The Uncarved Blog

Ken Chawkin is a media relations director for Maharishi University of Management and the David Lynch Foundation. For questions about these organizations you can reach him at kchawkin@mum.edu.

The Uncarved Blog is his first attempt at social media and contains articles, audio and video clips, primarily related to TM, the Transcendental Meditation technique, consciousness, and enlightenment. You can also follow him on Twitter @kenchawkin.

Ken also shares his love of poetry and posts a few of his own poems as well as those of other poets he appreciates. Some readers have wondered about the name of his blog and how it came about. We’ll let Ken explain that one.

How The Uncarved Blog got its name

Heather Hartnett at the David Lynch Foundation, encouraged me to set up my own blog and post all the TM-related articles I was sending around. So, when I thought of the word, blog, it reminded me of the word, block, the uncarved block, specifically, a term from Taoism that means the uncreated pure potentiality from which all things are created, the Tao, the source of the 10,000 things. It also reminded me of the unmanifest pure Creative Intelligence Maharishi talks about in his Science of Creative Intelligence, the field of pure potentiality; also the Unified Field of all the Laws of Nature, the Veda within Atma, Sutratma, the Self. And since ‘block’ and ‘blog’ sounded so similar, I thought it was a clever poetic way of coming up with a name.

I first read about the uncarved block in a wonderful book, Creativity and Taoism, by Chang Chung-Yuan. In it he described how the Taoist artist, a sculptor in this case, used to meditate, fast, purify himself first, and then go into the forest to find the right tree that for him contained the vision of what he was called to create. He would take that block of wood back to his studio and carve it out. Think Michelangelo freeing the statue from the marble he was carving.

Same message in the Bhagavad Gita translated and commented on by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, the founder of the Transcendental Meditation program and Maharishi University of Management: Transcend, Be, then act; and, established in Being perform action. Established in the Self, act in tune with Natural Law. Then you’ll be more successful in actualizing whatever inspired vision, or idea, you had that motivated you to create, whether it’s a poem, a painting, a piece of sculpture, or a blog post.

I certainly enjoy blogging, and glad I started. It’s a fun creative process using digital words, images, and sounds, to carve out something meaningful for myself and hopefully my readers. Of course, there’s so much more one can do in terms of the look and functionality of a blog. But that takes up even more time, so I’ll leave it up to the good folks at WordPress.com to keep coming up with more ways to improve the experience, both for bloggers and readers. Enjoy exploring The Uncarved Blog, and thank you for visiting!

And in case you were wondering what the small colored abstract square you see next to the link in your browser at the top left, or on the right next to my comments, is all about, it’s one of Ken West’s photos, used as the blog picture, or icon, for The Uncarved Blog. Here is the complete photo © 2008 Kenneth G. West Jr.. Click on it and it will open up in a larger format. I chose it for its beauty and ambiguity; its abstract quality can imply different things. For more information and links to a video and photo gallery, check out this blog post: Ken West and his unique landscape photographs are featured on IPTV show Iowa Outdoors.