Infinite Creativity - The Project Sanctuary Story

289 Pages·07.935 MB·English

by  Silvia Hartmann

Infinite Creativity: The Project Sanctuary Story 1
Infinite Creativity
The Story Of Project Sanctuary
Dr Silvia Hartmann
DragonRising Publishing
www.DragonRising.com
United Kingdom
Ebook Version 1.0
February 2012
Infinite Creativity: The Project Sanctuary Story 2
Table of Contents
The Game In Space & Time.........................................................................................6
Welcome To Project Sanctuary....................................................................................7
Creativity................................................................................................................13
Mind.......................................................................................................................17
Happy.....................................................................................................................21
Stress.....................................................................................................................25
Contact...................................................................................................................26
Crossroads..............................................................................................................27
Places.....................................................................................................................29
Metaphor.................................................................................................................31
Intuition..................................................................................................................34
Take Me To The Perfect Place .....................................................................................35
Project....................................................................................................................39
First Sanctuary.........................................................................................................42
Magic Mirror.............................................................................................................45
Flying......................................................................................................................46
Artefacts.................................................................................................................48
And What Happens Next?..........................................................................................51
The Meaning............................................................................................................52
Friends....................................................................................................................54
Making Friends.........................................................................................................57
Relationships............................................................................................................59
Evolving Relationships...............................................................................................64
Stories....................................................................................................................67
Games....................................................................................................................69
Playing Games.........................................................................................................71
Infinite Habitats.......................................................................................................75
Journeys..................................................................................................................83
Intermission.............................................................................................................89
Story......................................................................................................................90
The Story Of Friendship.............................................................................................96
Magic Solutions......................................................................................................125
Play......................................................................................................................128
The Others.............................................................................................................141
Creative Template...................................................................................................144
Perpetrators...........................................................................................................150
Installations...........................................................................................................151
Help......................................................................................................................155
Light.....................................................................................................................158
Invitations To Play...................................................................................................178
The Unchanging You................................................................................................184
Genius...................................................................................................................186
The Boy & His Sticks...............................................................................................187
Metasong...............................................................................................................192
Archetypes.............................................................................................................202
Sanity...................................................................................................................222
Shared Habitats......................................................................................................226
Food For Thought....................................................................................................231
Games To Play In Time & Space..............................................................................233
Reminders.............................................................................................................233
Project Sanctuary Pre-Suppositions In Brief............................................................233
Sanctuary & Energy............................................................................................233
Living Metaphor..................................................................................................234
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Playing Games....................................................................................................234
Global Rules For All Games...................................................................................235
Autogenic Lucidity...............................................................................................235
The Classic Game...............................................................................................236
First Sanctuary...................................................................................................236
Friends..............................................................................................................237
Games To Play In Sanctuary.....................................................................................238
World Seed Games..............................................................................................238
Problem Solving Games.......................................................................................238
Dream Games....................................................................................................239
Memory Games..................................................................................................239
Quest Games.....................................................................................................240
Adult Games......................................................................................................240
Aspect Games....................................................................................................241
Games Of Evolution & Metamorphosis...................................................................241
Games For Children.............................................................................................242
Magic Failure Games...........................................................................................242
Story Games......................................................................................................243
Editorial Games..................................................................................................244
Alien Games.......................................................................................................244
Champion & Service Games.................................................................................245
Astral Games......................................................................................................245
Installation Games..............................................................................................246
Venn Games.......................................................................................................246
Word Games......................................................................................................247
FAQ Games........................................................................................................247
Games To Bridge Into The Hard................................................................................248
The “I Don't Know!” Game...................................................................................248
The Gift.............................................................................................................248
Calculating The Inverse.......................................................................................249
Unlocking Hard Artefacts......................................................................................249
Creating Hard Artefacts.......................................................................................249
Instant Habitats......................................................................................................250
“That reminds me ...”..........................................................................................250
“If This Was Sanctuary ...”...................................................................................250
Instant Friends...................................................................................................251
Instant Dress Up Games......................................................................................251
Bedtime Stories..................................................................................................251
Project Sanctuary Tips & Useful Patterns................................................................253
The Genius Symbols................................................................................................256
Meet The Genius Symbols........................................................................................256
Cascade.................................................................................................................257
Genius Symbol Games From Space To Stardust..........................................................258
Space................................................................................................................258
Time.................................................................................................................259
Weather.............................................................................................................260
Land.................................................................................................................261
Plant.................................................................................................................262
Animal...............................................................................................................263
House................................................................................................................264
Friend................................................................................................................265
Crystal..............................................................................................................266
Fountain............................................................................................................267
Spirit.................................................................................................................268
Trade.................................................................................................................269
Magic................................................................................................................270
People...............................................................................................................271
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Dance................................................................................................................272
Artefact.............................................................................................................273
Light.................................................................................................................274
Angel................................................................................................................275
Gift...................................................................................................................276
Alien.................................................................................................................277
Dragonwings......................................................................................................278
Stardust............................................................................................................279
The Children Of Project Sanctuary..........................................................................280
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T G I S & T
HE AME N PACE IME
Let’s play a game!
A game in space and time,
a game of mind and thought
and energy, attention –
But before we start to step away from every day,
I must explain the nature of this game,
for this is not a competition or a sport of war,
it is a dance of exploration
of worlds within,
the words without restriction,
without hesitation, without limitations ...
It is a game a child could play
so that we might discover more
about the wondrous universe
and how it does respond
to the lightest touch,
the brightest, newest thought
and how it looks, and tastes and sounds
and feels so good and right
when we discover ...
Star velvet,
infinite potential,
at your beck and call –
all ready now for you,
your universal sandbox is awaiting you ...
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W T P S
ELCOME O ROJECT ANCTUARY
By Dr 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
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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 come to 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.
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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,
Infinite Creativity: The Project Sanctuary Story 9
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.”1
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 (The Harmony Program); to ask what emotions really are and then formulate a simple, natural
strategy to deal with them (EmoTrance); 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 (Events
Psychology).
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.
1 Lyrics quote from “The Soft Parade” The Doors, 1969
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