How do you relate to the notion that creativity is a spiritual experience? There are several stages of creativity 1) Imitation or copying 2) Re-creation or creatively reorganizing known objects/patterns and 3) Creation of a new patterns/objects. Nature creates new patterns through mutation within the local limits of the environment. Chaos, randomness or freedom, appear to be the platform for this new ‘original creation’. When this new creation is in harmony with the environment it becomes a stable pattern for reproduction. If it is not, it is discarded. These creations are like the notes in the music of nature. All life forms exhibit this process of ‘natural creation, mutation and selection’. These stages can be related to the three layers of brain-mind. For example, what appears to be creativity for survival is preprogrammed by nature as the operating system. This is also the creativity expressed through copying, 2) emotional creativity as in arts is the next level of creativity, where creativity is expressed as reassembling a known set of patterns. 3) The original, intuitive or spontaneous creativity is a rare step beyond the subconscious into the common or the spiritual consciousness, when we become a ‘channel’ for expression of a higher consciousness. This happens in a semi-trance state between the chaos of our ego-soul-mind and the tranquility of higher consciousness, when we momentarily become the original creative ‘force’ of nature as ‘knowingness’ or the blissful flow of ‘the self’. As the author points out, belief is a function of our mind and ‘knowingness’ is a function of the ‘common conscious mind’. This is the source of all original creation – ‘the mind of God.’ Can you share a story from your life that illustrates this? As the author suggests, there are moments in our life when creativity becomes a spontaneous flow and we experience it as ‘the bliss of creation’. When this becomes more frequent, we can be in a ‘genius’ layer of consciousness in a particular aspect of life. This is more common in arts than in structured science. Art as in singing and music has been a spiritual path to higher consciousness all over the world. There are notes, melodies and rhythms that resonate with different layers of our consciousness, as in ‘mantra chanting’. What does "midwife-ing and witnessing your own creative progression" mean to you? As the question suggests, it is a way of helping universal consciousness or universal creativity to express itself through us, by removing the interference of our own conscious and subconscious mind, through meditation and witnessing. Witnessing is a process of observing our emotions and thought processes. As emotions become love and thoughts are reduced, the creator or the artist becomes the ‘process of creation’ in a blissful semi-trance state of common consciousness. Music written in such a trance state can induce a similar trance state of common consciousness in the listener and in the environment.
On Dec 9, 2012 Narendra wrote :