I just came across Elizabeth Gilbert’s TED Talk, “Your elusive creative genius”, for the first time after hearing about it from Visa Veerasamy.
What resonated with me most was her explanation of a genius historically being something you have and not something you are. That you’re not the source of your ideas: you’re just the vehicle through which they manifest in the material world.
It parallels a core idea of mindfulness, spirituality, self-transcendence: that your creativity (and your thoughts, emotions, body, and so on) are not you. They are things that come and go. They act through you. I am merely a portal through which creativity is manifested into our universe.
(For the rationalists: this isn’t non-scientific. Neuroscientist Sam Harris talks about this—you literally can’t predict what you’ll think next, or choose your thoughts. An MRI can show you’ll think something before the first time you’re aware you’re going to think it.)
So where DO our thoughts and, more interestingly, our creative impulses, come from?
There’s no way to completely answer that in words. But we can devise models to bring us usefully close. (All models are wrong, some are useful). We can label it as ‘the universe’, or ‘the source’, or ‘God’, if those help us.
In fact Gilbert talks about how historical cultures referred to the not-you genius as a ‘spirit’ or ‘daemon’ that might appear to you and act through you.
It’s easy to look at that and say that those civilisations were naive, and we know better now… but is the idea that creativity comes directly from our human intelligence really better? Or does it just serve to enhance our isolated ego and cause untold doubt and misery?
“I am a hole in a flute that the Christ’s breath moves through,” said Persian poet Hafiz. Of course, that’s not a literal representation either. Just a model.
But it seems to me a damn useful one to help us question whether seeing ourselves as separate, and our minds as the source of… well, anything, is a help or a hindrance toward whatever our goal is.
I for one see that level of humanism / personalisation cause more bad than good. (…or at least my daemon does.)
