Despite the effort it takes and the challenges along the way, it is my heartfelt opinion that becoming a connoisseur of consciousness and applying it to your creativity is the most useful thing you can do with your time. Here are just some of the benefits:
Since your consciousness processes all of your experiences, the knowledge and clarity you gain by befriending it, and the limiting habits and prejudices you often overcome, affects all aspects of your life. Like wiping clean a blackboard before beginning to use the chalk, becoming a connoisseur of consciousness allows your sensorial experiences to be more vivid, your thinking more clear, and your heart more open, all of which strengthen your creative capacities.
Next when you start paying direct attention to your awareness of being aware, your consciousness ceases to behave like some disembodied puppeteer ruling you from a distance and begins to walk beside you like a dear friend. In other words, your consciousness becomes accessible and something you can begin to engage directly, which increases your creative powers. Think of all the colors of the rainbow suddenly being multiplied by being able to change out the lenses that view them.
Finally, the combination of 1) paying attention to what you’re doing while you’re doing it, along with 2) maintaining connection to consciousness itself, leads to bliss; and not just any bliss, not the bliss of flopping down on a comfortable couch at the end of a long day, but an enlivening bliss, an energized ecstatic bliss that allows you to engage the world with ever increasing levels of clarity, empathy, vitality, and creativity. Joining what you are doing with your awareness of doing it, simple as though it may sound, is quite challenging and very rare. And yet this experience is celebrated across all disciplines. In sports it’s known as “the zone.” In art, it’s the mindset (and body-set) that produces masterpieces. In science, it’s the experience of insight that leads to more exacting explanations of the natural world. In religion, it’s the quintessence of the mystical experience that reveals all things as sacred.
In short, consciousness and the capacity to create are not only our most defining qualities as human beings, they become the vehicles through which we develop our humanity.
With all this in mind, let’s return once again to the mysterious dawn of consciousness self- awareness and the emergence of genuine creativity, not as something that happened long ago but as something fresh, something that is happening right now. In this moment, as the future becomes the present and the present become the past, the dawn of consciousness is underway. In every moment, like the morning’s breathtaking changes of light and color painted across the eastern sky, creative insight keeps dawning again and again, refreshing our sensations, layering new emotions, illuminating new perspectives, and giving us new opportunities to appreciate and to love. In an immense universe that is mostly black empty space, on a planet that is neither boiling hot nor frozen solid, the coming together of our agile bodies with our self-aware consciousness and our unique creative capacities that result is incredibly rare and unfathomably precious.
All of which begs the questions: what are you going to do to get to know your consciousness better? What are you going to do to foster your exquisite creative capacities?
Austin Hill Shaw is a creativity expert, author, writer, architectural designer, and mapmaker of creativity across art, science, and religion. He specializes in helping others tap into and utilize the creative life force in everything they do. He can be reached at austin@austinhillshaw.com.