A seemingly manufactured life of discipline allows our inner wildness and creativity to manifest themselves.

Natural things - like the world itself, the planets, and all of their moons - seem to come out of nowhere, a fact that never fails to elicit in us a sense of surprise.  Manufactured items, on the other hand, are planned and intended, and we can trace the intentionality of their origins.  Because of this contrived element, they are generally less surprising.

The standard Judeo-Christian creation account gives us the sense that things are manufactured.  It's as though God says: "Now I will make the sea creatures; now I will make plants; now I will make land creatures." However, perhaps this assessment is not quite correct, for the Genesis account uses a recurring refrain: "Let there be . . ."  This kind of "allowing" does contain, one might argue, an element of surprise.

Even so, I prefer a less intentional - though still personal - version of creation. Here, we might imagine that when God LOSES himself in blissful love, all creatures nevertheless come spilling out, like echoes arising despite the fact that the Speaker never got around to speaking the word that would have served as their source.  Here, the feeling of surprise is predominant, a sense that creation arises out of nowhere.

Paradoxically, the surprising, creative elements of our own true self cannot manifest themselves unless we practice discipline, whereby we restrict our desires for mindless pleasure with the intention of allowing something truly NEW to spring forth.  Oddly, without the seemingly manufactured intentionality of self-denial, the spontaneous, mysterious and wild aspects of our inner self cannot reveal themselves.  Without personal discipline, we are reduced to a mere bundle of predictable addictions.  But WITH discipline, our creativity burgeons forth.

According to the Jewish mystical teaching of Isaac Luria, this process is a mirror of the way God creates. Here, although God is a light eternally filling all space, he realizes that he must shrink his presence - a contraction that is called 'tzimtzum' - in order to allow room for the creation to burgeon forth. Without God's  manufactured plan to discipline the natural tendency of his presence to expand itself, the wildness of the world would never be able to become manifest.

Photo: The moon shines next to a man-made "star"; Estes Park, CO; January 25, 2013