Tao Jones
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3/16/2010 1:52:53 PM
Works of the Imagination
Been reading this book from the fifties or so called " The Creative Process." It's a gathering of writings by many famous writers, artists and scientists where they try to explain a bit about how they do what they do: creativity. These articles were not written for this book, they were just gathered into one book. They have Einstein in there and Picasso, Henry Miller, Henry James, all kinds of poets and musicians, Mozart etc....
The writings vary somewhat, of course, but one consistant thing said by every one of these creative people is that the actual creation of new ideas ALWAYS comes from below, you know, subconcious territory. Every single one of them says this, and every single one of them is at a loss to explain how any of it got put together down below there. They all speak of it as almost a black box with unknown processes.
True, they all discuss how the concious mind can work with the material deived from the unconcious, and they talk of how the concious mind can even sort of request things of it (usually not to come forth for at least a couple months later),and how the concious mind can work hard at skills and such, but evey single NEW idea, every valued idea they all claim comes from a part of themselves they do not feel they understand how it creates.
They all talk about how they are likely to get that sort of idea from a half wake half sleep state, too.
I have always felt like at least two parts of me are woking on the material, but they are not equal partners. The vebal conscious part of me is more a helper, not really a creator. That part can trim the material, rearrange it, such things like that, but the real creator works somewhat behind a curtain, and will surprise me often.
I find that working on skills and thoughts does help, but it's like skills and thoughts that I then drop into the black box and must wait to see what may come forth.
And the longer I go in the creative journey, the less I mess with what comes from the subconcious. In fact, it's mostly a study in how to get out of the way.
Just like when split brain patients have one side of their body cancelling what the other side is doing, when they are asked to explain what the contradictory side is doing, they immediately generate an explanation, a verbal explanatiojn of what their nonverbal side has done. Generally the explanations are quite ridiculous and show that they really don't know why one part of their body is doing such and such behavior, yet they seem predisposed to THINK they get it. I think we are the same with when we try to explain anything truly creative that came from our own underworlds. We think we know why and we tack the appropriate reasons on, butI think we often don't understand our own creations really, we just think we do. At least if it's the beautiful subconcious odd stuff.
So more and more I don't even try to make sense of it. I just try to learn to get out of the way of the flow. Explaining it to myself, I believe, tends to restrict its resonance, and who am I to restrict the true creative part as if I knew how it operates?
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