand the person and you can understand what.

Has created that. And feeling into it gives you a lot of information. And I had the weirdest dream this weekend. I was laying down and it was like a psychedelic dream. And I just had this experience where I had played with AI again to write A whole bunch of stuff. And I started seeing things I hadn't seen before. It was like I had this partner, this muse. And while I was laying down and meditating, I felt this infinite vastness in the sense of being able to accomplish and create anything because I had a tool that never says no. And I felt this feeling as though.

I can ask this thing anything. I remember as a child, I imagined having a computer and I imagined an Internet long before such a thing existed. This idea of what if I had a infinity book where I could read anything and never have to go to the library? It was basically a Kindle and then an Internet where you could ask something, any question and get the information. Now just imagine how powerful you'd be. But now this idea of being able to create. And I did a little experiment today, again, just as an exercise, where I decided I wanted to create, have the computer create a book on first principles, which I find endlessly fascinating. And I thought, what are all the first principles you'd want to know about? Like, what are the top 10 first principles Elon Musk might have? Or the top 10 principles for physics or architecture or engineering? So I just created a. A spreadsheet that asks Chat GPT for the top 10 first principles on a whole bunch of topics. And it gives me those. And then it writes a 100 word description of it and then a 1000 word book chapter on it. And because I can automate it, I can literally just press a button and boom, create a 200 page book with illustrations in about 15 minutes. Okay. And not all of it's good, granted, you know, because you have to look at it and say, how am I going to tweak this? But having a first draft partner from asking better questions opens up a world of infinity. And I think the connection between being open and learning how to ask questions is the seed of manifestation. It's the seed of possibility. So that's what I felt into while you were going through what happened. And I just love this dance and this weave of playing. Yes. And it's like, wow, what an interesting way to stack, accessing this universal knowledge. And I couldn't have just pulled that out of, out of myself without listening to you first and feeling through this seed that began with, let's just talk today about the art of being open.

The art of being open. Well, I think that that is one of the great moments of human existence is when you shift from thinking, you know, everything to wondering about everything. That to me, wonder is the great natural wonder drug of creativity. Because you can, you know, so many people get lost in the zone of the known, just what's known. And it's a limitation. And everybody knows it's a limitation, but everybody feels more comfortable there. And so when you start venturing outside into the zone of the unknown, wonder is really your greatest tool. Because wonder takes you into this place that we're talking about, this place of genuine openness. Because when you wonder about something.

I wonder how X, Y and Z works. You're coming into a place of innocence. You're in a place of cosmic openness. And wonder is the tool that I use a lot, probably more than anything else, as well as meditation, to get there.

That I think if I go back to what is the most common phrase that exists inside my mind, and I remember thinking it as long as I can remember. So my first conscious thoughts were probably around three or four. I wonder if. Or I wonder what. Or I wonder how I would say is the most. If there were a way to transcribe my thoughts from the moment of consciousness. Those are probably the three most common ones. And still to this day. Or I wonder who.

Well, folks, we're all about wonder here at the Big Leap podcast. And today we're wondering about what magic can happen when you go for that still open.

Ordinary, extraordinary space inside. That's just pure wonder. Pure openness. Pure openness to the most interesting thing that could possibly happen right now. So that's your big assignment, folks. Live in that space. Enjoy it, cultivate it.

As usual, we've come to the end of the show. So here we have our big ask, which is share this with someone if you're watching or listening. So if you're listening, make sure you head on over. Just click in your podcast app, give us five stars, write a quick review. I love reading your reviews. And then head on over. If you're watching this on pod on YouTube, click the up the thumbs up because it actually helps the algorithm find more cool people like you. And if you have happened into a really fun seed of wondering and experiencing the art of being open, you can always send Gay and I a message@bigleappodcast.com so with that, thank you so much for listening, watching, and being part of our family. Gay, anything else before we wrap up?

No, Mike, I can't think of anything except stay open.

All right, see you in the next episode.