Alexander Newley Speaking Topics

• CREATIVITY IS FOR EVERYONE—NOT JUST FOR ARTISTS

  Whether you are a business, a parent, a plumber or a politician, creativity is for you. Artists do not have a monopoly on this magical elixir.

  The aim of this talk is to define the complex and mysterious nature of creativity and to prove that it’s a supra-rational force, in the same way that 2 plus 2 can equal 5. It could and should be used in everyday life to solve problems and give us the insights we need to achieve the ‘masterpiece’ of our overall vision.

  But how do we achieve this mysterious x-factor that pushes the every day towards the miraculous; this alchemy that somehow makes the sum more than its parts?

  The answer lies in childhood and the realization that creativity and genius are far more common than we suppose.

  Alexander Newley propounds his belief that everyone should be creative, that it is our birthright, evident in all children—but that this original magic routinely gets drummed out of us by the stultifying powers that be. Every child is born a genius, as immortalized in the lines by William Blake: ‘Trailing clouds of glory do we come from god…’ But this is often short-lived. Children are alive with immortal feelings and enthusiasms—this is why we adore them—but we might, because we have lost it, resent this radiance in them and try to squash it.

  The trick of the creative life is therefore to keep alive the child in us even as we grow and negotiate the important rights of passage that define adulthood—it’s no more complicated, and difficult, than that. On the way we must contend with the negative voices that would call us self-indulgent, simple-minded or air-headed if we hold to our ‘childish’ enthusiasms.

  It’s only by nurturing these enthusiasms that we can hope to guide the inner child to its full maturity. The happy, fulfilled life we all desire is therefore the one in which the inner child can fully share—feeling neither trapped nor abandoned—so that its dreams, and its genius, can shine undimmed.

• LOVE IS THE HIGHEST FORM OF INTELLIGENCE

  There’s a tendency in our culture to regard love as something sentimental—the sort of thing that inspires teenagers to carve a heart enclosing their initials on a tree. This limited view leads us to believe that the ‘serious’ work of intelligence is done by rationality and logic; that ‘Love is blind’—simply emotional and often irrational—and not to be trusted as an expert guide on life’s path.

  Alexander Newley contends that this bias is one of the core prejudices and mistakes of our culture, and that it’s brought us to a nihilistic impasse where we worship science and tech at the cost of the ‘better angels of our nature’ such as compassion, intuition and prophecy—supra-rational traits that give us access to timeless wisdom and the ultimate moral of our human story.

  To address this psychic imbalance between love and reason in ourselves and society at large, the speaker proposes a revised hierarchy that puts love at the top as the enclosing form of intelligence that includes all others. He uses examples from a loving program of parenthood to show that love is the most successful and creative way to prepare a soul for the challenges of life, and demonstrates with startling examples that logic and rationality can actually lead us astray—far from our joy and ultimate purpose.

  He concludes with the assertion that love is the one thing that can help us understand the ‘why’ of life—which is the realm of Art—rather than the ‘what’ of life, which is the lower-order task of Science.

• CREATIVITY IS THE NEW SPIRITUALITY

  We live in a secular time, even though religious fundamentalism is surging at the margins of our ‘civilized’ world. The fact remains that the majority of people who guide, control and define world culture see traditional religion and spirituality as subservient to, and subversive of, a scientifically-proven reality that enforces reason and rationality.

  This bias has led to the model of a successful life severed from all moral and ethical restraint—a prime example being the toxic culture of ‘alpha males’ that brought the world to the brink of financial collapse at the beginning of this century. This malevolent profit-consciousness now infects all areas in the workplace, as well as politics, fostering a culture of billionaires and Davos barons who live the high life while the rest of the world falls into an existential abyss.

  Alexander Newley contends that we are moral and ethical animals by nature, that we need transcendent meaning in our lives as much as we need breath. He goes on to demonstrate a program for the re-integration of creative and spiritual practices into every day life. Using simple exercises and meditations, he guides the audience into a private space of reflection where the particular facts of their individual lives can take on a universal and mythic significance, therefore transforming the everyday into the extraordinary—the person in the street, into the hero.

  He concludes that only this creative hero can take control of a life ride it out to its unique, moral conclusion.

• EVERY JOURNEY IS A HEALING JOURNEY

  Every treatment and description of the human ‘quest’ story tells of an initial loss, followed by a search for the missing piece that will somehow make the hero whole again. The quest for wholeness is thus a search for health: the hero is motivated by illness, which is an intense feeling of lack and imbalance inside the self.

  We are well-acquainted with the errant knight who must recover the ‘ring’ or the missing part of his sacred amulet; who must face down terrible dangers—dragons, sorcery, armies of the night and scarifying self-doubt—if he is to take back his birthright of human integrity.

  Alexander Newley proposes a series of exercises that will help us find the missing piece in our own lives and identify the original crises that could, with the right willingness. spark our heroic quest for wholeness. The listener is led to identify what has been taken from them by so-called ‘civilizing’ influences of society and home, and to begin the long and arduous task of reintegrating the ‘split-off’ self.

  The speaker ends with the caveat that, even though wholeness of personality is universally desired, the ‘complete’ person remains a threat to society because he or she cannot be controlled—acting instead from a centre of sovereign self-agency. Society believes that this can imperceptibly shade into the criminal, that creativity is often dangerous and must be treated with caution. An important part of the healing journey is therefore to develop the inner strength and belief to go against these societal voices when they interfere with our noble truth—rightly seeing them as visitations of fear and distraction on the road to our best life.

• CREATING A NEW MYTHOS FOR OUR TIME

  What is a mythos? How does it differ, if at all, from a religious system? This talk addresses the need for a new mythological and religious system to lend moral urgency to the scientific discoveries of our time. Alexander Newley contends that a vacuum has opened up between science and religion, and that it is now the job of religion to assimilate the new and powerful discoveries in Science if it is to remain a relevant and powerful source of guidance to humanity.

  Drawing on many examples from the religions of the East, most notably hinduism and buddhism, the speaker contends that Christianity and Judaism are lagging behind in their apprehension of reality, as revealed by quantum physics and modern astronomy. He looks into Eastern mysticism to show that ancient texts such as the Upanishads and the I Ching were already in touch with the shifting, non-material nature of subatomic reality thousands of years ago.

  No such vision exists in the West. We are still under the thumb of ‘God the father’ an angry, vengeful old man with human foibles. This chimera has yet to be dissolved by the insights of western science, and therefore we have been forced to choose between science and religion—with disastrous results for our moral life.

  The speaker concludes by proposing several new modes of mythological and symbolic insight that can help align the basic intuitions of Christianity and Judaism with the universe as we know it now—thereby giving the skeptical, contemporary mind a non-shaming and rational path back to faith.

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