Conscious self-awareness is the key to creativity
Consciousness, specifically conscious self-awareness, is perhaps the single most exciting aspect of our capacities as human beings.
More than any of our other qualities, our conscious self-awareness—our awareness of being aware—adds an entire universe to our experience, granting us a cognitive freedom that was unheard of anywhere in the pre-human world.
Unlike two chemicals that are condemned to interact in a certain way by the natural laws, or a plant rooted at the mercy of the elements, or an animal whose predictable behavior is governed by primarily by instincts, conscious self-awareness grants us the ability to assess a situation, recognize patterns, think abstractly, remember ourselves in the past, project ourselves into the future, ask others what they think and ultimately, make real choices.
No other living organism, no plant, no reptile, no dinosaur, or pre-human mammal ever (at least as far as we know) possessed such a capacity.
Way beyond the procreative capacities of the organisms that came before us, conscious self-awareness, allows each and every one of us a whole new possibility: creativity and the capacity for genuine creative expression.
Conscious self-awareness in daily life
In our daily life, consciousness acts as a sort of airport control tower, noticing the myriad of stimuli that enter into our fly space, skillfully monitoring them to see how they might affect us, choosing which sensations, thoughts, and emotions we want to land on our runway and which ones we choose to let fly right on by.
In this way, consciousness allows us to fully enter into an experience, or to keep our distance, the former allowing us to feel the world deeply, which fosters creative insight, rapture, and joy, the latter allowing us to plan for the future and to carry out those plans without being constantly distracted, ultimately allowing us to turn our creative insights into concrete realities.
From conscious self-awareness to consciousness connoisseur
It’s clear that consciousness is incredibly important and something that we use all the time. But what might it mean to be a connoisseur of consciousness?
What might it look like to cultivate not just our awareness—our thoughts, emotions, and sensations—but our awareness of our awareness? What might it look like to cultivate an intimate understanding of the ways we are processing all those experiences?
In other words, instead of fixating on the various objects and events we see unfolding through the window of consciousness, how might it serve us to shift our attention to the window itself? Where might we even begin and how might that enhance our creative capacities?
We’ll begin exploring this in the next post, in part 3 of “Consciousness and Creativity”
About the author
Austin Hill Shaw is a creativity expert who works with individuals who want to unlock their full creative potential and organizations that want to build cultures of innovation. He is the founder of Creativity Matters, author of The Shoreline of Wonder: On Being Creative, and inventor of The Creativity Quiz.
Click here connect with Austin to bring more creativity and innovation into your organization.
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