Infinite
Creativity
The Project Sanctuary Story
by Silvia Hartmann
A good book solves a problem.
This book solves the problem of "how to be creative."
Chronicling the development of Project Sanctuary from the very beginning and
including hundreds of Sanctuary games as well as the Genius Symbols, this book
is the key to all of Silvia Hartmann's work - and to your own infinite
creativity.
Welcome To Project
Sanctuary -
The Game In Space & Time
By Silvia Hartmann
I come from a place where it was held that fantasy and imagination is a curse.
Where day dreaming was held to be a dangerous waste of time
and creativity something the rich would mess around with because they didn't
have to work *hard* all the time.
This place in time and space where I was born and raised was
dedicated to hard work, material labour, from dusk to dawn, just in order to
scratch a meagre living and to live in constant fear that even that would dry
out soon enough, and we would all starve to death ...
The place in space and time where I was born was Germany not
so long after the end of the Second World war. Things had been hard beyond our
current comprehension. But also, those people who had survived this hardship had
at one point been invited to dream - to dream great dreams, to put their faith
and trust in symbols and in works of art; in theatre, in the potential to live
much better lives and in myth and magic.
All these dreams were broken; and to the people from that
time and place where I was born and raised I now understand there was nothing
more bitter, nothing more soul destroying and nothing more painful than fantasy,
imagination, myth and magic, creativity and dreams.
Now, with the wisdom of hindsight, I understand why this
should have been so. I understand that the people who raised me felt it was
their duty to try and ensure that I would never dream, and that I would
understand the terrible lesson that all is hard at the end, and you are only
going to end up broken, starving, heart broken, of broken spirit and of broken
back the same if you pin your hopes upon a star.
But dream I did.
And I observed.
I observed the lack of joy, the lack of lightness.
I observed the unreasonable fear of innovation, of creativity
across the board.
I was stunned by the depth of aggression I encountered when I
would try and tell a story and was accused of being a liar, and beaten for it.
I was confused by having dreams as vivid as any life
experience could be, and being told that dreams were nothing at all, all in my
mind, it doesn't matter, it doesn't count, get back to work, we must make a
living ...
Now it is true that children will rebel against their elders,
especially and probably only when their elders seem to be insane and
unreasonable in their emotions, actions, words and deeds.
If the elders were so up in arms about imagination and
creativity, there must be something to it, I thought.
And so imagination and creativity became things I would
embrace, make my own, and use powerfully and from an early age to create a
counterbalance between that world of endless toil and misery, which I christened
“The Hard” and that world of infinite freedom, space, joy, excitement,
adventure, colour, tastes and textures, light and music that I would call “The
Sanctuary.”
I took imagination seriously and spent as much time as I
could working on it, even as a very small child. I would work out ways to get
into that other world, by looking at a colourful quilt for example and having it
become a world of rivers, mountains, lakes and grasslands. Then I would step
inside there, and there would be creatures of all kinds and people too,
adventures and experiences awaited.
What I didn't realise for the longest time was that the
experiences in Sanctuary were giving me life experiences that were missing from
my hard existence.
I was learning things in Sanctuary that I wasn't learning in
the Hard.
In fact, I had engaged myself in a training program that gave
me not just an anchor in sanity and a Sanctuary to escape to, but which gave me
additional information about the world that other people did not seem to have
access to.
Through the craziness, thick and thin, of my entire
childhood, Sanctuary was by my side. It saved my sanity, saved my life on too
many occasions to count, and made many things very easy for me that others found
so difficult, or impossible.
Just how different having the Sanctuary space that I could
access at will made me did not really strike me until I was sent away, around
the age of 9, to a summer camp on a North Sea island.
There were about 120 children, divided up into groups of ten,
12 groups in all, and every day, each group had to put something “creative” into
a journal that belonged to the group and would be a part of the group
competition judging at the end of the 6 week summer camp.
This group journal was the source of intense pain to everyone
- people could not think what to do with it. And they were loudly complaining
that it was too much to ask to come up with a new creative something every
single day for a whole 6 weeks.
I loved the opportunity of the journal and couldn't wait to
do this for my own group before breakfast each day. Then came the occasion where
my group leader hired me out as a favour to another group leader to put some
things in their journal, as it was painfully barren and most days had nothing in
it at all.
It was just a question of writing a short poem, pressing a
flower that grew nearby, a comment on camp activity, perhaps a riddle or a
picture, a cartoon - it really wasn't difficult.
Eventually, I ended up doing most of all 12 group books every
day, for the entire 6 weeks, and it was easy for me to do this, and there wasn't
another child in the camp who seemed to be willing and able to come up with
regular, interesting things to put into their journals. Of course, and as usual,
when this came to light the camp leaders were furious, punished me and “chewed
me out” in public; but by then I was well used to that anyway, took pride in
that kind of thing, and shrugged it off.
However, it did strike me that there was something different
about me.
I wondered over the years when situations like that occurred
again - like being asked to come up with uses for a paper clip at a corporate
training, and I managed 107 in the allotted time, and the next best guy had 19 -
what was wrong with me, but I honestly never thought it was my other world that
was the cause for these outbursts of creativity on tap.
I thought everyone did that.
I thought everyone would go into their own Sanctuaries before
going to sleep at night, or on long train journeys, or when they had boring work
to do that didn't require the mind to be present.
I thought everyone had their own many worlds, populated with
many friends, animals and aliens, islands, kingdoms and mystery quests, that
everyone had invented hundreds of different and alien toys to play with, and
lived a myriad of different lives in different times and places by the time they
were 14.
I had no idea that people don't do that at all, and that it
was the way I lived my double life all the time which made that difference I
could never account for.
Until the day came, I must have been 23 by then, and a friend
told me about a bad dream. She was obviously much upset by it and I was amazed
and asked her why she didn't move it on in Sanctuary. When she looked at me
blankly and with complete non-understanding it began to dawn on me that I was
sitting across from a person who didn't seem to use their Sanctuary.
Funny as it seems now, at that time I actually thought that
there was something wrong with *her* and still went on believing that everyone
else had their Sanctuary, just as I do, in total privacy and as something you
just don't ever talk about.
I cautiously showed her how to take the dream, step inside
and play it on to gain a resolution, a victory if you will; she did this and was
amazed by it. It made me feel good to have helped, and not soon after, another
opportunity arose, again with someone telling me about a bad dream that was a
recurring nightmare, this time a male friend who was very artistic, intensely
creative, all the time.
Surely, he would have a Sanctuary inside?
But even he was amazed, so much so that he cried, “You should
write a book about that!”
I thought, there must be a hundred books on Sanctuary
already, I don't want to make a fool of myself and re-invent the wheel ...
Back in the day, we didn't have the internet. I had to
actually go into a library and read little cards, pull books from shelves, get
catalogues from scientific/psychological specialist publishers and ring round
book shops.
The more I saw and read, the more astonished I became.
It wasn't just my friends who didn't have a clue about
Sanctuary - nobody did!
And if they did, they had never written a book about it.
What I read about the ideas of metaphor, fantasy and
imagination was so wrong, so impoverished, so convoluted, so weird by any other
name, I was quite literally floundering.
If it had not been for my good friends in the Hard at the
time, I might have walked away from it at that point; but whenever I started to
explain how you make a world, or you take an existing one from a story or a
book, a movie or a song, and you step inside it and have adventures there, and
those are real, they feel real and they make a real difference, people were just
fascinated.
Not only were they fascinated, they could do it too!
With the smallest amount of encouragement and guidance on my
part, all my friends back in the day soon had their own Sanctuaries up and
running and were so excited about it, I could tell that having the Sanctuary had
added a dimension to their lives that had previously been absent.
At that time, I was getting more involved in the mind, body
spirit scene and came across people who had done things like guided meditations
and autogenic training and metaphor therapy, but still, even those seemed to
have never really taken Sanctuary and what you can do with it any further, never
really made it come to life properly.
I tested simple things with many people, and eventually came
to the conclusion that all people can do Sanctuary, that they can do so easily,
that it delights them, lights them up, gives them comfort, sets their problem
solving skills free at last, gives them a space to express their personality and
their hopes and dreams, and that the experiences you gain in Sanctuary “hold in
the Hard.”
One night in 1993, I was sitting by my computer, thinking
about writing a poem. I turned my stereo on and into the room drifted the voice
of Jim Morrison, and he sang:
“Can you
give me Sanctuary
I must
find a place to hide,
a place
for me tonight.
Can you
give me soft asylum,
I can't
take it any more,
the man
is at the door.”
Lyrics quote from “The Soft Parade” The Doors, 1969
I looked across time and space to the man who wrote those
words and said out aloud into the room,
“Yes, I can.
"I can give you Sanctuary. This is what you need to know ...”
... and called up a new blank document, and carefully typed
over the top of it,
Project Sanctuary
That night I started and in the days and nights that
followed, I wrote the original Project Sanctuary manual.
To this day, I get notes of gratitude from people who came
across that, and I love it.
I don't know where I got Sanctuary from, I have no idea why
that happened or why I found it.
But I do know that without Sanctuary I would not be here, and
without that, there would be many things missing that are in the world today.
All the things I've researched and discovered started out as Sanctuary
experiences that led me to ask certain questions, for example to understand the
reality of energy and its effects on everything that not just human beings, but
at least all social mammals do; to ask what emotions really are and then
formulate a simple, natural strategy to deal with them; and to seek to
understand how life experiences shape a person through time in such a way that
instead of endless talking, we really get to make some progress in learning,
evolution, healing, change and forward momentum as a human being.
In 2008, I designed a system of simple symbols that would
help people bridge between the energy mind and the conscious mind, The Genius
Symbols. They make it easy for people to have more ideas to choose from, rather
than just one, or none at all as the case may be; and in working with that and
many people from all walks of life I started to think that what human beings
really need across the board to get out of the various fine messes we've got
ourselves into is exactly that - ideas.
Not world peace. Not a cure for world hunger, climate change
or cancer.
We need more people to have more creativity, more ideas, new
ideas all the time.
We need to evolve everything.
If you think about your daily life, and the annoyance and
challenges on little silly levels you have to battle with all the time, that's
where we can start.
From back breaking designs for shopping carts to hobs that
are so difficult to clean; from ugly, clumsy, wasteful transportation systems to
crazy schizophrenic road layouts; from weird and convoluted ideas about
learning, studying and handling knowledge and data to the most peculiar societal
entrainments that lack reason, rhyme and logic; from the way we conduct all our
relationships with everyone and everything from cradle to the grave to what and
how we eat and live - all of it has so much room for improvement!
Imagine there were people in your gas company, in your local
council, in the school your children attend, on Wall Street, in the government,
in the government departments, in the health service, in your local shop, in
your local church, people everywhere who were having good ideas on how to
improve what's wrong all the time.
Never mind imagine all the people living life in peace -
imagine all the people out there being creative, being intelligent, being
sensible, being logical, seeking solutions, having genius ideas on how to make
things work beautifully!
What a world we could be living in!
I would have to seriously re-appraise my name for “the Hard”
and come up with something else altogether!
I am one of those people who didn't like the world they were
born and raised in, and decided that they would have a go at “changing the
world.”
Of course, I often wondered what to do, what I can do to
change the world, for the human world is at least 100,000 years in the making,
now 8 billion strong, a huge ship of people with this enormous momentum of the
ages on a collision course with reality, with the natural laws of the Universe
and the Great Creative Order itself.
Sounds like a stiff task for one seriously imperfect woman,
doesn't it.
But I've decided that by encouraging more people to be more
creative, to access their innate wisdom and understanding of what's right and
what's wrong, and to engage their own fabulous minds is what I can do in this
lifetime to change the world.
For every great change that humanity has ever known, if you
dig down deep enough, there is always and only one single person at the bottom
of it who had a new idea.
These people were and are far and few between, and that does
not need to be that way.
I have absolutely proven to myself beyond the shadow of a
doubt that people can get a hold of their own creativity and imagination; that
they can learn or re-learn to use it; and that genius solutions no longer need
to be confined to the chosen few.
With The Genius Symbols, it's so easy a child can do it as
well as an old age pensioner.
But behind the Genius Symbols lie the entire and
extraordinary realms of Sanctuary itself.
Vast, unexplored, ready and waiting.
Such riches and treasures lie there, diamonds and gold pale
in comparison.
Every ordinary human mind is the portal to infinite
experiences, infinite riches, lives way beyond what you could ever have in the
Hard.
Put the hard experience together with Sanctuary experience,
and something emerges that is more than the sum of its parts, you might as well
call it genius, or wisdom, or possibly even the truth.
People who can think like that are not just the answer to all
of humanity's problems.
That's just the start, all that problem solving and healing
that is now required is only so desperately needed now because of the stupid
actions of our progenitors, God forgive them, they didn't know what they were
doing ...
Beyond all that hard work to put to rights what has gone
wrong is something else altogether.
There is beauty, majesty, awe.
Excitement, love, delicious sexiness of the highest
proportions.
Logic of such profoundness, it makes you want to weep.
THAT is what human beings were built for, not to suffer worse
than any animal ever would in the valley of the shadows, the vale of tears, or
the stony lands beyond the forbidden Garden of Eden.
Sanctuary shows us this, reminds us of this truth.
The Universe is glorious.
We human beings are glorious - we are a work of art like at
least our Planet Earth has never seen before.
It isn't suffering or fear of death that makes us human.
It is Sanctuary that lifts us up from the root digging
savages to being - glorious.
We have two worlds at our disposals.
One is the Hard.
The other is Sanctuary.
We have the ability and propensity to live and experience
things that are not here in the Hard.
We can learn from places, people and events we have never had
access to in the Hard.
We can experience infinite freedom and expansion into who we
were really meant to be at any time, free of charge, just for the asking.
Playing in Sanctuary is truly the first step into the most
awesome place, that of a human being activated, catalysed, enacting a reality
that is structurally pre-supposed in our very existence.
Don't ever think for one moment that the Hard is more
important than Sanctuary.
Both need to come in sync, both need to share their
experiences, and when they come onto the same page, both become more than the
sum of their parts - and our lives become completely other to what we had ever
hoped and dreamed that they might be.
Sounds amazing?
It is.
It really is.
I am joyful that you are here, and that you will share in the
excitement of The Greatest Game on Earth - playing Project Sanctuary and in
doing so, discovering your own mind.
Welcome to you!
Silvia Hartmann
December 11th, 2010
Infinite Creativity
is available in all formats
from all good book stores,
online and off.
Publisher direct from DragonRising
Click HERE to own.
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