Creativity Matters
“The imagination is not interested in…naively pitting one side against another, dark against light. It is interested in the place where the two sides meet, and what they give birth to when they cross-fertilize each other.”
John O’Donohue, Irish Poet, Author, and Priest
We began this series on consciousness and creativity by pondering their mysterious beginnings some several hundred thousand years ago. Take a moment to put yourself in that unknown creature’s shoes. Imagine what it would have been like to go to sleep one evening with only your senses and instincts to guide you and wake up […]
The balance between the active and passive aspects of our waking consciousness and its effects on our creativity brings up another important point: consciousness is linked to all aspects of our being—our physical bodies, our five senses, our emotions, and to our thoughts—but cannot be fully reduced to any one of these things. Still, we […]
Taking a closer look at our waking consciousness, the type of consciousness we use to maneuver the manifest world around us, we notice that we are constantly tweaking it to meet our various needs. In the same way a photographer is continuously playing with light to capture the essence of her subject matter, we are […]
The challenge of “seeing” consciousness Since consciousness is so all encompassing, it is challenging to see. Like the water surrounding a fish deep in the open ocean, it is hard to gain perspective on its vastness and all pervasive nature. But in order to foster our creative abilities, it is essential that we attempt to […]
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 […]
