5 Creativity Tips Straight from God
This year, I went looking for God.
I’d heard a great many stories about where he might be, and figured I’d just follow them up, one by one. Apart from the ones that said he was ‘everywhere’ of course — they were clearly nonsense and of no use to me whatsoever.
I started in Israel, and God was nowhere to be found. I crossed the deserts of Saudi Arabia, the bustling cities of Uttar Pradesh, the mountains of Manchuria, all to no avail.
Eventually I ended up in Peru. After 7 months of searching, I was almost ready to give up and go to America. Tired and disheartened, I threw myself down by the side of the road, waiting for someone to drive by so I could hitch a lift. Nobody came.
But when I looked up, there was an old man sitting next to me. I hadn’t noticed him before. Which was odd, because he was so close I could almost taste him, and noisily huffing what I would up until that moment have described as ‘fatal’ quantities of aerosol. He snorted with an inhuman zeal, as if by hitting it harder he could ascend to some higher form of being.
“Where did you come from?” I asked.
He didn’t say anything, just kept on huffing. I thought his head might explode at any moment. He was covered from head to toe in shit. In spite of this, I tapped him on the shoulder. Curiosity is a powerful thing.
“That’s quite dangerous,” I said, “you should probably stop now.”
“Not for me it isn’t,” he grunted.
“Oh. No I really think you sh-”
“I’m God.”
There was silence for a few moments as I mulled the possibility over.
“I don’t believe you.”
“Dun’t matter,” he said, and produced a handful of odd-smelling gunk, seemingly from nowhere. “Here. Eat this. That’ll learn ya.”
Swallowing the gunk, I laid back and felt the cosmos inside me. At that moment, I slipped out of the universe to a plane of unexistence, where everything, suddenly, was not.
There I entered God’s workshop. It was a ruin and clearly hadn’t been inhabited for millennia, but what I learned there is almost impossible to transpose into human knowing. It’s beyond language. People have been trying to share God’s secrets for years, and just look at what happened to Jesus.
Nonetheless, here I’ve tried to make my post-celestial segue count. By distilling my observations on God’s process of creation into 5 real things that anyone can do, I can help make your pithy thoughts and ideas sear themselves into being with the brightness and quasi-permanence of starlight. Some of them may seem a little outlandish, counter-intuitive, even dangerous — but these are the purest ways in and outside the universe to train yourself in the art of creation.
1. Inhale the ashes of a friend or relative
You’ll be imbued with new life, wisdom, and the memories of a lifetime. Your dreams will catapult you into the thought-stream of someone you’d half-forgotten, opening your mind to new (past) experiences and a deeper understanding of those closest to you. What could be more inspiring?
It’s worth noting that whilst this is undoubtedly a life-changing and soul-enriching experience, it’s best carried out in a controlled environment, far away from other friends and family. You don’t want Dad coming downstairs at 4am to find you ripped off your tits on Grandma. He probably wouldn’t understand.
2. Shit yourself in public
Necessity is the mother of invention. As you limp, cack-legged and afraid through the too-bright aisles of the supermarket, looking for brie, babywipes and the nearest exit, your creative impulses will start to whirr at breakneck speed.
You might think to tuck your jeans into your shoes or socks.
You might be wearing shorts, forcing you to react in any number of ways:
a) You toss the brie at a cashier to cause a diversion then bolt for the exit amidst the maelstrom, babywipes held under each leg as makeshift shit-hammocks.
b) You swallow the cheese whole then eat as many of the babywipes as it takes to get you vomiting uncontrollably. You spend anywhere between 5 and 10 minutes bent double, retching, sobbing, heaving out everything inside you that’s not tied in, shouting ‘Help, I’ve got bleach poisoning!’ (‘Mmph, Ibe boff eeff bervernun!’) The cashier calls an ambulance. Retch. Sob. Heave. Retch. Sob. Heave. Repeat until the arrival of paramedics. No-one judges you since you’re clearly just somebody life has been unkind to.
c) You find the wipes, sidle into the toilets before the dirt-runnels make it to your white socks, clean up, then pay for your brie and half-empty pack of babywipes.
Whichever way you handle it, it’s top-tier, survivalist-level creativity.
3. Change your name to ‘Wolf’
Bonding your spirit through eponymity to that of an eternal soul such as a wolf will unlock creative power beyond your wildest imaginings.
Also, people will think you’re cooler and deeper than the Twilight Zone (both the seminal, mind-bending ’60s TV show and the mesopelagic layer of the ocean which typically ranges between 4–12°C at a depth of 200–1000m).
4. Shave your entire body
The human body is a pernicious network of nooks, bungholes and crevices. It’s a nightmare to navigate with sharp objects. Even the most adept shavers are liable to come out of the bathroom looking like they’ve been dragged, screaming over a bed of carpet grips. Much like invention, art, and writing, maintaining total bodily hairlessness is a task that requires tenacity, resilience, and a certain degree of self-mutilation. Doing it every other day should be sufficient to train your wayward mind.
And as you slip around in your bath like a big, gangly baby, you’ll rediscover that childhood sense of uninhibited joy and wonder so invaluable to the creative process, and that you thought was gone forever.
5. Experiment with your brain chemistry like a mad scientist
Genius is the result of chemical imbalances in the brain. Nobel prize winning mathematicians and physicists routinely rely on amphetamines and cocaine to keep them fired up in the early hours of their third sleepless morning in a row.
Out of body experiences, running 30 miles to ‘blow off some steam’, discussing the socioeconomic downfall of modern society with dead rockstars, it’s all great for filling that well of inspiration you’ll need to draw on later.
So whip up a psychosis-courting cocktail of Raoul Dukean proportions and have at it, one swirling headfuck at a time, and journey to the depths and recesses of your mind you’d forgotten, never knew were there, or have otherwise been struggling to repress since your earliest years.
When I woke at the side of the road the stars were out, and a concerned Peruvian farmer was pouring tepid cola onto my face and neck. The old man was gone. Numbly I climbed into the back of the farmer’s truck, vacantly staring past the bleating ewes whose bed I was now sharing.
I rode in the truck all the way to the city, took a boat up the river into Ecuador, then hitched my way through Colombia, Central America, into Mexico, all the way telling as many as would listen about what I’d seen out there in the nothing. Few listened. I didn’t really expect them to.
God isn’t some guy with an elephant head, lightning bolts, or a celestially-proportioned forefinger. Not many are ready to hear that. Fewer still are ready to hear that he’s a shit-smeared substance abuser who clearly gave up the creation game a long time ago.
I don’t pray, because I know he can’t hear me. And if he could, he wouldn’t be interested.
I don’t seek him, because he could be anywhere, and if I found him he’d probably just shrug me off and feed me full of drugs again.
I don’t worship him, because he’s a stinking, ruinous wretch with no dignity or self-respect.
Nonetheless, he’s given me new purpose and appreciation for the universe, and with it I’ll continue to travel the world, sharing my experiences with the less fortunate. Maybe I’ll start my own church. The Church of Post-Cosmic Creative Enlightenment.
Right now I’m in a minivan, on my way to Texas. Maybe they’ll be interested in what I have to say.
Click the heart to support my teachings and flourishing gunk-habit in the land of the free.
