Inspiration Meditation – The Creative Moment by Orna Ross

SONY DSC

We’d all be more creative if we paid less attention to the surfaces — our goings and doings — and more to the depths, our knowing and being and the nothingness that underlies everthing. When we take silent time to meditate, a shift happens within.  Our consciousness expands, our awareness deepens, we come into the presence of what the physicist Albert Einstein once described as “the most beautiful emotion we can experience…the [underlying] power of all true art and science.”

This power – our creative intelligence – is in us all. We don’t acquire it, any more than we acquire our fingers or our feet.  Accessing it is largely a matter of removing the barriers we place between ourselves and this innate, powerful potential, allowing it to flow more freely.

Meditation dissolves those barriers.

 

I used to teach a module called Creative and Imaginative Practice to postgraduate students, a class made compulsory by our farseeing Director of Studies, so that many students who would not be attracted to such a course had to attend. In the first session I would ask for a show of hands in answer to the question: Hands up those who think they are not creative. Always at least half the room put up their hands.

This is clearly crazy. To be alive is to create. Everyday we make hundreds of ideas, experiences, feelings and things, from our morning outfit to evening dinner but our society destroys creativity. All societies do. Nobody is born “uncreative” — just observe any child — but by the time we have grown up, the majority of us have disconnected from that vital source of energy and power. (And on university campuses is where you will find many of the most disconnected, prisoners of concepts and analysis and the tyrant intellect, alive only from the neck up, animated only by opinion).

When thinking about our creative capacities, it helps to think about two dimensions of our intelligence, the rational and the creative:

•     Conceptual intelligence aims to control; creative intelligence aims to allow.

•     Conceptual intelligence communicates through thoughts, concepts, opinions and ideas. Creative intelligence communicates through feelings, emotions, imaginings and intuitions.

•     Conceptual intelligence analyses and critiques; creative intelligence absorbs and explores.

•     Conceptual intelligence categorises; creative intelligence disrupts.

•     Conceptual intelligence looks out, seeing human reality as material and fixed (shit happens!). Creative intelligence looks in, seeing human reality as imagined and co-created (shift happens!).

•     Conceptual intelligence persuades through intellectual opinion and argument. Creative intelligence persuades through story, symbol and song.

•     Conceptual intelligence enjoys art, writing and music as entertainment. Creative intelligence enjoys art, writing and music as expression.

•     Conceptual intelligence likes answers; creative intelligence likes questions.

•     Conceptual intelligence sees failure as avoidable and a defeat. Creative intelligence sees failure as necessary and a learning opportunity.

•     Conceptual intelligence consumes. Creative intelligence creates.

 

While the rational and analytical conceptual intelligence is often contrasted to the creative, and laying them out like this might feed that view, that’s actually like setting your right foot against your left, or your in-breath against your out-breath.

 

They are designed to work together.

The problem — the pathology — most of us live with is that we are completely out of balance. We have both a personal and a social tendency to privilege conceptual  intelligence over creative intelligence, and habit and training reinforce that tendency.

 

Those who take time to stop and meditate immediately see this for the mistake it is, how it is limiting their lives. Nobody would tell you that your left foot is more important to walking than your right — but rational and analytical brain power is privileged by schools, workplaces and other institutions. Which is why as you go through life, trying to make something of yourself, you feel constrained or frustrated. It’s as if you were trying to walk with one foot tied behind your back.

Understanding, owning and honing your creative intelligence opens you to the world, and the world to you, in a whole new way.

Today, new technologies and understandings are confirming some, and changing other, long-held ideas about creativity and inspiration. Chief among those that are changing is that the word “creative” is no longer applied only to a particular set of activities — writing, drawing, singing. It is now being understood as a condition of consciousness, a type of attention and awareness.

Like meditation, creation is a condition, not an experience. Not even a process. It is a condition of openness through which the creative spirit is able to freely manifest. “The mind is not a vessel to be filled but a fire to be ignited,” said Plutrarch.

In this understanding, any activity can be uncreative. You can paint or sing or draw or write in an uncreative way. You can mop the floor, cook the dinner, do the filing or mow the lawn in a creative way. To be creative is to employ an attitude, an inner approach, that is defined by wakefulness, presence and openness while happily focussed on the task in hand.

You don’t even have to do anything to be creative. In fact, in order for creative inspiration to arise, a part of your mind has to in a state of “being” rather than “doing”. Guatama Buddha, sitting still under the bodhi tree, apparently doing nothing, was as creative as it is ever possible to be.

Indeed, it is not so much the person who is creative, or even the activity. It is the moment. In order to be created, it needs your presence, your attention. You, and the activity or nonactivity, are the conditions, the conduit through which creative consciousness expresses itself in this world of ours.

Inspiration Meditation – Creative v Conventional by Orna Ross

Creative v Conventional

Life can be understood in a variety of ways and how we think about the world and our place in it is largely dependent on our psychological stage and state. There are core creative principles that form the foundation of understanding life as unfolding creation in action.

The phenomenal world is not, as it seems a fixed entity, but something perceived, inseparable from our senses. Everything that “exists” in the outer world — ourselves, other human beings, fauna, flora and matter — is brought into time and space by one or more of our five outer senses: sight, taste, touch, sound, smell.

Continue Reading →

Inspiration Meditation – Creative Surrender by Orna Ross

Creative Surrender

Accessing creative consciousness, our creative intelligence if you like, requires us to drop out of our conditioned thinking-mind with nothing in place but intention, imagination and enough trust to surrender to the process.

This is something that many of the educators, entrepreneurs, artists and innovators who are drawn to creativity cannot do. They see the power of the creative mind at work, the magic of inspiration in action, but they don’t know how to let go of their will. They try to appropriate creativity, to take it over and use it for their own ends.

Continue Reading →

How Does Meditation Work?

meditating

Meditation is deep rest for our mind, giving it a break from the onslaught of thoughts and ego-centred feelings.

We have written evidence that for as long as people have lived, or at least for as long as things have been written down, humans have been aware of some essential truths about the human creative spirit that we still haven’t managed to absorb en masse.

Ancient sages, saints and artists knew all about these invisible truths and now cognitive psychology, cosmology, quantum physics and neuroscience are contributing to our understanding of the human creative intelligence and the part meditation plays in creating the conditions for it to flourish.

In meditation, the body settles into a stillness as deep as sleep  while the mind remains focused.  This allows the deeper dimensions of our minds – what we popularly refer to as the heart and the soul – to surface.
Continue Reading →

What Is Meditation? By Orna Ross.

Inspiration Meditation by Orna Ross

Inspiration Meditation by Orna Ross. A Go Creative! Book.

Picasso once said: “A painting speaks for itself.  What is the use of giving explanations?”  The same is true of meditation. Like art, meditation is a doorway between our inner and outer worlds; between “reality”, the seemingly solid world that we can see, hear, smell, taste and touch and an elusive “something else” beneath, between and beyond what those five senses can grasp.

And, like art, meditation is its own explanation. The danger in analysing is that intellectual explanations can detract from our understanding of it.

Perhaps a description might offer us a better way in.  In the passage below, Jo Devereux, the narrator of my second novel, Before The Fall, is having a meditative experience . Jo has spent recent months immersed in a tangled family history of insanity and murder.  Now as she walks along a wild Irish beach, mired in misery and confusion, she is surprised to find another part of her mind interjecting into her troubles:

Stop it, I order myself. Stop thinking.  Feel the sun on your eyes and the breeze on your skin. Pull yourself out of your head, down into your body, the body that can’t be in tomorrow or yesterday but only here, where it is.  

Somehow, to my own surprise, I do it.  In the very middle of my trouble, I manage to let it go.  

And as I do, I feel a shift in perception that recomposes the scene before me, making everything in my sights seem more completely itself. The expanse of glistening sands, the knobbled fingers of rock jutting into the ocean, the sunlight pirouetting on the waves — each is more full of its own living presence than it was a moment ago.  Yet somehow, simultaneously, more connected to me. 

I kick off my shoes, I slip out of my clothes, I walk into the sea. My skin is porous, no longer a boundary. Joy surges: I am melting into the water and all the world.  The same molecules dance in me and in everything. 

Continue Reading →