In this talk, filmed at the Lightning in a Bottle Festival on the morning of Saturday, May 26, 2012, and Part II of the hour long talk (for Part I click here), I continue building the framework, bringing sacred outlook and a profound sense of connection into the process of designing and building specifically and […]
Austin Hill Shaw Talks on The Five Essentials of Designing and Building Sacred Space, Part I
In this talk, filmed at the Lightning in a Bottle Festival on the morning of Saturday, May 26, 2012, I create a framework bringing sacred outlook and a profound sense of connection into the process of designing and building specifically and creativity in general. The framework comes from Vajrayana Buddhism, also known as Tantric Buddhism, […]
Embrace the Spiraling Nature of Creativity
Do you ever find yourself circling back around to a familiar place every so often—a certain part of town, a grove in the woods, the home where you grew up? Do you keep coming back to landscape photography over other subjects you might explore with the precision of celestial bodies? Do you notice how that […]
Life Before Death: Creativity and Impermanence
“People living deeply have no fear of death.” -Anaïs Nin This last weekend, I had the pleasure of working at the Wisdom 2.0 Business Conference in San Francisco, California. One of my speaker liaison team members was Alison Raby, founder of “Life Before Death,” an organization dedicated to teaching others to embrace the finality of […]
Wisdom and Creativity in Business: I’m Enjoying Being the Speaker Liaison at the Wisdom 2.0 Business Conference
Wisdom and Creativity in Business: I’m Enjoying Being the Speaker Liaison at the Wisdom 2.0 Business Conference Today I have the honor of being the Speaker Liaison at the first Wisdom 2.0 Business conference at the historic Palace Hotel in downtown San Francisco. The Wisdom 2.0 Tech Conference is well known in the region as […]
A Lifetime of Creativity: Where the Wild Things Are Author, Maurice Sendak, Interviews
Last Tuesday, the day before my 42nd birthday, Maurice Sendak, author and illustrator of the hugely popular children’s book, Where the Wild Things Are, died. He was 83 years old. He was a very creative man, prolific in both his writing and illustrations. And though he had no children himself, and didn’t claim to even […]
Understanding Creativity Across Art, Science, and Religion Part II
Last time we came up with a working definition of creativity as 1) connecting with the world and 2) affecting it in a meaningful way. We also looked at the various ways in which we engage the world through 1) our senses 2) our thoughts (including thoughts about how we perceive ourselves) and 3) our […]
Creativity and Precious Human Birth
There is a saying in Buddhism which goes as follows: “Contemplate the preciousness of being born free and well favored. This is difficult to gain and easy to lose. Now I must do something meaningful.” This saying is know as “Precious Human Birth” and is the first saying of what is known as The Four […]
Understanding Creativity Across Art, Science, and Religion Part I
It is common for people to pigeonhole creativity into a specific type of activity such as art, invention, or innovation. It is also common for people to say that there are creative “types” out there, those that seem to be inherently more creative than others. But from my own perspective, all of human activities share […]
Creativity and Nonduality: The Self and the Built Environment
Here is another abstract that my co-host of the Conscious Design Build talks, Hristiyan Atanasov, and I submitted to the 2012 Science and Nonduality Conference: It has been estimated that the construction and operation of buildings consumes over a third of the world’s energy consumption and 40% of all the mined resources. Furthermore, the built […]