Why Go Creative?
1. What do you mean, ‘Go Creative’?
To go creative is to activate and operate your innate creative intelligence. We are all creating all the time — both consciously and unconsciously. But our understanding of this process, and our confidence in it, has been suppressed and undermined (see 6 & 7 below).
Creativity, and human creative intelligence, is erratic, nebulous and difficult to pin down — but that doesn’t mean it cannot be understood or applied.
2. A definition please?
Human intelligence is our capacity for knowing, learning and evolving. Creative intelligence is a vital dimension of all of these.
It is what allows us to go beyond the given to generate novel ideas, experiences and things, by integrating and expressing our unique experience of life.
In writing and art, the ‘given’ that we must go beyond is cliche, the forms and ideas of others. In life, the ‘given’ includes the societal dynamics into which we are born and, significantly, what I call our abcde’s – the attitudes, beliefs, concepts, denials and expectations of society, family and ourselves.
These abcde‘s are what make up our habitual thoughts and feelings about what is possible or desirable.
3. Hmmm. Why bother?
When we understand the creative process, we can learn how to direct it into what psychologists call creative flow, making more of whatever we wan This is creative intelligence in action.
I like this description of the experience by the poet, Alfred Lord Tennyson, from “At Armagedden”:
“..my mind seem’d wing’d with knowledge and the strength
of holy musings and immense ideas,
even to Infinitude. All sense of time
and being and place was swallowed up and lost.”
This is very similar to contemporary psychologist, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s description of creative flow, so named because in his extensive interviews with his research subjects, so many of them described the feeling of energized focus, full involvement and success in the process of an activity as a “flow” experience.
Other common terms for this condition include: to be in the zone, present, in the now, awake, mindful, wired in, in big mind or in the groove.
Patanjali, the humble physician credited with putting the yoga sutras into writing, described it thus: “thoughts break their bonds, your mind transcends limitations, your consciousness expands in every direction and you find yourself in a new, great and wonderful world [where] …dormant forces, faculties and talents come alive.”
Many other writers, artists and sages have given eloquent descriptions of this sense of inspiration in action.
Contrary to what has been thought in the past, our ability to map the brain now shows us that being in flow is not an elite state, possessed by a few.
By owning and honing our creative intelligence, we can access this state, in varying degrees, more often and more readily.
4. But inspiration can’t be controlled.
Trying to catch hold of inspiration is like trying to squeeze water – the tighter your grasp, the less you hold. What we can do though is understand the conditions, states and practices that enable it to flow (see 11 below) and make changes that encourage them in our lives. Being inspired is, in some ways, a choice.
5. So creative intelligence is not just something for writers and artists?
No. Productive writers and artists have learned how to harness and apply this intelligence to their work (though not necessarily to their lives). But the intelligence itself is present, though often suppressed, in us all. We all own it, we can all hone it.
6. Who suppressed it in us?
We ourselves mostly — with help from family members, school, workplaces, consumer culture and other authority figures.
7. Why I wasn’t taught about this in school?
Since its inception alongside the Industrial Revolution of the mid-nineteenth century Britain, formal schooling has favoured the analytical, organizational abilities of the brain, those abilities that are essential to sorting, ordering and figuring out, which can be (to some degree) measured by IQ tests. In fostering these abilities and their way of thinking about the world, school taught to repress other, less quantifiable dimensions of our intelligence.
8. Why would educators do this?
Creative intelligence is more difficult to measure and facilitate And schools and workplaces favored analytical intelligence because it trained us for efficiency — the highest value in the industrial (19th century) and information (20th century) economies. Now, as we move into the more fluid and flexible creative (21st century) economy, intelligence values are changing.
9. Does that mean we no long need analytical intelligence?
No. We will always need to know how to order, rank and figure things out. It is just that we are realising our minds are capable of more than we have traditionally allowed.
10. If I did ‘go creative’, what would it mean?
- You would recognise the relationship with your own creative process as the No 1 relationship in your life, the one that defines all the others.
- You would allow yourself to observe and express the truth of your unique character and experience.
- You would be awake to life through seven senses (sight, hearing, taste, touch, smell, overall perception and intuition).
- You would know how to summon stillness, awareness and presence and do so regularly.
- You would see that you are not separate from the rest of creative life, that the same process that creates one thing creates everything.
- You would allow challenging relationships and events in your life to teach you what you need to know.
- You would understand that creative intelligence is not acquired so much as accessed. It is alway there for us though we are not always there for it.
- You would feel confident of your ability to tune into your creative potential.
- You would know how to apply your creative intelligence to any aspect of life – relationships, hobbies, money, work – to create what you truly want and enjoy the process of bringing it into being.
11. That sounds too good to be true.
It is pretty wonderful but it also calls for a particular kind of effort.
- A level of deep attention to life as it is unfolding that is not always easy to hold.
- A willingness to accept personal responsibility, that it is we who creating our own experience of life.
- A readiness to be stretched.
- An openness to failure as a learning experience.
- An acceptance of change as the norm.
- A loose of attachment to outcomes.
For some people, opening such dimensions of freedom and possibility can be uncomfortable, destabilising, even frightening.
For these reasons, people often resist their own creative spirit.
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Orna’s ‘How To Create Anything’ will be available on AMAZON KINDLE in March 2012.
